Wladyslaw Alexander Dering

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Władysław Alexander Dering (born March 16, 1903 in Iwankowce , † July 1965 in London ) was a Polish surgeon and inmate doctor in Auschwitz , where he supported the sterilization experiments of the camp doctor Horst Schumann on inmates.

Life

Studies, occupation and resistance to the German occupation of Poland

Dering completed a medical degree at the Medical University of Warsaw , which he graduated in 1928. The surgeon , who specializes in gynecology and obstetrics, then practiced in Warsaw , where he ran a private practice and was a contract doctor at a local hospital.

After the start of World War II , he served as a military surgeon in the Polish army during the Soviet attack on Poland . He was captured by the Soviets, from which he was able to escape. He then returned to Warsaw, which was occupied by the Wehrmacht after the attack on Poland . Dering resumed his work as a doctor and joined the conspiratorial Tajna Armia Polska (German Secret Polish Army, TAP for short), where he headed the health service. His apartment is said to have been a conspiratorial center for resistance activities.

After this underground organization was discovered, he was arrested and abused by the Gestapo on July 3, 1940 .

Prisoner doctor in Auschwitz concentration camp

On August 15, 1940, he was sent from Warsaw to the Auschwitz concentration camp with 1,500 other inmates . For fear of being murdered as a member of the Polish intelligentsia, he withheld his medical qualifications. Dering received the prisoner number 1,723 in the camp. He first had to do forced labor in Auschwitz . In the camp he joined the Polish camp resistance organization Union of Military Organizations (pln. Związek Organizacji Wojskowej, ZOW for short) under the leadership of Witold Pileckis . He later worked as a nurse and finally, after his medical qualifications became known, from summer 1941 as head of the surgical department (Block 21) in the prisoner infirmary (HKB) of the main camp of Auschwitz . The doctor, who was recognized by the prisoners and camp doctors alike, helped many compatriots. When the camp doctor Friedrich Entress instructed him to give an inmate an injection, he injected phenol into the inmate without knowing what the substance was. When the inmate died after a few seconds, he refused to give any further injections. He was not punished. Dering later contradicted this statement made by a surviving prisoner doctor after the liberation from the Auschwitz concentration camp, insofar as he stated that he had not given the injection.

Camp elder in the prisoner infirmary and participation in human experiments

After the camp elder of the HKB Ludwig Wörl was locked in the bunker of Block 11 at the end of August 1943 , Dering took over his function on the instructions of the SS medical officer Eduard Wirths . Doctors were not normally selected for this post, but because of his professional skills and self-confidence, he enjoyed the trust of German camp doctors. The camp doctors Carl Clauberg and Horst Schumann finally brought him in as a technically experienced surgeon for the sterilization experiments on prisoners and worked diligently on the human experiments. In order to prove the effectiveness of Schumann's sterilization using X-rays, Dering removed the irradiated testicles and ovaries from Jewish prisoners for pathological examinations . During the operations he set speed records and in the end even refrained from sterilizing the surgical instruments . Hermann Langbein , like other Auschwitz survivors, attested that he had an “arrogant anti-Semitic attitude towards the victims”. Dering is said to have said to a Jewish prisoner who protested against the planned removal of his testicles: "Stop yapping like a dog, you have to die anyway". He had a pouch tanned from the scrotum of a sterilization victim, which he used as a tobacco pouch and which he proudly showed to fellow inmates. The inmate doctor Andre Lettich gave the following assessment of Dering after the end of the Second World War: “This surgeon operated with a rather great brutality. The patients received a light local anesthetic and their screams could be heard appalling. Often two gonads were removed at the same time. Many of these unfortunate people died quickly from the consequences of the operations. ”Dering was also an informant for the Political Department . He had a Jewish prisoner doctor whom he disliked and a nurse sent to the gas chamber without selection .

Release from Auschwitz concentration camp and end of the war

Dering applied for inclusion in the German People's List and was then released from Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1944. This was done in agreement with the Polish camp resistance movement, so that he could survive and in future bear witness to the National Socialist genocides. After his release he was conscripted at Clauberg's gynecological clinic in Königshütte , where he stayed for a year until the Red Army marched in . Shortly afterwards he was interned in the Soviet Union, from which he was released after eight days. He returned to Warsaw.

Postwar Period - Wanted War Criminal

Friends of Auschwitz survivors in Warsaw warned him of investigations carried out by a Jewish committee against suspected war criminals. Dering was among those wanted. He organized forged identity papers with a new identity and made a living as a farm laborer at times. In the summer of 1945 he left Poland and in December 1945 joined the troops of Władysław Anders , who were initially stationed in Italy and later in Great Britain . From August 1946 he worked as an obstetrician in the Polish military hospital in Huntington. Finally, in January 1947, he was arrested for serving as a prison doctor and detained in Brixton Prison. Since 1945 he was on the war criminals list of the United Nations War Crimes Commission . He was wanted as a war criminal in Czechoslovakia , France and Poland . Now Poland has also asked Great Britain to extradite Dering. France and Czechoslovakia had previously applied for his extradition. A castration victim and Auschwitz survivor was summoned to confront Dering at the end of August 1948 , but could not identify him. As a result, Dering was not extradited and released from custody due to insufficient evidence.

Doctor in British colonial service and returned to Great Britain

After his release, he worked as a doctor in the British colonies and ran a hospital in Hargeysa ( British Somaliland ). For his ten-year colonial service, he was awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1960 , having previously obtained British citizenship. On his return he moved to Ealing in the spring of 1960 , where he bought a house and lived with his second wife and stepdaughter. His first wife divorced him soon after the end of the war, after hearing about his job in Auschwitz. With the doctor Jan Gajek, already known to him from Warsaw, he ran a joint practice in north London.

Libel Trial Against Uris And Others

After his wife had read the novel Exodus by Leon Uris , in which Dering's involvement in the operations (especially sterilization) in Auschwitz is mentioned in one sentence, he denied her participation in the human experiments. At the request of his wife, Dering brought an action against the author Uris, the editor William Kimer Ltd and the publisher Purnell & Sons (withdrawn from the proceedings on payment of £ 500) of the novel in a London court in the spring of 1964. Uris had claimed in his novel Exodus that Dering carried out 17,000 operations in the Auschwitz concentration camp. The internationally recognized Dering v. Uris and Others began on April 13, 1964. Human experimentation victims and former inmate doctors also testified among the 22 defense witnesses. The most important witness of the defense was the former prisoner doctor Adélaïde Hautval , who had refused to participate in human experiments in Auschwitz. The nine witnesses for the prosecution included Dering as well as former Polish inmates associated with him. Dering invoked an imperative to order in the proceedings , since refusal to participate in the operations could have resulted in his death. Ultimately, Dering was able to prove 130 surgical interventions on prisoners. Therefore, after 18 days of trial, on May 6, 1964, he was formally right, but was the moral loser of the trial. Uris was sentenced to a symbolic fine of a halfpenny , but Dering had to take over the majority of the procedural costs of the equivalent of 269,000 DM.

In the course of the 1st Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial , Dering was questioned as a witness on March 23, 1965 in the German Embassy in London . Dering died in July 1965 after a brief illness.

literature

  • Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .
  • Robert Jay Lifton : Doctors in the Third Reich , Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1988 (Original edition: RJ Lifton: The Nazi Doctors. Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide . New York 1986), ISBN 3-608-93121-X .
  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • Katharina Stengel: Hermann Langbein: an Auschwitz survivor in the memory-political conflicts of the post-war period. Scientific series of the Fritz Bauer Institute. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2012, ISBN 978-3-593-39788-7 (limited preview in the Google book search), p. 372ff.
  • Jack Winocour: Points of the Compass. A Ha'penny & the truth. The Dering's Trial in London . In Encounter, August 1964, pp. 71-88 (online)
  • Robert Aitken, Marilyn Aitken: Law Makers, Law Breakers and Uncommon Trials , American Bar Association, Chicago 2007, ISBN 978-1-59031-880-5 .
  • Leon Uris : QB VII. A process excites the world novel. Translated into German by Evelyn Linke. Kindler, Zurich 1970, ISBN 3-463-00484-4 ; as paperback: Heyne, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-453-00389-6 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Date and place of birth according to: Oświec̨im Państwowego Muzeum: Zeszyty oświęcimskie, Volume 24, 2008, p. 288
  2. ↑ Year and place of death after death : Wladyslaw Alexander Dering . In: Der Spiegel , edition 30/1965 of July 21, 1965, p. 78
  3. ↑ a b c d Jack Winocour: Points of the Compass. A Ha'penny & the truth. The Dering's Trial in London . In: Encounter, August 1964, p. 72
  4. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 90
  5. ^ A b Robert Jay Lifton: Doctors in the Third Reich , Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1988, p. 283
  6. ↑ a b Was doctor Wladislaw Dering a hero or was he a criminal? on http://www.znak.org.pl . Source: Filip Gańczak, Władysław Dering, doctor z Auschwitz, “Newsweek Polska”, 23 August 2010
  7. ^ Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna, 1980, pp. 255f.
  8. ↑ a b Quoted from: Hermann Langbein: Menschen in Auschwitz , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna, 1980, p. 256
  9. ↑ Quoted in: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 90
  10. ^ Robert Jay Lifton: Doctors in the Third Reich , Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart 1988, p. 284
  11. ^ A b Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz , Ullstein, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna, 1980, p. 257
  12. ↑ Frederick Kuh: Poles Protest Britain's Stalling on Auschwitz Killer . In: New York PM Daily, Nov. 23, 1947 issue, p. 11
  13. ^ Jack Winocour: Points of the Compass. A Ha'penny & the truth. The Dering's Trial in London . In: Encounter, August 1964, p. 73
  14. ^ Jack Winocour: Points of the Compass. A Ha'penny & the truth. The Dering's Trial in London . In: Encounter, August 1964, p. 71
  15. ↑ a b Katharina Stengel: Hermann Langbein: an Auschwitz survivor in the political memory conflicts of the post-war period. Scientific series of the Fritz Bauer Institute , Frankfurt a. a. 2012, p. 372ff
  16. ^ Robert Aitken, Marilyn Aitken: Law Makers, Law Breakers and Uncommon Trials , American Bar Association, Chicago 2007, pp. 262ff
  17. ↑ Died: Wladyslaw Alexander Dering . In: Der Spiegel . No. 30 , 1965 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Dering, Władysław Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dering, Wladyslaw
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish prisoner doctor in Auschwitz concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Ivankowce
DATE OF DEATH July 1965
Place of death London