Adam Grünewald

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Adam Grünewald (born October 20, 1902 in Frickenhausen am Main near Würzburg , † January 22, 1945 in Veszprém , Hungary ) was a German SS-Sturmbannführer and camp commandant of the Herzogenbusch concentration camp .

Adam Grünewald

Life

Adam Grünewald, a trained baker, became a member of one of the Freikorps after the First World War . From 1919 he did 12 years of military service as a professional soldier in the Reichswehr and ended his military career as a sergeant major . Grünewald, married since the late 1920s, joined the SA and the NSDAP in 1931 (membership number 536,404). After joining the SA, he initially worked full-time there, but switched to the SS in 1934 (membership number 253.631).

Activity in the concentration camps and the camp commandant's office

Grünewald, who went through the Dachau School under Theodor Eicke , was initially transferred to the Lichtenburg concentration camp guard in the mid-1930s . Afterwards Grünewald, who worked in various concentration camps, became, among other things, protective custody camp leader in the Dachau concentration camp (1938 to 1939). After he had also worked as a protective custody camp leader in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1943, Grünewald finally rose to camp commandant of the Dutch concentration camp Herzogenbusch in October 1943. Grünewald, according to the personnel file of limited capacity, was replaced in this position by Hans Hüttig in February 1944 . Grünewald's release from this post was caused by the so-called "bunker drama" in which ten female prisoners died in mid-January 1944. On January 15, 1944, SS men, including camp commandant Grünewald, his adjutant Hermann Wicklein and protective custody camp leader Arnold Strippel , pressed 74 female prisoners into a 9.5 m² cell in the Herzogenbusch concentration camp. Another 17 women were locked up in the neighboring cell. By the morning of January 16, 1944, when the cell door was opened, ten women died from agonizing suffocation. Since this incident led to considerable uproar among the Dutch public, Grünewald and Wicklein were brought before an SS court. At the beginning of March 1944, Grünewald was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for mistreating subordinates and Wicklein was sentenced to six months in prison for favoritism. By Heinrich Himmler , the two convicts were pardoned and Gruenewald became the SS Totenkopf Division displaced, where he died at the front line in January 1945th

literature

  • Tom Segev: The Soldiers of Evil. On the history of the concentration camp commanders . Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-499-18826-0 .
  • Coenraad JF Stuldreher: German concentration camps in the Netherlands - Amersfoort, Westerbork, Herzogenbusch . In: Wolfgang Benz (Red.): Dachauer Hefte 5: The forgotten camps . Munich 1994, ISBN 3-423-04634-1 .
  • Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .

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