Gerhard Helmut Detleff Graf von Schwerin (23 June 1899 – 29 October 1980) was a German General der Panzertruppe during World War II.
World War I
Gerhard von Schwerin was born to a Prussian aristocratic family in 1899. His father was a civil official in the Prussian State Government. At the age of 15 he entered the military cadet school at Koslin. Joining the Prussian Army's 2nd Foot Guards Regiment as a Fahnrich (commissioned officer cadet), he subsequently transferred to the 2nd (1st Pomeranian) Grenadier Regiment.
He saw action with the infantry on both the Eastern and Western fronts in 1918 whilst still a teenager, serving as a company commander and battalion adjutant. He was wounded in action on 26 September 1918, and hospitalized until the war's end in November 1918. In 1918 he was awarded the Iron Cross for gallantry in action, both 2nd Class and 1st Class.
Inter-war years
Schwerin was discharged from the army in 1920. He spent the following two years engaged in a managerial business apprenticeship with a coffee import firm in Bremen, and a petroleum company in Berlin. In 1922 he rejoined the Reichswehr as a professional soldier, being commissioned with the rank of lieutenant into the Prussian Army's Infantry Regiment No.1. In 1931 he joined Infantry Regiment No.18 in Paderborn. He was promoted to captain in June 1933. From 1933 to 1935 he attended the General Staff course at the Prussian Military Academy in Berlin.
Whilst Schwerin was at the Academy the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler seized autocratic governing power in a paramilitary political revolution in Berlin, abolished the Weimar Republic state with the passing into law of the Enabling Act of 1933, and declared an ideological militarist dictatorship described as the Third Reich, fundamentally altering the post-World War political order in Europe.
In October 1938 Schwerin was promoted to the rank of major. At the end of the 1930s he was a staff-officer with Oberkommando des Heeres (Supreme High Command on the German Army).
In January 1939, whilst working at the UK/US intelligence section of the German War Ministry at the German Embassy in London, Schwerin made a clandestine personal approach to the British Government, suggesting that if it abandoned its policy of appeasement towards the Third Reich, and instead moved to a stance of open military opposition towards its escalating aggression in central Europe, this would provide a rallying point and catalyst for elements in the German military who were at that time considering launching a coup d'etat against the National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler. At a dinner party in Marylebone hosted by Admiral Sir Aubrey Smith, Schwerin met James Stuart, representing the British Government, Admiral John Godfrey, head of naval intelligence, and General Sir James Marshall-Cornwall, Director-General of air and coastal defence, to warn them of Hitler's intention to invade Poland. Along with the suggestion that Great Britain's and Germany's best interests would be served by Neville Chamberlain being replaced as Prime Minister by Winston Churchill, Schwerin advocated that pressure for an internal military coup by anti-Nazi elements of the Wehrmacht, of which he was aware, could be induced by the deployment of a squadron of Royal Navy battleships taking up a hostile position off Germany's Northern shore in the Baltic Sea, and by the Royal Air Force moving elements of its Bomber Command to a pre-battle theatre station in French airfields, as a means of indicating the British Empire's ultimate willingness for a confrontation with the Nazis. This politico-military strategy was communicated to Chamberlain but was rejected as being too aggressive at that point as a way of dealing with the gathering menace of the Third Reich. However, Schwerin's representations to the British Government may have contributed to its collective assessments which were ongoing at that time as to how to deal with Adolf Hitler, and to the decision to make a stand on the Polish border eight months later rather than somewhere else. Frank Roberts, an official in the Foreign Office's German Department who also dealt with the issue, light-heartedly - in spite of the risk that Schwerin had taken in making such a move on the eve of war, which would constitute high treason and a capital crime in the Third Reich's jurisdiction if it was discovered - dismissed the subject of Schwerin's approaches as being an internal matter for the German high command. In April 1939 Schwerin was promoted to the rank of lieutenant colonel.