Emil Hantl

Emil Hantl (born December 14, 1902 in Mährisch-Lotschnau , today part of Svitavy ; † August 18, 1984 in Plochingen ) was a member of the camp team at the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz . As a medical officer in Auschwitz, he was sentenced to three and a half years in prison after the war.

Life

Hantl was born in 1902 as the son of a factory worker and, after attending primary school, trained as a baker in Zwittau. Since he could not find a job as a baker after completing his training, he took a job in a Zwittau textile factory. From 1924 he worked for Czech farmers. In 1925 he returned to Zwittau to work as a weaver.

After the Sudetenland was annexed by the German Reich in September 1938 , Hantl became a member of the NSDAP and the SS . At the beginning of 1940 he was drafted into the Waffen-SS , during which he underwent infantry training with an SS skull standard. Hantl was not sent to the front, however, but was commissioned to go to Auschwitz at the beginning of 1940 to serve in the guard battalion. He later became a command leader and commanded a detainee detachment. Hantl fell seriously ill in 1942 and did not return to work until the end of the year. After his return he was first assigned to the department of the SS medical officer and after some time worked as a medical officer in the infirmary. His work as a medical service also included the selection of exhausted prisoners and the killing of prisoners with phenol injections .

In the summer of 1944, the SS transferred Hantl to the Auschwitz III Monowitz concentration camp (previous name: Buna camp). Buna is a synthetic rubber that should make Germany independent of rubber imports. Prisoners who were locked up in the specially built Buna concentration camp were used to produce the material.

At the end of 1944, Hantl was transferred to the Jaworzno subcamp . When the camp was dissolved and the military withdrawal was initiated at the same time, Hantl managed to break away from the Auschwitz SS and report to a unit of the Todt Organization . He was then captured by American soldiers as a member of the Todt Organization and not as a Waffen SS member and was therefore released after a few weeks. His ID, which identified him as a member of the Todt organization, protected him from a heavier sentence.

After the war, Hantl worked in agriculture in Münchenreuth and moved to Marktredwitz in Franconia in the early 1950s, where he again worked as a weaver.

Hantl was arrested in May 1961 and was remanded in custody in the course of the first Auschwitz trial , which took place before the jury court in Frankfurt am Main . On August 19, 1965, he was three and a half years prison sentenced. The sentence was offset against the pre-trial detention, which is why he was released immediately.

literature

• Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Ullstein-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main / Berlin / Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .

Web links

• Brief portrait of Emil Hants on www.auschwitz-prozess-frankfurt.de
• Short biography and picture on www.auschwitz-prozess-frankfurt.de
• Peter Reichel : The first Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial , in: Kurt Groenewold , Alexander Ignor, Arnd Koch (Ed.): Lexicon of Political Criminal Trials , online, as of May 2018.