Fritz Scherwitz

Fritz Scherwitz (also El (e) ke or Elias Sirewitz; * August 21, 1903, presumably in Schaulen , ( Kowno Gouvernement , today's Lithuania ); † December 4, 1962 in Munich ) was manager of workshops for Jewish forced laborers in during the Second World War Riga .

Life

Scherwitz's origin could never be clearly established. While he described himself as a Jew after the end of the war , the historian Anita Kugler came to the conclusion that there was no evidence of Jewish origin.

In 1919 he was accepted by a member of the German Freikorps Diebitsch, active in Lithuania and West Prussia , and after the end of the fighting in Lithuania he was taken to his estate in Silesia . In 1925 he came to Berlin , was probably a day laborer and often unemployed .

On November 1, 1933, he became a member of the SS . After the beginning of the war in 1939 he came to Riga as a police sergeant. In 1942 he ran a workshop at the Riga-Kaiserwald concentration camp in Riga Lenta . In this workshop he was assigned almost 1,000 Jewish ghetto residents who had to work there under his direction. Scherwitz is said to have protected "his Jews" - probably also to consolidate his own position of power as workshop manager. In 1943 he became a "specialist in the rank of SS-Untersturmführer".

The workshop was closed at the end of September 1944, Scherwitz made his way west and came to the American POW camp in Heidesheim near Bad Kreuznach , where he posed as a persecuted Jew. On behalf of the Americans, he began to look for former SS men interned.

At the beginning of 1946 Scherwitz succeeded in becoming a trustee for several trading companies in the district of Wertingen (Bavaria) . In January 1947 he was given the trusteeship for all Jews who had lived in the district up to 1942. It was now his job to secure former property of Jews for possible survivors or their heirs. On December 19, 1947, he became the deputy guardian of the persecuted in the Swabian part of Bavaria.

He was arrested on April 26, 1948. He was accused of being an SS man and murdering Jews. On March 3, 1949, Scherwitz was sentenced to six years imprisonment in Munich for the shooting of three prisoners. The verdict was upheld by jury on appeal on December 14, 1949 and August 1, 1950 .

In 1954 he was released from prison. He then worked as a sales representative. Since he saw himself as innocent, he tried several times to initiate a rehabilitation process - but without success.

literature

• Anita Kugler : Scherwitz, the Jewish SS officer . Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-462-03314-X , limited preview .
• LG Munich I, August 1, 1950 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicides 1945–1966, Vol. VII, edited by Adelheid L Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1971, No. 227, pp. 137-146 [1]
• Alexander Levin: The Jewish SS Officer . Translated from Russian into English, in: Gertrude Schneider : The Unfinished Road. Jewish Survivors of Latvia Look Back . Praeger Publishers Inc, 1991, ISBN 9780275940935 , pp. 67-79, limited preview .

Web links

• Literature by and about Fritz Scherwitz in the catalog of the German National Library