Gottfried Weise (SS member)

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Ewald Franz Gottfried Weise (born March 11, 1921 in Waldenburg (Saxony) , † 2002 ) was a German SS sergeant and warden in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

Life

Gottfried Weise grew up in a middle-class family. His father was a building contractor. After attending elementary school , he began an apprenticeship as a bricklayer in 1935, which he successfully completed after four years in April 1939. In addition to his apprenticeship, he attended the commercial and public trade school from 1935 to 1938 and then a construction school. He was unable to complete the construction technician training he was aiming for there because he was called up for military service in September 1940.

At the age of 16, he was accepted into the Schutzstaffel (SS) by the Hitler Youth (HJ) as a relay applicant in November 1937 . In 1940 he voluntarily joined the Waffen SS . In September 1941 he was seriously wounded and lost one eye during the Russian campaign .

In May 1944, Gottfried Weise was assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp as head of the official group and had to supervise male and female sorting teams in the prisoner property and securities warehouse administration. He was particularly feared among the prisoners and had the reputation of an unpredictable and violent SS overseer. ( Wilhelm Tell of Auschwitz )

In June / July 1944 he killed a prisoner who had not started work immediately after a short break, and two other prisoners who were hiding in a railway wagon loaded with clothes, with headshots. In the late summer of 1944 he had also placed three empty cans on the head and shoulders of a 6 to 10-year-old boy who had just been deported to the camp by train. After shooting the cans off the child's body, he killed the boy from close range with one shot in the face. He also shot a girl, around 17 or 18 years old, several times from her head and then killed her with a targeted head shot. Further acts accused of Gottfried Weise could not be determined with certainty.

After the end of the war he worked as a site manager in Solingen . From October 1986 to January 1988 Gottfried Weise had to answer for murder at the Wuppertal district court . He was sentenced to life imprisonment by judgment on January 28, 1988 for five murders . He appealed against this and was released on deposit of 300,000 DM . After his appeal was rejected by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court on April 19, 1989, he evaded his arrest by fleeing to Switzerland. Here he was hiding as "Gerhard Sieber" for twelve weeks in a house in Faulensee in the canton of Bern, but was then tracked down in a Swiss hospital after a heart attack and arrested again. On April 4, 1997, at the instigation of the then North Rhine-Westphalian Interior Minister Franz-Josef Kniola , he was granted exemption from custody for health reasons.

literature

  • Peter Nied (Ed.): The BLIND ONE. About dealing with the past of the war criminal Gottfried Weise. Self-published, 1999.
  • Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. The secret network of old and neo-Nazis. An inside report. 2nd updated edition. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-86153-266-2 .
  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • Rüdiger Gerhard (ed.): The case of Gottfried way. Documentation on an Auschwitz-Birkenau trial. A "lifelong person" demands justice , 2nd edition, Berg am See: Türmer-Verlag, 1991, ISBN 3-87829-147-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 428.
  2. ^ Judgment of the regional court in Wuppertal
  3. ↑ Hanno Kühnert: After embarrassing legal mishaps. Finally behind bars. Concentration camp murderer Gottfried Weise captured. In: time online. 4th August 1989.
  4. ↑ Oliver Schröm, Andrea Röpke: Silent help for brown comrades. The secret network of old and neo-Nazis. An inside report. 2nd updated edition. Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin 2002.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Wise, Gottfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Weise, Ewald Franz Gottfried (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Unterscharführer, overseer of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH March 11, 1921
PLACE OF BIRTH Waldenburg (Saxony)
DATE OF DEATH 2002