Erich Hermann Bauer

Erich Hermann Bauer (born March 26, 1900 in Berlin ; † February 4, 1980 there ) was a German war criminal who was involved in the gassing of thousands of prisoners in the Sobibor extermination camp from 1942 to 1943 . The death sentence pronounced against him in 1950 was later commuted to life imprisonment . Bauer served the sentence until his death in 1980.

Life

Bauer was born in Berlin in 1900 as the son of an upholsterer and decorator. After elementary school he began training as a lathe operator . However , he did not take his journeyman's examination because he had since been drafted into military service. He fought as a soldier in France until September 1918 and then fell into French captivity, from which he was released in early 1920. After that he initially worked as an unskilled worker. After completing appropriate training, he worked as a driver from 1923 . From 1933 he was employed as a tram conductor for the Berlin transport company. In the same year he joined the SA , where he held the rank of squad leader. A little later he was accepted into the NSDAP .

After the beginning of the Second World War, Bauer was initially employed as a driver in " Aktion T4 ". After the termination of Operation T4 at the beginning of 1942 he was assigned to the police as Oberwachtmeister and posted to Lublin in German-occupied Poland . A few days later he came to the SS command to which the Sobibor extermination camp was subordinate to " Aktion Reinhard ". There he received the rank of SS Oberscharführer . Bauer was directly involved in the gassing of thousands of prisoners. He actively fought with his weapon against the prisoners during the Sobibór uprising on October 14, 1943.

After the Sobibór camp was closed, Bauer returned to his police unit in Lublin in December 1943 and was then assigned to the “ Special Department Operation R ” in Trieste , where he worked as a driver. At the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Americans in Carinthia , from which he was released in 1946. Before the denazification commission he kept quiet about his work in the Sobibór camp, so that he was initially classified as unencumbered. However, he was accidentally recognized by former inmates Samuel Lerer and Estera Raab on a street in West Berlin. Lerer fled the camp after an uprising and came to Berlin at the end of the war. Bauer was arrested in August 1949.

On May 8, 1950, the Berlin regional court sentenced Bauer to death for crimes against humanity . The reasons for the judgment highlighted Bauer's particular brutality. It says: "In this camp the accused exercised his terror regime and did nothing to torture the prisoners even worse than his other comrades already did." The judgment was pronounced on the basis of the Control Council Act No. 10 . Although the death penalty was abolished in the Federal Republic of Germany when the Basic Law came into force on May 23, 1949, West Berlin was not formally part of the Basic Law's scope until 1990. In West Berlin, the death penalty was not abolished by law until January 20, 1951. In 1971 the sentence was officially commuted to life imprisonment. Bauer died in 1980 in the Tegel correctional facility .

literature

• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 . (Updated 2nd edition)
• Ernst Klee: What they did - what they became . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-596-24364-5 .
• Jules Schelvis : Sobibór extermination camp. Unrast Verlag , Hamburg and Münster 2003, ISBN 3-89771-814-6
• LG Berlin, May 8, 1950 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. VI, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1971, No. 212, pp. 543-560 Mass killing of Jews by the accused, known as the 'Gasmeister von Sobibor', as well as mistreatment and shooting of individual Jewish prisoners

Web links

• Sobibor trial (Berlin) - judgment: LG Berlin of May 8, 1950, PKs 3/50
• Reasons for judgment
• The Sobibor Perpetrators

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibor extermination camp. P. 279