Erhard Wetzel

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Erhard Wetzel , in the literature falsely Ernst Wetzel or Alfred Wetzel called (* 7. July 1903 in Stettin ; † 24. December 1975 ) was a German jurist who in the era of National Socialism in the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO) worked for the Nazi chief ideologist Alfred Rosenberg as a "Jewish advisor". Wetzel became known in the post-war period because of the so-called gas chamber letter he wrote . The letter is the earliest document to date that testifies to the connection between the T4 action and the systematic extermination of Jews in Europe. Wetzel also participated in these murders - and not least - through his participation in the follow -up conferences to the Wannsee Conference . He has also participated in various actions in the context of the implementation of the General Plan East , with which the policy of Germanization of the occupied eastern territories was pursued.

Weimar Republic

Wetzel was born on July 7, 1903 in Stettin as the son of the bailiff Erich Wetzel and his wife Clara nee. Golchert born. He spent part of his youth in Jakobshagen in Pomerania before his father was transferred to Potsdam in 1909 . There Wetzel first attended the municipal pre-school and then the Viktoria-Gymnasium . From 1920 to 1922 he belonged to the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund . In 1921 he passed the school leaving examination and then enrolled for seven semesters at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin, where he studied law and political science. In 1925 Wetzel passed the first state examination in law at the Higher Regional Court in Potsdam and then moved to Göttingen. It was in 1928 at the Georg-August University of Göttingen with the constitutional thesis The exclusion of members of the association to Dr. jur. PhD . He completed his legal traineeship in Potsdam from 1925 at the public prosecutor's office, the local district and regional court and with a resident lawyer. After passing the second state examination in law, he was appointed court assessor and worked as a lawyer and notary representative from February 1930 to November 1933 at local and regional courts in Berlin and Brandenburg.

National Socialism

Career in the Reich leadership and district court advisor

In May 1933, shortly after the National Socialists “ seized power ” in Germany, Wetzel joined the NSDAP . From 1935 to 1937 he was the jock press administrator of the Nazi legal guardian association , to which he had belonged since May 1933. From May 1935 he also worked on a voluntary basis for the Race Political Office in the NSDAP Reichsleitung in the Office for Race and Law . As early as 1934 he was appointed to this position by State Secretary Roland Freisler , who later became President of the “ People's Court ”. In 1939 he was appointed head of the department for race politics.

From December 1933 to October 1939 Wetzel worked at the Potsdam District Court, where he was appointed to the District Court Council in early August 1936.

Race Commissioner in Poznan

After the beginning of the Second World War , Wetzel became an employee of Heinrich Himmler in the office of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationality (RKFDV). As a result of the attack by the German Wehrmacht on Poland in September 1939, Wetzel worked from October 1939 as a representative for all racial issues with the head of the civil administration in Posen ( Warthegau ), SS-Obergruppenführer Arthur Greiser . Only a few days later, on November 25, 1939, he and Günther Hecht, the head of the Department for Ethnic Germans and Minorities in the Racial Policy Office of the NSDAP, wrote a secret memorandum with the title The question of the treatment of the population of the former Polish territories according to racial policy Points of view . The subject of this publication was the “ resettlement ” of “Poles” and “Jews” in a “remaining area”. This document also reads:

“ Poles ' property is to be expropriated . A cultural life of its own is to be excluded; no Polish schools, no services in Polish; no Polish restaurants, theaters, newspapers, etc. "

In April 1940 Wetzel became head of the Reich Main Office at the Racial Political Office. From this point on until October 1941 he resumed his work as a district judge. With the other half of his working time he worked for the Racial Political Office and, among other things, took over the chairmanship of the Hereditary Health Court in Potsdam.

Race Commissioner in the East Ministry

Wetzel as a participant in the conference on the final solution of the Jewish question on March 6, 1942 in the Reich Security Main Office

After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the official appointment of the Nazi chief ideologist and Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg in July 1941 to the office of "East Minister", Wetzel was appointed representative of the Racial Politics Office in the newly established Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories (RMfdbO) Deputy, where he worked from October 1941 as a " Jewish clerk " in the Political Department of the RMfdbO. Since June 1941, this department has been headed by the diplomat and lawyer Otto Bräutigam , an important liaison between the RMfdbO and the Foreign Office . On October 25, 1941, Wetzel sent a letter to Reichskommissar Hinrich Lohse in the Reichskommissariat Ostland in Riga . This so-called gas chamber letter is the earliest written testimony that documents the connection between the T4 campaign and the genocide of the Jewish population in Europe. The letter also proves that Wetzel, Bridegroom and the RMfdbO were not only involved in the extermination of the Jews, but also knew about the " euthanasia " murders. The occasion of the letter, as Wetzel wrote, was "very numerous shootings of Jews" in Vilna. The aim must therefore be to implement an orderly solution beyond the public eye, and Viktor Brack has already stated that he will “participate in the creation of the necessary accommodation [= gas chambers] and the gassing apparatus”.

On January 20, 1942, Ministerialrat Georg Leibbrandt and State Secretary Alfred Meyer , both also central employees of Alfred Rosenberg in the RMfdbO, took part in the Wannsee Conference at which the coordination of the mass murder of the Jews, referred to as the “final solution to the European Jewish question” , was decided. Erhard Wetzel took part in a meeting at which the "result of the state secretaries' meeting of January 20, 1942" was discussed. This took place on January 29, 1942 in the rooms of the RMfdbO in Berlin Rauchstrasse 17/18. Participants in this conference were subordinate representatives of various ministries, the party chancellery and the high command of the Wehrmacht . Wetzel was very well informed about the genocide against the Jewish population in the occupied eastern territories. Last but not least, he also took part in the second follow-up conference on the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) on March 6, 1942. In September 1942, Wetzel was promoted to the "main group leader for settlement issues" of the RMfdbO and to the rank of government councilor. In this position he took part in the final solution conference on October 27, 1942 in the Eichmann department of the RSHA.

On February 7, 1942, Wetzel wrote a secret report for Otto Bräutigam about a meeting in the Berlin RMfdbO about the question of racial Germanization, especially in the Baltic countries. In addition to representatives of the RMfdbO, representatives from Heinrich Himmler's offices and the racial anthropologist Eugen Fischer from the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute also took part in the meeting. The RMfdbO took the position that it had to be considered “whether the racially undesirable parts of the population could not expediently be scrapped through the industrialization of the Baltic region”. For the rural population of Poland, Himmler's offices claimed that only "3% of racially valuable" people lived there; there are still no figures for the urban population. The participants of this meeting came to the conclusion “that with regard to the question of the east country, a precise examination of the population must be carried out beforehand, which must not be labeled as a racial inventory, but rather as a hygienic examination and the like. The like. Must be camouflaged so that there is no unrest in the population. "

A meeting took place on March 13, 1942, attended by Erhard Wetzel, Adolf Eichmann and Franz Rademacher from the Foreign Office . The subject of this meeting was deportations. On April 27, 1942, Wetzel campaigned - against the suggestion of Wolfgang Abel from the SS Race and Settlement Office to "Germanize" the "Russian race" - that a birth control should be carried out. On the same day, Wetzel wrote a document entitled Statement and Thoughts on the General Plan East , in which he calculated the annihilation of "around 5 to 6 million Jews". Alfred Rosenberg had the guidelines for the occupied eastern territories supplemented on that day . Tatars, gypsies and people with an oriental appearance should be included in the extermination campaigns. At the beginning of July 1942, Wetzel was appointed senior councilor and officially a member of the RMfdbO. He headed the special department "Racial Policy" and later became group leader of the leadership group "Germanism, Settlement and Racial Policy".

In August 1944, Wetzel was promoted again. Now he was given the position of Ministerial Counselor . In 1961, two Hanoverian public prosecutors, who were researching Wetzel's documents at the Munich Institute for Contemporary History , discovered a report written on December 1, 1944 under the file number P / 1137a / 44g, which proves that Wetzel was involved in the "euthanasia" campaign. After a visit to Latvian children's homes, he suggested that “various children” in Swinoujscie and Ahlbeck should be subjected to “ special treatment ” in accordance with the “provisions on eugenics and race care”.

Towards the end of the war, Wetzel was drafted into the Volkssturm in Potsdam. At the beginning of May 1945 he was imprisoned for a few days at the Michendorf collection point, where he managed to escape on May 4, 1945.

post war period

Special camp inmate in the Soviet zone of occupation and prosecution in the GDR

Wetzel was arrested in his Potsdam apartment on May 19, 1945 and was then interned in the special camps in Ketschendorf, Frankfurt / Oder, Landsberg and Buchenwald. In mid-February 1950 he was transferred to the Waldheim prison and indicted in the Waldheim trials . On May 4, 1950, Wetzel was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment and confiscation of his property for reparation for extraordinary support of the Nazi tyranny. After the public prosecutor went into revision on May 5, 1950 because of the gravity of the Wetzel crimes, it was tried again on the basis of the sentence. Wetzel was sentenced to 25 years at home on June 8, 1950. The Large Criminal Chamber of the Chemnitz Regional Court justified the increase in the prison sentence as follows:

“In the first hearing the court assumed that the East Ministry had nothing to do with the crimes in Poland, especially in Maidanek [!] And Auschwitz. This view is erroneous, and at the second hearing the court found that the accused, as a specialist in racial questions, represented an important wheel in this machinery as a ministerial councilor. "

After a pardon, the prison sentence was gradually reduced. On December 31, 1955, Wetzel was finally released from the Torgau prison. Shortly afterwards he moved to the Federal Republic of Germany .

Home Office

In February 1956 he was recognized as a returnee , and in May 1956 he got a job as a ministerial advisor in the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Interior , but was retired in 1958 for “health reasons”.

Erhard Wetzel was not called to account for his crimes during the time of National Socialism in the young Federal Republic of Germany. In the course of the Eichmann trial in 1961, the German public became aware of Wetzel because it became known that he had participated in the follow-up conferences to the Wannsee Conference. Because of his salary as Ministerialrat a. D. an investigation was initiated against him at the Hanover public prosecutor's office , but it was discontinued on December 9, 1961. Regarding the memorandum that Wetzel had written on November 25, 1939, the public prosecutor's office noted, for example: "The content of the memorandum is indeed vile and testifies to a mean and ruthless attitude", but "no criminal offenses that can be prosecuted are evident". The reason was also:

“Wetzel is a lawyer, [...] extremely agile and obviously unbroken physically and mentally. It can be assumed that he counted against himself long before the initiation of these proceedings. It could not have been difficult for him to find out [...] about the material at hand. [...] It will probably not have escaped him that the evidence against him, insofar as criminal misconduct comes into consideration, is incomplete. In view of the documents available from him, which he could not deny, it was obvious that he would rely on orders and instructions from his superiors. [...] "

state of knowledge

The level of knowledge about Erhard Wetzel is so far low. Even his name has been misrepresented over and over again. In his popular book The Final Solution , the historian Gerald Reitlinger gave Ernst as his first name in 1953 (still in the 7th German-language edition 1992), which was taken over by several scientific authors. This made biographical research much more difficult. It was not until a Spiegel article in 1961 that it became clear that Erhard and Ernst Wetzel were the same person. In addition to “Ernst Wetzel”, the erroneous name variants “Ehrhard Wetzel” and “Alfred Wetzel” were also found.

Fonts

  • Erhard Wetzel: The exclusion of association members, in particular the question of his judicial review in literature and jurisprudence. White Knight Voggenreiter, Potsdam 1928 (also dissertation, University of Göttingen ).

swell

  • Czesław Madajczyk (Ed.): From the General Plan East to the General Settlement Plan. Saur, Munich et al. 1994.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Officials of National Socialist Reich Ministries at https://ns-reichsministerien.de
  2. ↑ Erhard Wetzel: The exclusion of association members, especially the question of his judicial review in literature and jurisprudence. White Knights Voggenreiter , dissertation, Potsdam 1928, p. 63.
  3. ↑ Czesław Madajczyk (Ed.): From the General Plan East to the General Settlement Plan. Saur, Munich et al. 1994, p. XVIII .
  4. ↑ Helmut Heiber: The General Plan East. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 6, 1958, Issue 3, pp. 281-325, here p. 286 f. (PDF) .
  5. ↑ a b c d e f g h Ernst Klee : The personal dictionary for the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 673.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 , pp. 216-218.
  7. ↑ a b c Gerald Reitlinger : The final solution. Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945. 7th edition. Berlin 1992, p. 144.
  8. ↑ Sometimes incorrectly called " Gerhard Hecht" in the literature .
  9. ↑ BArch R 49/75, cf. a. Michael Alberti: The persecution and extermination of the Jews in the Reichsgau Wartheland 1939–1945. Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 3-447-05167-1 , p. 88 .
  10. ^ Ingo Haar : Historians in National Socialism. German history and the “national struggle” in the east. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2002, ISBN 3-525-35942-X , p. 331 (source: IfZ , MA 125/9, p. 380572-597); Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 673 (source: Nbg. Doc. PS 660).
  11. ↑ Hans-Dieter Heilmann: From the war diary of the diplomat Otto Bräutigam. In: Götz Aly u. a. (Ed.): Biedermann and desk clerk. Materials on the German biography of the perpetrator (= contributions to National Socialist health and social policy. Vol. 4). Berlin 1987, p. 175 f.
  12. ↑ Document VEJ 7/206 in Bert Hoppe, Hiltrud Glass: (Ed.) The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945 (source book) Volume 7: Soviet Union annexed areas I - Occupied Soviet territories under German military administration , Baltic States and Transnistria. Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-486-58911-5 , pp. 564-565.
  13. ↑ Gerald Reitlinger: The final solution. Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945. 7th edition. Berlin 1992, pp. 144 f., Cf. also p. 226 f .; Helmut Heiber : The General Plan East. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 6, 1958, Issue 3, pp. 281-325, here p. 305 (cited sources: Nbg. Doc. NO-365, NO-996/97, PDF ). A complete copy of the document can also be found in: Anatomie des SS-Staates: Expert opinion of the Institute for Contemporary History. Vol. 2, dtv, Munich 1967, p. 337.
  14. ↑ Kurt Pätzold , Manfred Weißbecker (ed.): Steps to the gallows. Life paths before the Nuremberg judgments. Leipzig 1999, p. 40 ff .; and Joe Heydecker , Johannes Leeb: The Nuremberg Trial. Cologne 2003, p. 401.
  15. ^ Robert MW Kempner : Eichmann and accomplices. Zurich 1961, p. 165; as well as Hans-Dieter Heilmann: From the war diary of the diplomat Otto Bräutigam. In: Götz Aly u. a. (Ed.): Biedermann and desk clerk. Materials on the German biography of the perpetrator (= contributions to National Socialist health and social policy. Vol. 4). Berlin 1987, p. 180 f.
  16. ↑ Czesław Madajczyk (Ed.): From the General Plan East to the General Settlement Plan. Saur, Munich et al. 1994, p. 60 (cited source: NG-2586).
  17. ↑ Czesław Madajczyk (Ed.): From the General Plan East to the General Settlement Plan. Saur, Munich et al. 1994, p. 40.
  18. ↑ Quoted in: Czesław Madajczyk (Ed.): From General Plan East to General Settlement Plan. Saur, Munich et al. 1994, p. 41.
  19. ↑ Gerald Reitlinger: The final solution. Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945. 7th edition. Berlin 1992, p. 41 f.
  20. ↑ See Czesław Madajczyk (ed.): From the General Plan East to the General Settlement Plan. Saur, Munich et al. 1994, p. 54.
  21. ↑ Gerald Reitlinger: The final solution. Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews of Europe 1939–1945. 7th edition. Berlin 1992, p. 230.
  22. ↑ a b One came through . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1961, pp. 23 ( online - August 16, 1961 ).
  23. ^ A b Henry Leide: Auschwitz and State Security - Law Enforcement, Propaganda and Secrecy in the GDR , Berlin 2019, p. 79f.
  24. ^ Judgment of the 3rd large criminal chamber of the LG Chemnitz in Waldheim from June 8, 1950; BStU, MfS Abt. XII RF 575, Bl. 13 f., Here 14. Quotes from: Henry Leide: Auschwitz and State Security - Criminal Prosecution, Propaganda and Secrecy in the GDR , Berlin 2019, p. 79.
  25. ^ Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 673 (source: Hiring decree of December 9, 1961, 2Js 499/61 StA Hannover).
  26. ↑ For details of Wetzel's official title, cf. Czesław Madajczyk (Ed.): From the General Plan East to the General Settlement Plan. Saur, Munich et al. 1994, p. 569 : "Head of the advice center of the Racial Policy Office of the NSDAP VI, VII, X, XIV, XVI, XVIII, XIX."
  27. ^ "Ehrhard Wetzel" in: Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005 (in the 2nd edition from 2007 correct “Erhard Wetzel”).
  28. ^ "Alfred Wetzel" in: Henry Friedlander : The way to genocide. From euthanasia to the final solution. Berlin 1997, ISBN 3-8270-0265-6 ; and: The Holocaust Chronicle. Special edition for Droemer Knaur, Munich 2002, p. 275 f.
personal data
SURNAME Wetzel, Erhard
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wetzel, Ernst; Wetzel, Alfred
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH July 7, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Szczecin
DATE OF DEATH December 24, 1975