Albert Konrad Gemmeker

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Albert Konrad Gemmeker (1942)
Yule , Westerbork 1942: Gemmeker, Hassel, from the Fünten and Scheltnes ( Liro )

Albert Konrad Gemmeker (born September 27, 1907 in Düsseldorf ; † August 30, 1982 ibid) was a German SS-Obersturmführer and camp commandant of the Westerbork transit camp .

biography

Albert Gemmeker came from a poor background. In the 1920s, his father lost his job as a stonemason and the son had to work as an errand boy for an insurance company at the age of 14 after leaving school . Eventually he too became unemployed.

Gemmeker applied for a career in the police force and began training as a police officer in 1927. After completing his training at the police school in Bonn , he worked for the police in Duisburg from 1933 , preferably in the office. He tried to make a career through studies and "above-average loyalty". In 1935 he moved to the Gestapo in Düsseldorf. He rose to head of Department 1 C3, where he was responsible, among other things, for protective custody costs : He was thus responsible for collecting the costs for protective custody that the inmates had to pay themselves, 1.50 marks per day. After the war he claimed not to have known about the pogroms on November 9, 1938, but the Dutch historian Ad van Liempt found a document with instructions for that night signed by a gemmaker .

Gemmeker joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1937 (membership number 5.620.430) and the SS on November 1, 1940 . On August 25, 1940, Gemmeker was transferred to The Hague . There Gemmeker worked for the commander of the security police and the SD (BdS) until June 1942 as a consultant in the administration department. From May to August 1941 he attended a course at the SD leadership school in Bernau, according to the historian Hans-Christian Harten, a “training place for mass murder”. Gemmeker passed the police inspector exam there. Albert Gemmeker then briefly headed the Sint-Michielsgestel hostage camp .

From October 12, 1942 to April 1945, Gemmeker was the commandant of the Westerbork camp; his secretary Elisabeth Hassel , who was also his lover, accompanied him there. There he was the third and last German camp commandant. His superior Wilhelm Harster expected Gemmeker to bring order to the camp and to allow the transports to proceed without a fuss. This project was made easier by the opening of a direct railway line from Westerbork to Auschwitz in November 1942.

During Gemmeker's headquarters, around 80,000 Jews were transported to the extermination camps , which he was responsible for selecting. He met with his staff every week to discuss the composition of the transports, which usually consisted of 1,000 people. The security police in The Hague only determined the exact number of deportation victims.

But Gemmeker was also responsible for the deaths of people in individual cases. In December 1943 he discovered a couple at the barbed wire fence of the camp at night: Lotte Weisz, a camp inmate, met the guard Johan Smallenbroek there. Lotte's family was on the “root list” of those people who had functions in the camp and therefore should not be deported. Lotte Weisz was deported to Auschwitz after this incident; she later died in Bergen-Belsen . Her family was struck off the tribe list, and her parents and one of her brothers were murdered in Auschwitzer. Smallenbroek was sentenced to six months in prison and survived the end of the war. In another case, a prisoner and his family were deported at Gemmeker's initiative because he had not taken off his cap in front of the camp commandant. The prisoner had not known Gemmeker and also carried heavy logs in his arms. Gemmeker was also on site to clear the Jewish psychiatric hospital Het Apeldoornsche Bosch , from which over 1200 people were brought to Auschwitz.

Gemmeker was - in contrast to his predecessor Josef Hugo Dischner , who was an alcoholic and prone to excess - as cultivated and not corrupt. The Jewish teacher Etty Hillesum , imprisoned in Westerbork, wrote about Gemmeker in her diary that this had the “correct, sporty but meaningless appearance of an English whiskey drinker”. Hillesum was murdered in Auschwitz, and her removal was under Gemmeker's responsibility. Other inmates said of him: “The previous commandant kicked people into Poland with his boot, he smiles at them to Poland.” Gemmeker promoted leisure activities and cabaret in the camp and ordered the Jewish photographer Rudolf Breslauer to film daily camp life. The Jewish journalist Heinz Todtmann wrote the script. This resulted in 85 minutes of film material, in particular about the transports to Auschwitz . According to his Dutch colleague Hans Ottenstein, Gemmeker in Westerbork felt like the “king of a small kingdom” and was served by the Jewish prisoners - including doctors, hairdressers and craftsmen. His approach worked to the satisfaction of his superiors: In no other country in Europe did the deportation of people go as smoothly as in the Netherlands.

On April 11, 1945, Gemmeker handed over the management of the camp to the Jewish service manager Kurt Schlesinger and left the camp shortly before the approaching Canadians. Gemmeker worked briefly as an administrative officer in Amsterdam, which had not yet been liberated . After the liberation , he was arrested in May 1945.

On January 20, 1949, Albert Gemmeker was sentenced to ten years in prison in a trial before the Leeuwarden Special Court. The public prosecutor had applied for the relatively mild sentence of twelve years and not the death penalty, among other things on the grounds that Gemmeker was German and not Dutch (which was of no consequence in other comparable cases). The correct treatment of the prisoners was credited to him, as well as the fact that he was German and not Dutch. The defendant alleged that he did not know what to expect in the extermination camps.

After his release in April 1951, Gemmeker returned to Düsseldorf , where he then worked in a tobacco shop on Carlsplatz . Jewish Holocaust survivors are said to have been very satisfied when they went shopping and had the former camp manager serve them.

In 1959 the GDR magazine Weltbühne published an article about former National Socialists in the Federal Republic, in which Gemmeker was also mentioned. The public prosecutor's office in Düsseldorf classified these claims as “communist propaganda”. A few weeks later, a similar article appeared in the church newspaper The Voice of the Congregation, which prompted the public prosecutor to initiate an investigation. This was discontinued in 1961 because it could not be proven that Gemmeker knew about the murder of the Jewish people. New investigations were initiated in Germany in 1967, as former SS colleagues Wilhelm Harster and Wilhelm Zoepf had meanwhile admitted that they had known about the murder of the Jews since 1942 or 1943. By 1976 around 130 witnesses were interviewed in several countries. But this time too, no sufficient evidence was found to be able to bring the former concentration camp commandant to justice for his involvement in the Holocaust .

literature

  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Sandra Ziegler: Memory and Identity of the Concentration Camp Experience. Dutch and German eyewitness accounts of the Holocaust . Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, ISBN 3826030842 .
  • Jacob Presser: Ashes in the Wind - The destruction of dutch jewry , Souvenir Press, London 1968, ISBN 0-8143-2036-8 .
  • Ad van Liempt: The commanding officer with the two faces. Albert Gemmeker in the Westerbork camp . In: information. Scientific journal of the German Resistance Study Group 1933–1945, Vol. 91, 2020. pp. 22–26.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e van Liempt, Der Kommandant , p. 23.
  2. ↑ a b Jacob Presser: Ashes in the Wind –– The Destruction of Dutch Jewry , London 1968, p. 429f.
  3. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 178.
  4. ^ A b Sandra Ziegler: Memory and Identity of the Concentration Camp Experience . Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, p. 133.
  5. ↑ a b c d van Liempt, Der Kommandant , p. 24.
  6. ↑ cf. Israel Gutman (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust - The persecution and murder of European Jews , Piper Verlag, Munich / Zurich 1998, 3 volumes, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Volume III, p. 1578.
  7. ↑ Het Apeldoornsche Bosch. In: joodsamsterdam.nl. September 30, 2019, accessed June 12, 2020 (Dutch).
  8. ↑ a b van Liempt, Der Kommandant , p. 26.
  9. ^ Sandra Ziegler: Memory and Identity of the Concentration Camp Experience . Königshausen & Neumann, 2006, pp. 140ff.
  10. ^ Van Liempt, Der Kommandant , p. 25.
  11. ^ Gemmeker, Albert Konrad (1907–1982)
  12. ↑ Dutch criminal proceedings against Germans and Austrians for Nazi crimes committed during World War II on www1.jur.uva.nl
  13. ^ Brown Book Gestapo, SS and SD in State and Economy - SS Murderers and Nazi Leaders ( Memento of March 28, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ^ Ad van Liempt: Gemmeker: Commandant van Kamp Westerbork . Balans, 2019, ISBN 978-94-6003-978-2 .
  15. ↑ Compare the explanations on the Dutch Wikipedia .
personal data
SURNAME Gemmeker, Albert Konrad
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German camp commandant from Westerbork
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Dusseldorf
DATE OF DEATH August 30, 1982
Place of death Dusseldorf