Werner Scharff

By the end of 1944, Scharff was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The SS executed him on March 16, 1945. Fancia Grün was executed in the concentration camp as well. Many other members of the community only survived thanks to the end of the war—otherwise they would have faced certain death.

Many, most of all the wife of Hans Winkler, thought that the organisation was acting too reckless. A member of the group, Hilde Bromberg, was indeed arrested in April 1944 after a denunciation by the widow of the executed bookseller August Bonneß, Jr. (1890-1944). Although Bromberg did not reveal the other group members and even managed to lead the Gestapo astray, they eventually tracked down the group and arrested Werner Scharff on October 14, 1944. Scharff was brought to the prison at Alexanderplatz and brutally interrogated. Shortly thereafter, Winkler and many other members of the organisation were arrested as well.

When the other community members where deported in the summer of 1943, Scharff fled to the underground on June 10, 1943. Four weeks later, on July 14, the Gestapo found him and deported him to the Theresienstadt Ghetto. He did not stay long however and escaped on September 7 together with Fancia Grün. His destination was the address of resistance member Hans Winkler, which had been recommended to him in Theresienstadt as a possible hideout in Berlin.

Werner Scharff (August 16, 1912 – March 16, 1945) was a Jewish-German resistance activist against the Nazi regime. He was executed in Sachsenhausen concentration camp because of his activities in the "Community for Peace and Development" (German: "Gemeinschaft für Frieden und Aufbau"), which he founded together with Hans Winkler in Luckenwalde.

Werner Scharff was born into a Jewish family in Posen in 1912. The family moved to Berlin in 1918. After the early death of his father in 1929, Scharff took up an apprenticeship as an electritician to be able to take care of his mother and his two younger siblings. In 1938, he married Gertrud Weissman. A planned emigration of the Jewish couple failed. In 1941, Scharff started to work as an electrician in the synagogue Levetzowstraße in Berlin-Moabit, which was misused as a deportation site from 1942 by the SS. This provided Scharff with a deep insight into the cruelty of the Nazis and the bitter fate of their victims. As the electrician, Scharff was allowed to move freely within the deportation site and to leave it at any time. He used this to smuggle messages, food and clothes from the relatives of the detained into the deportation site on a large scale. Thanks to the occupation of his new girlfriend Fancia Grün, who worked as a secretary in the registration office of the Jewish Community and who was responsible for writing deportation lists, he was also able to warn many of his friends and acquaintances from imminent deportations.