Ansgar Pichen

Ansgar Pichen in August 1945

Ansgar Pichen (born September 22, 1913 in Esbjerg , ( Denmark ), † December 13, 1945 in Hameln ) was the head of the camp kitchen in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp .

Life

Pichen, originally of Danish nationality, as his father was a Danish citizen, moved with his family in 1914 to what was later to become the Polish part of Upper Silesia and received Polish citizenship. After the German occupation of Poland , Pichen was conscripted into the German Wehrmacht on May 25, 1940 and deployed on the Eastern Front. On November 25, 1942, he was wounded in combat and transferred to a hospital in Neustadt, from which he was released on January 12, 1943. As a result, Pichen's left hand was crippled. He was then transferred to Opava in Moravia and in March 1943 was sent to the Blechhammer labor and prisoner-of-war camp , which from April 1944 had been a sub- camp of Auschwitz III Monowitz . In the course of the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Pichen left Blechhammer on January 21, 1945 and arrived at the Groß-Rosen concentration camp on an evacuation transport at the beginning of February 1945 . On March 10 or March 11, 1945, Pichen arrived in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp . There he initially acted as a member of the security team, but was entrusted with the management of camp kitchen No. 1 due to his crippled hand. Pichen later testified that his papers had been taken from him in Bergen-Belsen and that he had been drafted into the SS , but that he had never worn an SS uniform.

On April 15, 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British troops who found over 10,000 dead and around 60,000 survivors there. The SS camp personnel were obliged to remove all corpses and bury them in mass graves . Pichen fell ill with typhus at the burial of the victims and was taken to the hospital.

In the Bergen-Belsen trial (September 17 to November 17, 1945) he was charged with his crimes committed in Bergen-Belsen. Pichen stated in his testimony that he had not mistreated any prisoners, and the prosecution accused him of having shot at least two prisoners.

Pichen, who pleaded "not guilty", was found guilty of war crimes in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on November 17, 1945 and sentenced to death by hanging . The British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on December 13, 1945 in Hameln penitentiary .

literature

• United Nations War Crimes Commission (Ed.): Law reports of trials of war criminals, selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. 3 volumes, William S. Hein Publishing, Buffalo (New York) 1997, ISBN 1-57588-403-8 (reprint of the original edition from 1947–1949).

Web links

• Mazal: First Bergen-Belsen Trial: Protocols - Pichen's statement on October 23, 1945 (English)
• Photos and features of the defendants