Emil Nitz

Emil Nitz (* 29. May 1888 in Great Coat / Neumark , † the 30th August 1952 in Dresden ) was a German prisoner functionary in the Neuengamme concentration camp , which after the Second World War because of the mistreatment of concentration camp prisoners from the East German judiciary to death was convicted and executed.

Life

During the Second World War, Nitz was sent to the Neuengamme concentration camp as a criminal, where he served as a Kapo from around 1941 . After the war he was initially able to escape undetected, but was recognized and arrested in 1949. A contemporary account of his actions as a kapo and the circumstances of his arrest gives the following description:

“Finally, in 1949, one of them [the Neuengamme survivors] recognized the 63-year-old Kapo in the rooms of the labor court on Inselstraße. The hour of reckoning had come. Whoever saw this pinched grimace of Kapos Nitz and looked at his long monkey arms, had an inkling of what had bloomed the poor people who were at the mercy of him for life and death. The camp SS guard knew why they used criminal inmate Nitz of all people to sift through the camp. In 1941 Nitz was appointed supervisor of the notorious potato peeling kitchens, the peeling kitchen in which the seriously ill, incapacitated anti-fascists were made 'crematorium-ready' according to the will of the SS command. Only people entered here whose emaciated, TB-eaten bodies and hunger and exhaustion could no longer do useful work. For these prisoners, the peeling kitchen was a waiting room of death. Between the sick people, the guard Nitz went around and smashed them with spade handles and dung forks beyond recognition. "

The East German judiciary subsequently tried Nitz before the East Berlin Regional Court for mistreating sick and incapacitated concentration camp inmates in Neuengamme and Bostel ( Stalag XB ) and for participating in the hanging of a Latvian prisoner who protested against the conditions in Bostel would have. On April 10, 1951 Nitz was sentenced to death and on 30 August 1952 along with Julius Bergmann in the central place of execution of the GDR in Dresden from an executioner of the German People's Police with the guillotine executed .

literature

• Joachim Dittrich: With Cobra and Ulla through the Berlin courtrooms , Berlin (GDR) 1953

Web links

• Entry on Emil Nitz in the GDR justice system and Nazi crimes

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl Raddatz: With Cobra and Ulla through the Berlin court room , p. 134.