Ernst-Robert Grawitz

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ernst-Robert Grawitz welcoming the participants in the first seminar of the Reichsfuhrer School of the DRK in Groß Schulzendorf (February 1939)

Ernst-Robert Grawitz (born June 8, 1899 in Charlottenburg , † April 24, 1945 in Potsdam-Babelsberg ) was manager of the German Red Cross , SS-Obergruppenführer and general of the Waffen-SS during the Nazi era . As " Reichsarzt SS and Police " he was jointly responsible for mass murders of the handicapped and medical experiments on prisoners.

origin

Ernst-Robert Grawitz came from a medical family. He was the son of the military doctor and later chief physician at the Charlottenburg-Westend Hospital Ernst Grawitz (1860-1911) and his wife Helene, née Liebau (born October 14, 1869 in Magdeburg). His uncle was the pathologist Paul Grawitz .

He stepped in mid 1917 as a volunteer in the Hunter Replacement Battalion 1, and fell on September 18, 1918, shortly before the war as a lieutenant in Épehy on the Western Front in English captivity . After his release in November 1919, Grawitz began studying medicine at Berlin University . After the state examination and the license to practice medicine, he was assistant physician, assistant and first assistant in the internal department of the Berlin-Westend hospital until 1929 and then established a practice in Berlin as a specialist in internal diseases. From 1933 to 1936 Grawitz was employed in the internal department of the Westend hospital in Berlin. The then medical director of the house valued Grawitz " as an absolutely reliable, loyal, highly honorable character ".

At the same time, however, his sponsor regretted not having been able to bring Grawitz to his habilitation , as the young scientist would have overused his political activities. In addition to his medical studies, Grawitz was active in right-wing organizations. In November 1919 he was a member of the “ Berlin Resident Army” and in 1920 was involved in the Kapp Putsch . Then Grawitz joined the Freikorps "Olympia" and stated in later documents that he had been a supporter of Adolf Hitler since 1920 . In November 1931 Grawitz joined the SS (SS number 27.483), in 1932 he became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 1.102.844). In 1935 the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler appointed him head of the SS medical office and "Reichsarzt der SS". As Reichsarzt SS, Grawitz was directly subordinate to Himmler and was the highest technical authority in all medical and sanitary matters within the SS. He was also responsible for the doctors and the medical conditions in the concentration camps .

Career and DRK

On December 17, 1936, Grawitz was appointed Deputy President of the German Red Cross by Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick in accordance with the current statutes . After changing the statutes and passing the DRK law at the end of 1937, Grawitz was then "Executive President". Why the SS man Grawitz of all people was commissioned with the leadership of the DRK on January 1, 1937 can be explained primarily by the German war plans. For Hitler, 1936 was the “year of the most difficult decisions”, as he later called it himself, because in that year he had made the final decision on war of aggression. Large parts of society had to be adapted to this decision: the army, industry and, last but not least, the German Red Cross, which, with its long experience in the field of medical paramedics and its large human resources, was a decisive factor in supporting a war of aggression.

In the existing organizational form of an amalgamation of several legally independent associations, the DRK could not be effectively prepared for this task. The president who has been in office since 1933, Duke Carl-Eduard von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha , performed purely representative tasks. In 1937, Ernst-Robert Grawitz was placed at his side, who was able to tie the DRK to the SS.

Grawitz declared on his inauguration that “ 1. the German Red Cross must be a healthy building that organically fits in with the laws of life of the National Socialist Third Reich , 2. according to its intended purpose according to the Geneva Agreement, the demands placed on it in peace and war absolutely has to suffice and 3. whose organizational form and leadership must guarantee the possibility and the incentive of voluntary work for broad circles of the German people. "

Already in the middle of 1937 Grawitz rebuilt the DRK organization without any legal basis in the sense of the propagated " Führer principle ". The previously independent state and district associations became state and district offices, and the association structure was completely destroyed. He reported on it: " Today a new, powerful German Red Cross, organized in a tight military manner and led by the National Socialists, is ready for any operation ". As a legal basis, the law on the DRK and a new statute were subsequently passed at the end of 1937.

DRK and SS

Parallel to the reorganization of the DRK, Grawitz pushed through the DRK leadership with SS men. He appointed the SS-Gruppenführer Oswald Pohl (who had organized the administration of the SS for Himmler from 1935 and gradually also the administration of the concentration camps) as treasurer and later head of administration of the DRK. From initially small workshops and factories in the concentration camps, Pohl built up the economic empire of the SS, which exploited the concentration camp prisoners in their factories through forced labor .

With Grawitz's approval, Pohl provided the SS with millions of credits from the DRK's coffers, which he passed on to Himmler's business operations in secret transactions as “general representative for all property-related matters of the DRK”. Not least because of this, Pohl concentrated the money previously managed by the individual DRK foundations and organizations in joint accounts to which only Pohl, Grawitz and their closest employees had access.

In September 1939, according to SS doctor Werner Kirchert , Grawitz declared himself ready to stop the murder of physically and mentally handicapped SS doctors (later referred to as " Aktion T4 "). Grawitz is said to have said, "... it is not a pleasant job, but you also have to be ready to take on unpleasant work" , but "... he does not want to burden the SS outwardly, although he has at least some of the staff from the SS must make available ” . He did not exclude himself from this inconvenience and declared himself ready "... to carry out the killing of the first mentally ill himself after the establishment of the first killing center."

Together with Oswald Pohl, Grawitz approved the human experiments that had been taking place in Nazi concentration camps since 1941 . The prisoner requirements for medical experiments of various research institutions, such as the research center of the Army Medical Inspection and the Robert Koch Institute, were made to him . Himmler himself also commissioned Grawitz to plan or coordinate experiments and received regular written reports from him.

In the Nazi racial ideology , Grawitz's work as a doctor for the Red Cross and his involvement in the murders were not a contradiction in terms. According to this ideology, help should be given to all those who were defined as racially superior, as "Aryan". The “Aryan” mother, the “Aryan” child and the “Aryan” soldier saw the work of the National Socialist medical profession, the public health system and, last but not least, the activities of the German Red Cross in the “Third Reich”. But all those who were classified as inferior because they were of Jewish or Slavic origin, mentally or physically disabled, or because they turned against Hitler politically, were considered " ballast existences " in Nazi propaganda and in countless cases became victims of ideology the " destruction of life unworthy of life ". The medical knowledge of the medical profession was used against them, German doctors experimented with these people or administered lethal injections. And the German Red Cross as an aid organization in war and peace did not want to help these people, only a few DRK employees tried to organize illegal aid with modest means.

Gas fire and hepatitis experiments

On the initiative of Grawitz, in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, under the direction of Karl Gebhardt , sulfonamide tests were carried out on 60 Polish women to treat gas fires .

In 1943 Grawitz asked Himmler to provide him with eight concentration camp prisoners for experiments with infectious hepatitis . His letter states that research has shown that this disease is transmitted by viruses rather than bacteria. Hepatitis was experimentally transmitted from humans to animals, and it was "desirable" to transmit cultured viruses to humans. Himmler replied in writing and made eight Jews from Auschwitz available. The experiments were carried out in Sachsenhausen concentration camp .

suicide

Ernst-Robert Grawitz evaded punishment by the Allies and killed himself and his family in the last days of the war in 1945 with a hand grenade in his Babelsberg villa on what was then the street of SA 59. This scene is shown in the film Der Untergang (2004), in which he is portrayed by Christian Hoening, re-enacted .

See also

literature

  • Markus Wicke: SS and DRK. The Presidium of the German Red Cross in the National Socialist system of rule 1937–1945 VICIA, Potsdam, 2002, ISBN 3-8311-4125-8 .
  • Wolfgang U. Eckart : SS-Obergruppenführer and General of the Waffen-SS Prof. Dr. med. Ernst Grawitz. In: Gerd R. Ueberschär (ed.): Hitler's military elite. From the beginning of the war to the end of the world war. Volume 2. Primus, Darmstadt 1998, ISBN 3-89678-089-1 , ISBN 3-534-12678-5 (Scientific Book Society), pp. 63-71.
  • Judith Hahn: Grawitz, Genzken, Gebhardt. Three careers in the medical service of the SS. Diss. FU Berlin 2007. Klemm & Oelschläger, Münster 2008, ISBN 978-3-932577-56-7 .
  • Heiner Lichtenstein: Adapted and loyal. The Red Cross in the “Third Reich”. Bund, Cologne 1988, ISBN 3-7663-0933-1 .
  • Dermot Bradley (ed.), Andreas Schulz, Günter Wegmann: The generals of the Waffen-SS and the police. The military careers of the generals, as well as the doctors, veterinarians, intendants, judges and ministerial officials with the rank of general. Volume 1: Abraham – Gutenberger. Biblio, Bissendorf 2003, ISBN 3-7648-2373-9 , pp. 436-444.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Wolfram Fischer (Ed.): Exodus of Sciences from Berlin . de Gruyter, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-11-013945-6 , p. 555 (digitized version) .
  2. ↑ Birgitt Morgenbrod, Stephanie Merkenich: The German Red Cross under the Nazi dictatorship 1933–1945 . Paderborn 2008, p. 130.
  3. ↑ quoted from: Felix Grüneisen: The German Red Cross in the past and present . Potsdam-Babelsberg 1939, p. 190.
  4. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Second updated edition. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 198.
  5. ↑ Human experiment on the example. In: Der Spiegel. 11/1947.
  6. ↑ Experiments with hepatitis: see also Prof. Haagen in Natzweiler and Brachtel in Dachau.
  7. ^ Letter from Grawitz on June 1, 1943, In: Nürnberger Documents. Doc. NO 10.
  8. ^ Letter from Himmler dated June 16, 1943. In: Nürnberger Documents, Doc.NO 11.
  9. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau. Luxembourg 2002, p. 284.
  10. ↑ The original Kaiserstraße had this name between 1938 and 1945, since then it has been called Karl-Marx-Straße. Klaus Arlt: The street names of the city of Potsdam. History and meaning. In: Mitteilungen der Studiengemeinschaft Sanssouci eV, 4th year, 1999, no. 4 (edited version at www.aip.de/~arlt/SGS/strassennamen.pdf), p. 41.
  11. ↑ Reviewed for H-Soz-u-Kult by Petra Fuchs, Institute for the History of Medicine, Charité Berlin .
personal data
SURNAME Grawitz, Ernst-Robert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German physician, chairman of the DRK and Reich physician SS
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin-Charlottenburg
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 1945
Place of death Potsdam-Babelsberg