Alfred Trzebinski

Alfred Albrecht Josef Trzebinski (born August 29, 1902 in Jutroschin ; † October 8, 1946 in Hameln ) was a German medic and, as SS-Hauptsturmführer, concentration camp doctor in the concentration camps Auschwitz , Majdanek and Neuengamme .

Life

Trzebinski was the son of a high school teacher. After completing his school career, he studied medicine at the Universities of Breslau and Greifswald . With the dissertation Facial Paralysis in Fresh Untreated Syphilis , published in 1928 , he was promoted to Dr. med is doing his doctorate . After completing his medical degree and licensing , he first worked as a country doctor in Saxony . He had been married to a former fellow student since 1933, and the couple had a daughter.

Trzebinski had been a member of the SS since September 1932 (SS no. 133,574) and from February 1933 a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 1,447,570). In 1938 he was the honorary leader of the 91st SS standard in Torgau . Within the SS he rose to SS-Hauptsturmführer in June 1943.

After the beginning of the Second World War he was drafted into the Wehrmacht , with which he had already completed two months of military service from July 1937. In May 1941 he switched to the Waffen SS . From July 1941 he worked as a camp doctor in the Auschwitz concentration camp and from autumn 1941 in the same position in the Majdanek concentration camp . From April 1942 he was on- site doctor at the Majdanek concentration camp, where he was infected with typhus at the end of that year .

In 1943 he was transferred to the Neuengamme concentration camp , where he worked as a site doctor until the camp was closed at the end of April 1945 . After his recovery he was probably already in this position from February 20, 1943. The murder of 20 Jewish children in the basement of the Bullenhuser Damm school in Hamburg-Rothenburgsort on the night of April 20-21, 1945 caused a public sensation shortly after the end of the war . The children aged five to twelve years, half boys and half Girls were brought from Auschwitz to Neuengamme in November 1944 , requested by the concentration camp doctor Kurt Heissmeyer . After he had already carried out human experiments on Soviet prisoners of war, the children were infected with tuberculosis. Tissue samples were then taken from them to develop a vaccine. In order to get rid of the witnesses to this crime, SS-Obergruppenführer Oswald Pohl from Berlin ordered that the Heißmeyer department be "dissolved". In the basement of the school, the children were injected with morphine by Trzebinski and then - with the complicity of Arnold Strippel and Johann Frahm  - they were hanged on heating pipes. Their four supervisors and over twenty Soviet prisoners of war were also killed with the children. After the end of the war, Trzebinski described the morphine injections as a “charitable act”.

After the end of the war

After the end of the war Trzebinski went into hiding in Husum . He then worked incognito for the British Army as a military doctor in the Neumünster release camp and then ended up in Hesedorf through work in a Hamburg hospital. He was employed as a military doctor in the Hesedorf release camp and moved into an apartment there with his wife and daughter. On February 1, 1946, he was arrested in Hesedorf and transferred to the Westertimke internment camp. While in detention, he wrote a diary titled “I” that has not yet been published. On March 18, 1946, Trzebinski was indicted in the Neuengamme main trial , also for his complicity in the crime at Bullenhuser Damm. On 3 May 1946, he was to death by the strand convicted and on October 8, 1946 Hameln executed .

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 .
• Günther Schwarberg : The SS doctor and the children. Report on the Bullenhuser Damm murder Documentation: Daniel Haller. Edited by Henri Nannen . Gruner and Jahr, Hamburg 1979, 1980 (2 volumes) Awarded the Anne Frank Prize in 1988. Frequent new editions, also under the title: The SS doctor and the children from Bullenhuser Damm. z. B. Steidl, Göttingen 1994, ISBN 3-88243-306-X - Numerous translations (English, Romanian, Polish)
• Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz death books . Volume 1: Reports . De Gruyter, 1995, ISBN 3-598-11263-7 .
• Günther Schwarberg : Hanging twenty children takes a long time . In: Die Zeit , No. 15/2005.
• Dierk Strothmann: The children from Bullenhuser Damm . In: Hamburger Abendblatt , April 20, 2005

Web links

• Literature by and about Alfred Trzebinski in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Full name according to: State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (Hrsg.): Auschwitz death books . Volume 1: Reports . 1995, p. 301.
2. ^ ^{A b} Günther Schwarberg: The SS doctor and the children from Bullenhuser Damm . Göttingen 1988, p. 157.
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 631.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Excerpt from the seniority list of the SS
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} “Open Archive” of the Neuengamme Concentration Camp Memorial
6. ^ Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz death books . Volume 1: Reports , 1995, p. 301.
7. ↑ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims. Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 172.
8. ^ Günther Schwarberg: The SS doctor and the children from Bullenhuser Damm . Göttingen 1988, p. 124.
9. ^ Günther Schwarberg: The SS doctor and the children from Bullenhuser Damm . Göttingen 1988, p. 77f.