Three German murderers. Record of the banality of evil

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Ebbo Demant directed the film “ Three German Murderers. Notes on the Banality of Evil ”(1978/99, filmic report, 44 min. ARD). For his film "Lagerstraße Auschwitz", Ebbo Demant interviewed three Auschwitz murderers who were still alive in 1978. The conversations with the perpetrators - these are the only filmed minutes of the perpetrators with those convicted of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials - lasted several hours. Only a small part of this film material was used in "Lagerstrasse Auschwitz". Demant has now viewed all of the call recordings again and made a documentation out of them. About fourteen years after the second Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt (1965 and 1966) and during their imprisonment with convicts Josef Erber , Oswald Kaduk and Josef Klehr , interviews about the mass murders in the German concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau and their self-image as former relatives are recorded the SS guards there and shown as the perpetrator. There are no other contributions in the film than the questions of the director who is not shown and the answers given to them. You seem to report calmly about the murders in this concentration camp according to the duty roster as part of an organization: "You were assigned."

The three perpetrators

Josef Erber, a trained textile worker, was assigned to the Auschwitz extermination camp as SS-Oberscharführer since 1940. He belonged to the Political Department, the camp Gestapo , and was in charge of the reception , which meant that he checked the arrival of the trains on the ramp, recorded the numbers of prisoners and was involved in the selections . In 1966 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for 70 joint murder cases.

Oswald Kaduk, a trained butcher, was one of the cruelest SS men in the Auschwitz extermination camp, according to the Frankfurt court. He was the report leader there (supervision of the prisoner roll calls that are held twice a day). He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1965 for ten murders and at least one thousand joint murders.

Josef Klehr, a trained carpenter, had been in Auschwitz as an "SS medic" since 1941. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1965 for murder in 475 cases and complicity in community murder in 1980 cases.

Text version

  • Ebbo Demant (Ed.): Auschwitz - "Straight from the ramp ..." Kaduk, Erber, Klehr: Three perpetrators put on record , Hamburg 1979. 142 pages. ISBN 9783499144387

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