Who is Werner Schramm from A Thread of Grace and what is their importance?

Werner Schramm is a German officer physician who appears in Sant'Andrea searching for absolution from a Catholic priest. Dr. Schramm, an alcoholic with tuberculosis, is AWOL from the German army, and has had some kind of crisis of conscience over the 91,867people he has murdered under Hitler's euthanization program. Schramm is a complex character who, instead of returning to his family Germany and resuming his work with the Nazis, befriends the Italians in Sant'Andrea and stays on in Italy. Deathly ill, he is taken to Cadenza d'Inverno in the mountains,