Hans Nierzwicki

Hans Nierzwicki (born January 18, 1905 in Dirschau ; † May 15, 1967 in Nagold ) was a German SS-Unterscharfuhrer and was employed as a medical service in the Auschwitz concentration camp , among other places .

Life

Hans Nierzwicki was the son of a railroad worker. After elementary school, he completed training as a waiter and was named Serviermeister. At the beginning he worked in the profession he had learned and later hired on a ship. As a Polish citizen of German origin, he lived in his homeland again in 1938 and became a member of the Young German Party in Poland and the German Association for Poznan and Pomeranian . He made his living again as a waiter, u. a. in Gdansk .

A few months before the attack on Poland , the beginning of the Second World War , he was drafted into the Polish Navy. In September 1939 he was taken prisoner in Germany, from which he was soon released as a so-called Volksdeutscher and transferred to the German Home Guard. In January 1940 he was drafted into the Waffen SS and he was transferred to the Netherlands as a motorcyclist in the course of the western campaign . Due to an injury he was trained as a medic and was assigned to a medical replacement battalion in Oranienburg and transferred to the medical services department at Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of 1942 by the SS medical headquarters with the rank of SS sergeant .

As an SS medical officer in Auschwitz, Nierzwicki was initially in the SS infirmary, then in the prisoner infirmary of the main camp of Auschwitz and in the women's camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau . In April 1943 he was awarded the War Merit Cross, Second Class with Swords. From the beginning of September 1943 he was an SS medical officer in the Janinagrube subcamp and finally u. a. deployed in the Lagischa satellite camp. After the end of the war, Auschwitz survivors reported that Nierzwicki was said to have killed inmates with phenol injections into the heart. Until the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, Nierzwicki performed camp duty there.

After the end of the war, Nierzwicki was in American captivity, from which he was released in autumn 1946. He later worked as a cashier in Duisburg . In the course of the investigations into the first Frankfurt Auschwitz trial , Nierzwicki also came into the focus of the investigators. In the early summer of 1960 he was arrested and in 1963 charged by the Frankfurt am Main public prosecutor's office for participating in selections . Due to illness, he was classified as incapacitated and released from prison in mid-1963. Nierzwicki never appeared in court because of the risk of infection; when the main hearing began on December 20, 1963 at the Frankfurt am Main regional court , he was in a Düsseldorf hospital with pulmonary tuberculosis. His trial was cut off due to his health. He died in mid-May 1967.

literature

• 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 .
• Robert MW Kempner : SS in cross-examination: the elite that smashed Europe to pieces , Delphi politics, published by Greno, Nördlingen 1987, ISBN 3-89190-953-5 .

Web links

• Fritz Bauer Institute : Defendants - Biographies

Individual evidence

1. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 299f.