Eduard Krebsbach

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Krebsbach 1942

Eduard Krebsbach (born August 8, 1894 in Bonn ; †  May 28,  1947 in Landsberg am Lech (executed)) was a German medic and on- site doctor in the Mauthausen concentration camp from July 1941 to August 1943.

Life

Krebsbach attended a humanistic high school in Cologne. From 1912 he completed a course of medicine at the University of Freiburg i.Br., interrupted by four years of military service in the First World War . and obtained his doctorate in 1919 with the dissertation on Spirochaeten findings in the cerebellum in progressive paralysis . In the same year he was one of the co-founders of the Freiburg branch of the German National Guard and Defense Association . In mid-1920 he moved from Freiburg and worked as a company and district doctor . Krebsbach's first marriage was childless; after his divorce he remarried in 1943.

After the transfer of power to the National Socialists, Krebsbach was dismissed as a district doctor in 1933 as an alleged opponent of the National Socialists. A later SS superior from Krebsbach attributed the dismissal to the work of “reactionary and other black officials”. In autumn 1933 he opened a medical practice in Freiburg; at the same time he worked as a contract doctor for the Freiburg Police Department. In the same year he joined the SS and the NSDAP . There were problems with Krebsbach's party membership, so that he rejoined the NSDAP in 1937 after the suspension of admission . In the SS, Krebsbach was the leader of the senior medical staff of the 65th SS Standard in Freiburg; in November 1938 he was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer . Krebsbach belonged to the small group of SA and SS men who devastated the Freiburg synagogue and set it on fire during the November pogroms in 1938 .

During the Second World War , Krebsbach joined the Waffen SS in October 1939 . He took part in the western campaign with the SS Totenkopf Division . In 1940 he worked as a police doctor in the Alsatian city of Mulhouse .

Concentration camp doctor in Mauthausen and Kaiserwald

In July 1941, Eduard Krebsbach began his service as a site doctor in the Austrian concentration camp Mauthausen. In the capacity of his official position, Krebsbach was directly subordinate to Office D III (Sanitary and Camp Hygiene) of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office and was in charge of the sanitary and the entire medical staff of the camp. As part of the 14f13 campaign, Krebsbach designated inmates who were unable to work or who were sick for the fatal gasoline injections into the heart. In 1942, under his supervision, 900 tuberculous Russian, Polish and Czech prisoners were murdered by syringe. This activity is said to give him the nickname “Dr. Spritzbach ”. Krebsbach was responsible for the installation of a gas chamber in the cellar of the Mauthausen infirmary and for the purchase of a “ special car ”, which should replace the practice of death by injection. At the end of 1942, 120–130 Czechs were gassed in the presence of Krebsbach because of their involvement in the assassination attempt on the Deputy Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, Reinhard Heydrich . In 1942 he had reached the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer.

Presumably because of an incident in which Krebsbach shot a Wehrmacht vacationer in front of his house on May 22, 1943 for disturbing the peace at night, he was transferred to the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp for around a year in August 1943 . In Kaiserwald, Krebsbach, meanwhile with the rank of SS-Obersturmbannführer, was responsible for the management of the medical services and the supervision of the medical staff in the main camp and the satellite camps . Krebsbach played a key role in the selection of sick people and those unable to work who were either murdered by injections in the infirmary or shot in the surrounding woods. According to survivors, he conducted medical experiments in which prisoners were injected with typhoid pathogens. In the spring of 1944 he was involved in the so-called children's action, in which all children under the age of 14 were singled out and murdered. The “Krebsbach Aktion” is named after him, during which on July 28, 1944 up to 1000 prisoners, mostly old and weak, were selected and murdered.

After his efforts to be accepted into the Wehrmacht were successful, Krebsbach served there as senior staff doctor from late autumn 1944. In December 1944 he returned to work as a company doctor in a spinning mill in Kassel .

During the interrogation of the fatally wounded camp commandant Franz Ziereis on May 24, 1945, he incriminated Eduard Krebsbach, whom he declared to be responsible for the gassing facilities and selections in Mauthausen, and gave the interrogators Krebsbach's whereabouts.

Mauthausen main trial

After arrest and various interrogations, on March 29, 1946, Krebsbach was among the 61 suspects in the Mauthausen main trial (000-50-5) in Dachau . In addition to Friedrich Entress and Waldemar Wolter , he was one of the group of camp and site doctors accused there. Eduard Krebsbach did not testify as a witness on his own behalf. On May 13, 1946, the American military tribunal sentenced him to death by hanging . The sister's petition for clemency was denied. On May 28, 1947, Krebsbach was executed in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison . In the interrogation protocols of the Dachau trials , Krebsbach stated that it never occurred to him that the killings were crimes.

literature

Web links

Commons : Eduard Krebsbach  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Quoted by Heiko Wegmann: mass murderers without remorse. In: Badische Zeitung , June 1, 2013 (accessed November 21, 2013).
  2. ↑ Kathrin Clausing: Life on demand. On the history of the Freiburg Jews under National Socialism. City Archives Freiburg im Breisgau, Freiburg im Breisgau 2005, ISBN 3-923272-33-2 , p. 259.
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. , Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 338.
  4. ^ Franziska Jahn: Riga Kaiserwald - main 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 , pp. 17-64, here pp. 27 f, 42, 51 f.
  5. ↑ a b Eduard Krebsbach on www.mauthausen-memorial.at ( Memento from August 4, 2012 in the web archive archive.today )
  6. ↑ Franz Ziereis interrogation of May 24, 1945 http://www.library.yale.edu/testimonies/exhibit/Pages/Image-1219_3.html ( Memento of December 2, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) translated into English by Oscar Roth, Manuscripts and Archives, Yale University Library at www.library.yale.edu
  7. ^ Review and Recommendations of the Deputy Judge Advocate for War Crimes: United States of America v. Hans Altfuldisch et al. - Case No. 000.50.5, pp. 48f.
    Cf. Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 338.
personal data
SURNAME Krebsbach, Eduard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Site doctor in Mauthausen concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH August 8, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn
DATE OF DEATH May 28, 1947
Place of death Landsberg am Lech