---
title: Hanns Scharff's Son Chris Scharff Traces His Family's Path From Wartime Germany to Africa and America in WWII Memoir
description: Chris Scharff, son of Luftwaffe interrogator Hanns Scharff, tells his family's story from wartime Germany through 20 years in Africa to California.
author: Darie Nani (Editor-in-Chief)
date: 2026-09-24T10:53:17.059Z
updated: 2026-09-24T11:03:58.807Z
canonical: https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/hanns-scharff-son-chris-scharff-memoir
image: https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/chris-scharff-author-v2.webp
categories: Memoir & Biography, Authors & Writers
content_type: Spotlight
region: California
publication: Rich Books
about:
  - type: Person
    name: Chris Scharff
    description: "Chris Scharff was born in Greiz, Germany, in 1936, the son of Margaret Scharff and Hanns Scharff, the World War II Luftwaffe interrogator. He grew up in wartime Germany, spent 20 years in South Africa and Rhodesia, where he farmed tobacco, and moved to the United States in 1965. He spent 26 years at Yamaha, retiring as vice president and general manager of information systems, and lives in Carlsbad, California. Memories: My Life Story: Germany to Africa to the USA is his memoir."
    url: https://chrisscharff.com
    jobTitle: Author
---

Chris Scharff was about six years old when his father, Hanns Scharff, was drafted into the German military, and the job Hanns was given there, questioning American fighter pilots shot down over Europe, later made him famous. In *Memories: My Life Story: Germany to Africa to the USA*, now available worldwide on Amazon and through the author's own website, Chris tells what that war looked like to the interrogator's son, and follows his family from Germany through two decades in Africa to a new start in California.

### Book: Memories: My Life Story
*Germany to Africa to the USA*
By Chris Scharff

Chris Scharff's account of a life that began in Greiz, Germany, in 1936 and ran through wartime Berlin, a displaced persons camp, school in South Africa, nine years of tobacco farming in Rhodesia and a career in Los Angeles. His father, Hanns Scharff, questioned captured American fighter pilots for the Luftwaffe, and the book tells that story from a son's side of it.

[Amazon](https://a.co/d/0fBMXeLw)

## Hanns Scharff, the Luftwaffe Interrogator, Seen From Home

Hanns Scharff worked at the Luftwaffe's main interrogation center at Oberursel, near Frankfurt, from 1943 until the end of the war. He held a junior rank, but he became known as the Luftwaffe's master interrogator because he got information from captured airmen without threats or force. He called the prisoners his "guests", took them on walks and talked with them at length, and they often told him more than they meant to.

When Hanns came home on leave to Greiz, a small textile town in Thuringia, Chris writes, he brought keepsakes from the men he had questioned, such as compasses hidden in shirt buttons and escape maps printed on silk. The family still has one of those silk maps, framed.

![A framed silk escape map kept by the Scharff family since the Second World War](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/chris-scharff-silk-escape-map.webp)

The approach Hanns used is now studied by psychologists as the Scharff technique, and researchers have tested it in controlled experiments on how people give up information. In the book, Chris recalls meeting a veteran who had helped set up a US military survival and resistance training center in Warner Springs, California, where interrogations were modeled on his father's methods.

## Life in Germany During and After WW2

Chris was born in Greiz in 1936, while his parents were visiting from South Africa, where they had married. A second trip to Germany in 1939 left the family stranded when war broke out. His mother, Margaret, was English, and Chris credits her above anyone else with getting the family through.

In the early chapters Chris describes wartime Berlin as a child saw it. He and his older brother, Fig, rode the city's commuter trains on their own to meet their father for lunch, and he walked to school past apartment blocks still burning from the night's air raid. Back in Greiz, as fuel and food ran short in the last winters of the war, his mother kept the family going in ways the boys were sworn to keep secret. In 1945, with American troops in Greiz, she set out to get her five children out of Germany, and a year later the family sailed from Southampton to Cape Town.

## Twenty Years in South Africa and Rhodesia

Chris says he spent 20 years in various parts of Africa. He finished school in Durban, where his mother had started a screen-printing business, won a South African championship in track cycling and took a job at the Netherlands Bank, where he met Maureen Hamilton. In 1956, at 19, he moved to Southern Rhodesia to learn tobacco farming, and he and Maureen married at the Salisbury courthouse the following January. Their daughter, Karen, was born in 1959 in the same Salisbury hospital where his mother had been born.

In the Rhodesia chapters, Chris describes nine years on a string of tobacco farms, ending as manager of an estate at the edge of the settled farmland. He writes with humor about the accidents along the way, including a fall down a 33-foot well shaft. Alone in the bush one day, he became convinced the family had to leave Rhodesia, and in July 1965 they left for America, a few months before the country declared independence from Britain.

![Chris Scharff and his wife Maureen at Ardura Farm, Southern Rhodesia, 1957](https://cdn.nanimediahouse.com/chris-scharff-mo-ardura-1957.webp)

## From Africa to Los Angeles

Chris says it was his father's wartime history that eventually brought Hanns to the United States, which in turn made it possible for the family to follow. Because Chris had been born in Germany, he could enter under the German immigration quota. Fig had been born in South Africa, a country with a much smaller quota, and he could only follow four years later, once Hanns had become an American citizen and could sponsor him.

Hanns met his son at customs in San Francisco. By then he was working as a mosaic artist in Los Angeles, and in later years he made the mosaic murals inside Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World. Chris started out in his father's studio before retraining in computer programming, and went on to spend 26 years at Yamaha.

## The Interrogator, the Hanns Scharff Book, and the Old Bold Pilots

> "I wanted my friends and family to have a record of that whole journey, from World War II Germany, through Africa, to the life we built in the United States."
> — Chris Scharff

After Chris and Maureen retired to Carlsbad, California, they found that Raymond Toliver lived nearby. Toliver, a retired US Air Force colonel, had written *The Interrogator*, the book about Hanns Scharff first published in 1978. He invited Chris to join the Old Bold Pilots, a group of veteran airmen who met for breakfast every week. The group included one of the American pilots his father had questioned during the war.

Another member of the group, the World War II pilot Ron Nash, kept urging Chris to write his life story. Nash passed away before the book was finished, and Chris continued in his memory. He says the writing took roughly six to nine months. [The memoir was first published independently in 2022](https://richbooksmagazine.com/article/the-most-anticipated-memoirs-this-autumn) and has now been released worldwide in hardcover, paperback and ebook editions.

**About Chris Scharff**
Author

Chris Scharff was born in Greiz, Germany, in 1936, the son of Margaret Scharff and Hanns Scharff, the World War II Luftwaffe interrogator. He grew up in wartime Germany, spent 20 years in South Africa and Rhodesia, where he farmed tobacco, and moved to the United States in 1965. He spent 26 years at Yamaha, retiring as vice president and general manager of information systems, and lives in Carlsbad, California. Memories: My Life Story: Germany to Africa to the USA is his memoir.

[Website](https://chrisscharff.com)

## FAQ

**Q: Who is Chris Scharff?**
Chris Scharff is the author of Memories: My Life Story: Germany to Africa to the USA and the son of Hanns Scharff, the World War II Luftwaffe interrogator. He was born in Greiz, Germany, in 1936, spent 20 years in South Africa and Rhodesia, moved to the United States in 1965 and retired from Yamaha in 1996. He lives in Carlsbad, California.

**Q: What happened to Hanns Scharff after the war?**
Hanns Scharff moved to the United States and settled in Los Angeles, where he worked as a mosaic artist. He later became an American citizen and sponsored his son Fig's move to the US. He passed away in California in 1992.

**Q: What is the Scharff technique?**
The Scharff technique is the name psychologists give to the questioning method Hanns Scharff used on captured Allied airmen. It relies on a friendly manner and on appearing to know more than he did, rather than on pressure or threats. Researchers have tested it in controlled experiments, and his son's memoir recalls a US military training center that modeled its interrogations on his methods.

**Q: What did Hanns Scharff do for Disney?**
After the war Hanns Scharff worked as a mosaic artist, and he made the mosaic murals inside Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World. His son Chris worked in his mosaic studio after arriving in the United States in 1965.

**Q: What is Memories: My Life Story about?**
It is Chris Scharff's account of his life from a wartime childhood in Berlin and Greiz, through displaced persons camps, school in South Africa and tobacco farming in Rhodesia, to his career in Los Angeles. He wrote it so his family would have a record of that journey.