Hermann Balthasar book

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Hermann Balthasar Buch (born December 30, 1896 in Niederhöchstadt ; † July 10, 1959 in Kronberg im Taunus ) was a German SS-Hauptscharführer who was camp leader of the " Auschwitz Gypsy Camp " in the spring of 1944 .

Life

Before the Second World War, Buch worked as a commercial clerk. From August 1939 to mid-April 1942 he was a soldier in the Wehrmacht , then with the Waffen SS . Initially, Buch was deployed as a guard in the Ravensbrück concentration camp for the SS death's head associations. There he met the guard Luise Lehmann (June 20, 1913 - June 3, 1948), née Nitka, and married her in July 1943. The couple had a son. Lehmann was a notorious guard in the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp, which she headed with interruptions from May 1943.

At the end of February 1943, Buch was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he was initially a member of the guards at the Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp . From the end of January to the end of April 1944 he was head of the "Auschwitz Gypsy Camp". This was followed by a deployment of several weeks in the Bobrek satellite camp of Auschwitz. Afterwards he was command leader in the crematoria of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

After the Auschwitz concentration camp was cleared in mid-January 1945, deployments followed in the Groß-Rosen concentration camp and, most recently, in Mauthausen . At the end of the war he was still in action as a member of the Waffen SS.

After the end of the war Buch was interned and finally transferred to Poland as a member of the camp SS in Auschwitz. On January 22, 1948, he was sentenced in Krakow to six years in prison, five years of loss of civil rights and confiscation of his property. After serving his sentence in Poland and returning to Germany, he returned to work as a commercial clerk.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d e f State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz death books . Volume 1: Reports , 1995, pp. 271f
  2. Aleksander Lasik: The organizational structure of KL Auschwitz , in: Aleksander Lasik, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz, Irena Strzelecka: Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studies on the history of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. , Volume I: Construction and structure of the camp , Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum , Oświęcim 1999, p. 239.
  3. Johannes Schwartz: "Female Affairs". Spaces of action for concentration camp guards in Ravensbrück and Neubrandenburg , Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2018, appendix: short biographies of concentration camp guards. At Schwartz there is also the information that Lehmann, now married Buch, was in the Dachau internment camp after the end of the war and was extradited to Poland. There she was sentenced to death for abuse and murder and executed in early June 1948.
  4. a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 69