Fritz Klein (doctor)

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Fritz Klein (1945)

Fritz Klein (born November 24, 1888 in Feketehalom , Austria-Hungary , today Codlea, Romania , † December 13, 1945 in Hameln ) was a Romanian-German concentration camp doctor .

Life

Fritz Klein was a Transylvanian Saxon who received his doctorate from the University of Budapest and served as a lieutenant doctor in the Romanian army from 1939 to 1943 .

Since ethnic Germans were not drafted into the Wehrmacht during the Nazi era because of their foreign citizenship , he was, as his personnel file says, "provisionally" accepted into the Waffen SS on May 26, 1943 . In a “temporary employment relationship” he was assigned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp as a troop doctor and deployed to the women's camp, the “gypsy camp and the “ family camp”. There he carried out, among other things, the selections for the gas chambers . The doctor Ella Lingens-Reiner , who was imprisoned in Auschwitz for favoring Jews, quoted his will to annihilate the Jews: an inflamed appendix that had to be removed from the national body .

When the “evacuation” of Auschwitz began, he came to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on death marches at the end of January 1945 . He was deployed in Neuengamme concentration camp from February 10 to mid-March 1945 , but came back to Bergen-Belsen before the liberation. Klein was one of the few who did not flee, but instead awaited the arrival of the British troops with the commandant Josef Kramer and handed over the camp.

Klein does not appear in any of the (complete) "SS-Dienstaltersliste" (lists of officers of the General and Waffen SS) printed by the SS Personnel Main Office, although as an ethnic German he was undoubtedly one of the men of the local "guard tower" who were also employed in concentration camps. He was sentenced to death by a British military tribunal in the Bergen-Belsen trial , which took place in Lüneburg from September 17 to November 16, 1945 , and was hanged on December 13, 1945 in Hameln penitentiary .

Photograph of SS men in the mass grave

Fritz Klein in a mass grave in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after its liberation in April 1945

Klein was arrested when the concentration camp was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945 and, together with other members of the SS guards, was forced over the next few days, as elsewhere, to bury the bodies lying around the camp in large mass graves. The British troops found over 10,000 dead and around 60,000 survivors there. The British Sergeant H. Oaks of the 5th Army Film & Photographic Unit (AFPU) took a photo of Klein on April 24, 1945, as he stands in the middle of a mass grave.

See also

literature

  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-10-039309-0 .
  • Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, the Nazi medicine and its victims , 3rd edition, Fischer TB, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-596-14906-1 .
  • Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz . Ullstein-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .

Web links

Commons : Fritz Klein  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Ella Lingens-Reiner: Prisoners of Fear . Foreword by Arturo Barea . London: Victor Gollancz, 1948, p. 1 f. [ The Jews are the purulent appendix in the body of Europe , here freely translated from English]