Erich Gnewuch

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Erich Otto Wilhelm Gnewuch (born November 9, 1903 in Berlin-Charlottenburg , † July 20, 1961 in Berlin ) was a German SA man and gas truck driver .

Life

1909-1933

Gnewuch was the third child of a total of four siblings. The parents, Carl Gnewuch (1875–1946) and Bertha Gnewuch, geb. Müller (1872–1962) both came from simple backgrounds.

Erich Gnewuch attended elementary school from 1909 to 1913 and then worked as an errand boy until 1920. From 1920 to 1928 he worked as a travel agent in a Berlin company. Gnewuch worked as a driver for the Berlin-Charlottenburg district office from 1928 to the summer of 1940.

He married for the first time in 1929, and his wife died early. From this marriage a son was born.

1933-1945

Gnewuch joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 . He had membership number 2,826,263 and belonged to the local group Lützow (= Lietzow), District I, Gau Berlin in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He was a member of the NSKK , the National Socialist Motor Corps.

On June 15, 1933 he became a member of the SA, local group Wilhelmplatz, Staffel 16. There he announced his entry into the NSDAP with the date March 3, 1933. His parents' apartment in Alt-Lietzow, in Lützowerstr. 8 a, performed in Charlottenburg. His job title was driver with driving license class II / IIIb. He achieved the rank of SA troop leader. In the Berlin daily press, Gnewuch was referred to as an SS man two days after his suicide.

On July 1, 1939, the following memberships were stated by him on the NSDAP's party statistics questionnaire: NSKK-National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps (with the note “leading in it”), German Labor Front and NS-Volkswohlfahrt . He also had the SA sports badge, which as a military sports badge had a pre-military training character and u. a. Including 50 meters of small-caliber shooting.

At the beginning of 1936, Erich Gnewuch and his family moved to Rosinenstrasse 10 (later Gatschkestr. 22), near Alt-Lietzow in Charlottenburg. In mid-1937–1947, the National Socialists renamed Rosinenstrasse Gatschkestrasse after the National Socialist Herbert Gatschke (1908–1932). Today it is called Loschmidtstrasse. In the immediate vicinity of the Gnewuch family home in Rosinenstr. 3 the former “Volkshaus”, which served the Social Democrats, the trade union, the consumer cooperative and the local health insurance fund as a work and meeting house. The SA-Sturm 33 had occupied it and in a wild KZ converted, were detained in the political opponents and tortured. A membership in SA-Sturm 33 Erich Gnewuchs would be quite conceivable due to the spatial proximity.

From the summer of 1940 he was assigned emergency duty as a driver to the security police in Mulhouse / Mulhouse in Alsace. In autumn 1941 he had to register as a driver at the Reich Security Main Office , Department II D 3a, in Berlin. There he received his command to Sipo in Minsk / Belarus, Einsatzgruppe B, which was in Minsk from July 6, 1941. On December 13, 1941, Erich Gnewuch received a 7.65 mm PPK pistol with the serial number 301 306 k, including accessories, from the RSHA and was given the official designation "criminal employee". Before Christmas 1941, after a technical briefing, Gnewuch and a colleague brought two gas vans of the first series, the smaller Diamond type , to Riga. From there they went on to Minsk, where they arrived no later than June 1942 and reported to the dispatcher.

The Jewish Ghetto existed in Minsk as early as July 1941 and was completely liquidated on October 21, 1943. From November 1941, deportation trains with Jews from Berlin, other German cities, from Vienna and from Theresienstadt arrived in Minsk. How often exactly Erich Gnewuch with the gas vans people in Minsk from the ghetto or from prison picked, and thus became a thousand times the murderer, or Jews to the gas car or truck from the incoming deportation trains to the execution area, close to the extermination camp Maly Trostinez brought, can cannot be researched subsequently. Erich Gnewuch was also accused of gassing 100 Jews who had been used in soil excavation. According to Erich Gnewuch, SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Madeker , commander of the Sipo and the SD security service in Minsk , gave the orders for the gas truck operations .

Erich Gnewuch was also used as a car chauffeur for the police. Chauffeur services by Gnewuch for Heinrich Himmler , probably during his visit to Minsk in August 1941, are conceivable.

After October 21, 1943, Erich Gnewuch had applied for leave and was back in Berlin in November 1943. During this time his house in Gatschkestr. 22 completely destroyed. In order to be able to look for a new place to stay for himself and his family, he asked the RSHA to lift his assignment to Minsk. His request was granted and he initially moved to his older brother in Alte Schützenstr. 10 later in the Alte Schützenstr. 5 - north of Alexander Platz. During the war he continued to work for the RSHA in Berlin as a driver.

1945–1961

On August 27, 1945, Erich Gnewuch was summoned to the Russian commandant's office, in the New Town Hall, in Parochialstrasse, Berlin-Mitte, for interrogation. It was arrested by the Soviet secret service NKVD , according to Gnewuch's own statement, "because of my membership in the security police (Sipo) and the NSKK". According to the " Sachsenhausen Memorial ", he was blamed for his NSDAP block warden activities and his position as SA squad leader.

Gnewuch first came to the Soviet special camp No. 3 Berlin-Hohenschönhausen . On September 6, 1945 he was brought to the Soviet special camp No. 7/1 in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen. On July 20, 1948, he was released from there as part of a major dismissal campaign in connection with the official end of denazification in the Soviet occupation zone of Germany (SBZ). Erich Gnewuch then consistently refused to provide information about his whereabouts and reasons for his imprisonment and moved back to Alte Schützenstrasse 5.

After the death of his first wife, Erich Gnewuch married a second time in the same year. This marriage remained childless.

In 1951 he moved to West Berlin and found another job at the Berlin-Charlottenburg district office as a caretaker at a vocational school. He and his new wife settled in Westend, Lykallee 33, where he lived in the basement of a stately villa and also worked there as a caretaker and gardener.

On July 19, 1961, Erich Gnewuch was arrested. On behalf of the Koblenz Public Prosecutor's Office, he was interrogated as a suspect in the proceedings against members of the KdS Command of the Security Police - Minsk Office in Berlin and then taken into custody. On July 20, 1961, Erich Gnewuch was found dead in his cell at the Moabit prison. He was last seen alive on July 19, 1961, around 7 p.m. He had committed suicide by hanging himself with the sheets. Erich Gnewuch should have been brought before the judge at the Tiergarten District Court on July 20, 1961 to issue the warrant for murder.

literature

  • Walter Kornfeld: Crimes of the Einsatzgruppen - prosecution before Austrian jury courts using the example of the trial against Josef Wendl. Thesis . Uni Wien, 2012, p. 32 ff (killing by gas) and p. 39 ff (Tatorte Maly Trostinez).
  • Petra Rentrop: Crime scenes of the final solution. The Minsk Ghetto and the Maly Trostinez extermination site. Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-86331-038-7 .
  • The place of extermination of Trostenets in European memory. Materials for the international conference from 21.-24. March 2013 in Minsk. (IBB = International Education and Encounter Association Dortmund).
  • Dorothee Hochstetter: Motorization and "Volksgemeinschaft". The National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK) 1931–1945. (= Studies on Contemporary History. 68). Munich 2005, ISBN 3-486-57570-8 .
  • Martin Schuster: The SA in the National Socialist "seizure of power" in Berlin and Brandenburg 1926–1934. Dissertation . TU Berlin, Berlin 2005, DNB 974966436 .
  • E. Kogon, H. Langbein, A. Rueckerl (Eds.): Nazi Mass Murder: A Documentary History of the Use of Poison Gas. Yale University Press, 1993, ISBN 0-300-05441-6 , pp. 57-59.
  • Matthias Beer: The development of gas vans during the murder of the Jews. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte. 35th year 1987, no. 3 (July), p. 403 ff ( PDF ).
  • Franz W. Seidler: The National Socialist Motor Vehicle Corps and the Todt Organization in World War II, The development of the NSKK until 1939. In: Quarterly books for contemporary history. Vol. 32 (1984), No. 4, p. 625 ff.
  • Maly Trostenets extermination site. History and memory. A German-Belarusian traveling exhibition by the International Education and Meeting Association gGmbH (IBB Dortmund) and the International Education and Meeting Center "Johannes Rau" Minsk (IBB Minsk), in cooperation with the Foundation Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Exhibition catalog German-Russian Museum Berlin-Karlshorst, 2017, ISBN 978-3-942240-25-3 . (There mention of the use of gas trucks on pages 87, 99, 112, 113, 114, 119, 133, 151, 175).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth certificate Charlottenburg No. 2974 in the Landesarchiv Berlin 553/611 and death certificate No. 1164 Berlin in the Landesarchiv Berlin 820/162 and Bundesarchiv Ludwigsburg, B 162/967, p. 1 1999.
  2. ↑ Federal Archives, Berlin-Lichterfelde, formerly BDC (= Berlin Document Center), NSDAP-Gaukartei
  3. ^ SA membership card Erich Gnewuch in the Federal Archives Berlin-Lichterfelde, formerly Document Center
  4. ↑ Berliner Tageszeitungen:
    Berliner Kraftfahrer hanged himself in the detention cell, he drove the death bus from Minsk. In: Berliner Zeitung. July 22, 1961. Hanged
    with sheets on, suicide of a former SS man in the cell. In: evening. July 22nd, 1961.
    Berlin: SS man committed suicide. In: Spandauer Volksblatt. July 22, 1961.
    More than 100,000 people died in agony in the SS gas vans. In: Die Welt. December 8, 1965.
    Trials, gas vans, because of the nerves . In: Der Spiegel. 21/1966, May 16, 1966, p. 60.
    Foreign daily press:
    Jew-Slaye hangs self. In: Kentucky New Era. Vol. 73, No. 211, July 24, 1961.
  5. ↑ Federal Archives, Berlin-Lichterfelde, R 9361I / 937, Erich Gnewuch, party statistics survey of July 1, 1939.
  6. ↑ Federal Archives, Berlin-Lichterfelde, R58 / 1152, Reich Security Main Office, index card, Erich Gnewuch
  7. ↑ Copy of the interrogation protocol on behalf of the Koblenz Public Prosecutor's Office 9 Js 716/59, from July 19, 1961 in Berlin, Kripo, Tempelhofer Damm, in: State Archives Munich StanW Mü.I 33049/8
personal data
SURNAME Gnewuch, Erich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gnewuch, Erich Otto Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SA man and gas truck driver
DATE OF BIRTH November 9, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Charlottenburg
DATE OF DEATH July 20, 1961
Place of death Berlin-Charlottenburg