Engelbert Valentin Niedermeyer

Engelbert Valentin Niedermeyer (born December 26, 1911 ; †  May 28, 1946 in Landsberg am Lech ) was SS-Unterscharführer and was employed as a block leader and in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp .

biography

Niedermeyer, married and the father of two children, had been a member of the SS since 1933 . From May 1934, Niedermeyer was assigned to the Dachau concentration camp, where he served as block leader from April 1938 to November 1941. In the meantime, Niedermeyer, as the command leader, monitored a prisoner command during the construction of the garage from 1939 to 1940. From the end of November 1941 to May 1942, Niedermeyer was deployed in the crematorium of the Dachau concentration camp under Oberscharführer Theodor Heinrich Bongartz , where he supervised the cremations. He was also a member of a firing squad that executed around 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war in the early 1940s. He then worked again as a block leader and was temporarily responsible for the telecommunications office of the camp commandant's office. From February 1, 1943 until the end of the war, Niedermeyer was deployed at the front and thus retired from camp service.

After the end of the war, Niedermeyer was indicted as a war criminal by a US military tribunal on November 15, 1945 in the main Dachau trial, which took place as part of the Dachau trials , and sentenced to death by hanging on December 13, 1945 along with 35 other co-defendants . In the judgment, the abuse of prisoners was taken into account as individual acts of excess at Niedermeyer. The sentence was carried out on May 28, 1946 in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison .

Before the execution , Niedermeyer wrote a letter to his wife in which he showed no remorse for the acts he had committed: “Stay happy in your life, do not forget that you are a German woman […]. Never forget that I died innocent. One day the day will come when our innocence will take revenge, you can rely on it [...]. In the hope of a better future, I am dying for you and thus for Germany and say goodbye to you. "

literature

• Case No. 000-50-2 (US vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss et al.) Tried 13 Dec. 45 ( online PDF, 39 MB; English)
• Holger Lessing: The first Dachau trial (1945/46) . Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 1993, ISBN 3-7890-2933-5
• Ludwig Eiber , Robert Sigl (Ed.): Dachauer Trials - Nazi Crimes before American Military Courts in Dachau 1945 - 1948 , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0167-2

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} quoted from: Gabriele Hammermann: Defense strategies of the accused in the Dachau trials and in the Dachau internment camp , p. 98 in: Ludwig Eiber, Robert Sigl (ed.): Dachau trials - Nazi crimes before American military courts in Dachau 1945 - 1948 , Göttingen 2007