August rent

August Wilhelm Rent (born November 1, 1908 in Westerkappeln ; † August 9, 1987 in Osnabrück ) was a German SS squad leader and was sentenced to life in prison by the Düsseldorf Regional Court in the Treblinka trials for his crimes committed in the Treblinka extermination camp .

Until November 1943

Rent was the son of a miller and farmer and attended elementary school and then learned the miller's trade. When his father died in 1921, he worked with his brother on their parents' farm and in the mill. He was married and had three children.

In 1940 he became a member of the NSDAP . From May 1940 to October 1941 he worked in the Grafeneck Castle killing center in their farm, then until the beginning of June 1942 as a craftsman in the Hadamar killing center and in the crematorium there , where he burned the corpses of the mentally ill who were killed in the gas chambers . He was promoted to SS-Unterscharführer and was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp at the end of June / beginning of July 1942, where he stayed until mid-November 1943, when it was dismantled.

crime

Rent worked in the so-called "military hospital" in the extermination camp , a place where the sick Jews were killed, and was head of the external command, the lumberjack and the so-called stealth command, which had to ensure that no insight into the camp was possible. He supervised the sorting area, where the clothes of the dead were sorted out and bundled, and he was one of the German SS sub-leaders who took care of all matters in the camp. He also helped with the arrival of transports, provided that he was not serving in the "hospital". He was involved in the sorting out of those able to work and drove the arriving ones on with his whip or firearm, in the process he liquidated a large number of Jews who were frail because of their old age or illness by shooting in the neck. In the opinion of the regional court, rent personally murdered several hundred people in Treblinka and in doing so developed an " enormous criminal energy that was in a striking disproportionate to his generally low rank of an SS-Unterscharfuhrer, because he acted out of sheer sadism and because he did not show mercy and humanity even once towards the working Jews he supervised in the sorting squad. "

Rent was involved in the murder by killing a young man named Meir Berliner from Warsaw who was resisting and who attacked SS Sergeant Max Biala with a knife and killed him in the process. Berliners and two other prisoners were immediately slain, another ten were subsequently ordered by the deputy camp commandant and 80 to 100 prisoners were shot the next day in retaliation. Rent confirmed attacks on prisoners by camp manager Kurt Franz's mongrel dog Barry and admitted to having shot prisoners attacked by Barry.

After November 1943

Shortly before Christmas 1943, Miet was assigned to the special division Einsatz R in Trieste under the leadership of SS- Hauptsturmführer Gottlieb Hering and shortly afterwards transferred to Udine in Italy . In Udine he was employed by the Reinhard 3 unit and was involved in the confiscation and administration of Jewish property and was also used against partisans at times. He was also briefly with a unit in Turin .

After the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans and was released near Munich after 1945 . Until 1950 he worked in his father's company. Then he worked until his arrest in May 1960 as managing director of the savings and loan cooperative in Lotte in Westphalia .

Rent was punished in the Treblinka Trial with life imprisonment for the joint murder of at least 300,000 people and for the personal murder of at least nine people, which was proven to him in detail . He was conditionally released on February 27, 1985.

literature

• Wolfgang Benz : Treblinka extermination camp. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 8: Riga, Warsaw, Vaivara, Kaunas, Płaszów, Kulmhof / Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka. CH Beck, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-406-57237-1 , p. 407 ff.
• Richard Glazar : The Trap with the Green Fence. Survival in Treblinka. With a foreword by Wolfgang Benz. Fischer publishing house. Frankfurt am Main 1992. ISBN 3-596-10764-4
• Bogdan Musial (Ed.): "Aktion Reinhardt". The genocide of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement 1941 - 1944. pp. 303/304. Fiber Verlag, Osnabrück 2004. ISBN 3929759837
• Samuel Willenberg : Treblinka Lager. Revolt. Escape. Warsaw Uprising. Pp. 95/96. Unrast-Verlag, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-89771-820-3
• LG Düsseldorf, September 3, 1965 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XXII, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1981, No. 596, pp. 1–238 Subject matter of the proceedings: gassing of at least 700,000 predominantly Jewish men, women and children and, in a minority, also of gypsies. Fatal abuse, shooting, killing and hanging of individual prisoners as well as being mangled by 'Barry', the camp commandant's dog.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death register of the Osnabrück registry office No. 1274/1987.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Düsseldorf Regional Court: Treblinka trial judgment of September 3, 1965, 8 I Ks 2/64 ( Memento of the original of March 21, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed September 29, 2009 
3. ^ Benz: Treblinka extermination camp. P. 414 (see literature)