Hellmuth cousin

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Hellmuth Waldemar Vetter (born March 21, 1910 in Rastenberg ; † February 2, 1949 in Landsberg ) was a German physician who carried out human experiments in Nazi concentration camps in various places.

Life

The Vetters family, who came from Thuringia , moved to Frankfurt / Main in 1914 . There Hellmuth Vetter studied medicine at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University . In 1933 he spent a semester in Graz and after his return to Frankfurt in October 1933 he became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS no. 126.917). At the beginning of 1934 he began his doctoral thesis , his doctoral supervisor was the later Gaudozentenführer Heinrich Guthmann . At the end of 1935 he received his doctorate and from 1936 worked in the Saarbrücken Rastpfuhl Hospital. He also worked as an SS doctor for the I / 85 medical staff. In 1937 he finally became a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 5,393,805). When Vetter switched to the Bayer chemical company in Leverkusen in 1938, he began his career in the concentration camp system. Employed as a research assistant at Bayer, Vetter tested new preparations on inmates in several concentration camps.

His work began on July 29, 1941 in Dachau concentration camp , where he tested Bayer sulfonamide preparations for their effectiveness against gonorrhea , pneumonia and other indications . His inhuman attitude emerges from letters to his colleagues in Leverkusen in which he writes about Dachau that it is one of the “best-equipped KL” in the Reich and that he feels “like in paradise”.

When the model project Arbeitsdorf was set up in 1942, Vetter was transferred there. After Arbeitsdorf was dissolved, he moved to the newly established Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp on October 13, 1942 . Monowitz was initially set up as a satellite camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp . The prisoners housed there were used to set up the Buna works for IG Farben . Although employed as a camp doctor , Vetter usually only appeared in the camp once a week; Even then, it was not a matter of looking after the prisoners, but of selecting those doomed to be sent to the gas chambers . In Monowitz, too, he continued the series of experiments on people. This was about tests of spotted fever preparations from IG Farben. His employer Bayer wrote in a letter to the Hoechst company in 1942 : “Dr. As in the previous year, Vetter has a large typhus station in Auschwitz, where he has the opportunity to thoroughly test new drugs. "

Vetter's last stations - with his promotion to SS-Hauptsturmführer in 1944 - were the Gusen concentration camp in the Mauthausen concentration camp system . From March 1943 until the end of the war, Vetter acted as a camp doctor for the Gusen concentration camp and as "Amtsarzt iV" in order to be able to efficiently carry out the funeral examinations of the countless civilian victims in connection with the construction and operation of the underground B8 Bergkristall aircraft factory . During his tenure, incapacitated inmates in the infamous Block were given 31 gasoline injections. He is said to have selected the prisoners specifically for this purpose (see action 14f13 ). He is also said to have issued fake death certificates.

After the end of the war, as part of the Dachau trials against Hellmuth Vetter and four other defendants in one of the last follow-up proceedings to the main Mauthausen trial (file number 000-50-5-31), a US military court in Dachau started a trial on July 28, 1947 carried out.

As a witness on his own behalf, Hellmuth Vetter testified that while he was working in Gusen he had neither designated prisoners for injections nor had any knowledge of such events. Nevertheless, the court found him guilty of the deaths of hundreds of prisoners in Gusen and sentenced him (and one other co-defendant) to death on August 12, 1947 . After the petitions for clemency submitted by his wife Maria and his brother Adolf Vetter had been rejected, the sentence was carried out on February 2, 1949 in the Landsberg war crimes prison .

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz, Nazi medicine and its victims , Fischer Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt / Main, 2004
  • Stefan Hörner: Profit or Morality. Structures between IG Farbenindustrie and National Socialism . European University Press, Bremen 2012, ISBN 978-3-86741-763-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons. Frankfurt / M. 2013, p. 416
  2. ↑ Complete quote from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 640, letter dated August 4, 1941 (Nbg. Doc. NI-9402).
  3. ^ Rudolf A. Haunschmied , Jan-Ruth Mills, Siegi Witzany-Durda: St. Georgen-Gusen-Mauthausen - Concentration Camp Mauthausen Reconsidered . BoD, Norderstedt 2008, ISBN 978-3-8334-7440-8 . P. 150.
personal data
SURNAME Cousin, Hellmuth
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Vetter, Hellmuth Waldemar (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German concentration camp doctor
DATE OF BIRTH March 21, 1910
PLACE OF BIRTH Rastenberg
DATE OF DEATH February 2, 1949
Place of death Landsberg