Kurt Gerstein

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Kurt Gerstein

Kurt Gerstein (born August 11, 1905 in Münster , † July 25, 1945 in Paris ) was a hygiene specialist in the Waffen-SS , most recently in the rank of SS-Obersturmführer . In 1942 in the Belzec and Treblinka extermination camps he was an eyewitness to the trial use of engine exhaust gases in mass murders ; he also knew of the later use of Zyklon B for the same purpose. Even during the Second World War , Gerstein tried to inform neutral countries about his observations. After the end of the war he put his findings in writing. The Gerstein report was mentioned in the Nuremberg trial against the main war criminals as evidence of the quantities delivered by Zyklon B to Auschwitz .

Gerstein's personality and role are controversial in historical studies: some historians see him as a Christian close to the Confessing Church who, in SS uniform, tried to obtain information about Nazi injustice and use it against the Nazi regime. Others see him as an accomplice, who passed on his expertise to "improve" mass murder methods and only tried to portray himself as a secret resistance fighter after Germany's surrender .

Youth and education

Gerstein was born as the sixth of seven children of the district court president Ludwig Emil Gerstein (1868-1954). His parents considered him the most difficult of their children and his teachers noticed him as an intelligent, but rebellious student through many pranks. After his family moved to Neuruppin in 1921, he came into contact with the Protestant Church through befriended families and, after graduating from high school in 1925, joined the Christian Association of Young Men (YMCA).

From 1925 to 1931 Gerstein studied mining in Aachen, Marburg and Berlin and graduated with a degree in engineering . He then trained as a mountain assessor until 1935. During his studies, like some of his male family members, he was a member of the Corps Teutonia Marburg , but rejected the corporative system - especially the compulsory drinking - as incompatible with being a Christian. This led to the temporary exclusion from his student union . As a collaborator and leader of student Bible circles, he campaigned for the welfare of alcoholics and against extramarital sexuality.

NSDAP member

After the National Socialists came to power , he became a mountain assessor in the civil service of the National Socialist government. He had been a member of the NSDAP since March 1933 and a member of the SA since 1934 . As a Protestant youth leader, a member of the Confessing Church and the YMCA, as well as an employee in Bible circles , he came into conflict with the anti-religious politics of the NSDAP. Because he was doing propaganda for the Confessing Church in the Association of German Miners, he was arrested for the first time in Saarbrücken on September 24, 1936 and was in protective custody until October 18 . Thereupon he was expelled from the party, which also ended his work in civil service. At the insistence of his family, he challenged the expulsion from the party, whereupon the expulsion was converted into a somewhat more honorable dismissal from the party. On July 14, 1938, he was arrested a second time in Tübingen, taken to the Welzheim protective custody camp , but was released six weeks later, on August 28, because the allegations against him could not be upheld.

Entry into the SS

Gerstein began studying medicine in Tübingen in December 1936. In early 1941 he volunteered for the SS and joined the Waffen SS on March 13, 1941 . After the war he declared his entry as follows:

"When I heard of the beginning of the killing of the mentally ill in Grafeneck and Hadamar and elsewhere, I decided to make an attempt to look into these ovens and chambers to find out what was happening there."

He received his military training in Hamburg-Langenhorn , Arnheim and Oranienburg . Due to his medical knowledge, he was finally transferred to the hygiene institute of the Waffen SS . There he was promoted to head of the health technology department in January 1942 and was responsible for the technical disinfection service. So he had to take care of the procurement of Zyklon B , which was regularly needed in large quantities for the disinfestation of clothing and accommodation.

Witness to the Holocaust

In August 1942 Gerstein was commissioned to observe the mass murder of people using exhaust gases in the Belzec and Treblinka extermination camps and to develop processes for "improvement". Together with Rolf Günther and the hygienist Wilhelm Pfannenstiel , he witnessed how people were killed in gas chambers with engine exhaust. His job was to check whether the gasification plants could be converted to Zyklon B. According to his later account (April 1945) he was so shocked by what he had seen that on the train return from Treblinka on August 20, 1942, he told the Swedish Legation Councilor Göran von Otter his experiences with the request that they be sent abroad to pass on. He also made an attempt to meet the Apostolic Nuncio in Berlin with the same intention , but this failed. These attempts are supported by post-war testimonies by contemporary witnesses, but not by contemporary sources .

When his Dutch friend Ubbink visited him in February 1943, he also told him what he had seen and urged him to pass on the information about the mass killings in the concentration camps to "Dutch resistance groups" so that they could reach London by radio , which they did . This statement is also confirmed by a contemporary witness after the war.

In the course of time, Gerstein was drawn more and more into the machinery of extermination because, as part of his service, he also had to procure Zyklon B, which was intended for the killing of people. He requested a special form of Zyklon B from Degesch that contained no warning or irritant substances. However, he claims to have declared these supplies as obsolete and spoiled or only used to control lice.

His involvement and the knowledge of what was happening in the concentration camps led him (according to his own account) into deeper and deeper depression and despair. Nevertheless, he continued to try to help people threatened by the regime. For example, he distributed forged identity cards that identified the porter as an employee of the SS, which put himself in danger.

Testimony and death

On April 22, 1945, Gerstein surrendered to the French army in Reutlingen and was interned. He offered himself as a witness and handed over several documents and papers to the American "Field Team" on May 5, 1945 in Rottweil , including a six-page version of his curriculum vitae, his activities and experiences and one in French and dated April 26 two-page short version in English. A year later, a German parallel version dated May 4th was found in Rottweil, which is linguistically clearer, does not contain a generalized estimate of the number of victims and is cited in this form today as the “Gerstein Report”. The value of the report lies in the description of what happened in Belzec. There is no doubt about his authenticity and Gerstein's subjective will for accuracy and truthfulness.

Gerstein was initially in a kind of honorary position and was able to move freely between Tübingen and Rottweil. Then he was arrested, taken to Paris and questioned there as a defendant. On July 25, 1945, he was found hanged in his cell in the Cherche-Midi military prison in Paris . It is controversial whether he committed suicide or was murdered by fellow prisoners. He was buried in the Parisian cemetery Cimetière parisien de Thiais in Thiais , south of the capital. His grave can no longer be found today.

Rehabilitation

Gerstein's role was examined by the German Pest Control Society in the trial against Gerhard Peters . The court did not consider it to be proven that the Zyklon B requested by Gerstein was used for the murder without warning substance, but it did not rule this out either. Gerstein was classified as contaminated in post-war Germany . In the verdict of the denazification chamber it was said that Gerstein had inevitably become a stooge of organized mass murder at his post and should have reported away from there. Even in an appeal procedure, there was no more favorable judgment. The bereaved were denied an inheritance of $ 3,000. The widow was supposed to pay procedural costs of 24,000 Reichsmarks .

An intervention by Hermann Ehlers and a petition for clemency from the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg Gebhard Müller were unsuccessful in the matter; however, the widow was waived the costs of the proceedings. An application for a "war survivor's pension" under the Federal Pension Act in 1962 was ultimately rejected. It wasn't until 1963 that the rethinking began. Issy Wygoda campaigned for Gerstein's rehabilitation; The Central Council of Jews also paid tribute to Gerstein. With the world premiere of Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy , the fate of Kurt Gerstein became known to a wider public. In 1965, Prime Minister Kurt Georg Kiesinger reassigned Gerstein to the group of “exonerated”. In 1969 the widow received a pension under the Federal Supplementary Act.

In the last few years the dispute about the reassessment of Gerstein's person has started again. The first major biography did not appear in Germany, but in France. Again have Hermann Kaienburg and Andrej Angrick detailed inspection demanded for evaluation.

Literary processing

In literary terms, the character of Kurt Gerstein in the drama Der Stellvertreter (1963) was processed by Rolf Hochhuth, in a cinematic way in the successful French film adaptation of the work by Constantin Costa-Gavras from 2002, which puts him at the center of the plot. In the film Gerstein is portrayed by Ulrich Tukur .

See also

literature

Biographies

  • Dieter Gräbner, Stefan Weszkalnys: The unheard witness. Kurt Gerstein - Christian, SS officer, spy in the murderers' camp. Conte, Saarbrücken 2006, ISBN 3-936950-45-8 .
  • Saul Friedländer : Kurt Gerstein or the ambivalence of the good. (Original title: Kurt Gerstein ou l'ambiguité de bien , Castermann, Paris 1967, translated by Jutta and Theodor Knust), Beck'sche Reihe 1789, Munich 2007, ISBN 3-406-54825-3 (German first edition: Bertelsmann , Munich 1968 ; Abstract: Spy in the Murderer's Camp , Der Spiegel , December 23, 1968).
  • Jürgen Schäfer: Kurt Gerstein - witness of the Holocaust. A life between biblical circles and SS. In: Contributions to Westphalian Church History , Volume 16. Luther, Bielefeld 1999, ISBN 3-7858-0407-5 .
  • Bernd Hey, Matthias Rickling, Kerstin Stockhecke: Kurt Gerstein (1905–1945). Resistance in SS uniform. In: Writings of the regional church archive of the Evangelical Church of Westphalia Volume 6, 4th edition, Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, Bielefeld 2010 (first edition 2003, ISBN 3-89534-486-9 ), ISBN 978-3-89534-776-4 .
  • Pierre Joffroy : God's Spy. Structure, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-7466-8017-4 .
  • Gerhard Hirschfeld, Tobias Jersak (eds.): Careers in National Socialism: Functional elites between participation and distance , Campus, Frankfurt am Main, New York, NY 2004, ISBN 3-593-37156-1 , pp. 255-264.
  • Sebastian Sigler , Klaus Gerstein: The lonely path of Kurt Gerstein. In: Sebastian Sigler (ed.): Corps students in the resistance against Hitler . Duncker & Humblot , Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-428-14319-1 , pp. 289–321.
  • Ludwig (V) Emil Gerstein (1868–1954): How are we related to each other? Edited and reissued by Rolf Stamm and Hans Joachim Gerstein, Bonn 2013, ISBN 978-3-416-03400-5 , pp. 112–116.

drama

Documents

Movies

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ IMT: The Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals ... Fotomech. Reprint Munich 1989, ISBN 3-7735-2503-6 , Volume 6, p. 401 / January 30, 1946.
  2. ↑ Hey / Rickling / Stockhecke: Kurt Gerstein, pp. 23–35.
  3. ↑ Kurt Gerstein: Um Ehre und Reinheit (self-published in 1938)
  4. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 181.
  5. ^ German version of the Gerstein report of May 4, 1945
  6. ↑ Eyewitness report on the mass gassings. Knowledge-critical edition. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 1 (1953), pp. 177–194 / s. a. Gerstein report
  7. ^ Eyewitness report ... , VfZ, 1st year (1953), issue 2, p. 180.
  8. ↑ Friedemann Needy: Third Reich and Second World War: the lexicon. Piper, Munich a. a. 2002. - Valerie Hebert (Disguised Resistance?… In: Holocaust and Genocide Studies  20 (2006)) considers suicide to be almost certain and refers to farewell letters that were lost shortly after death.
  9. ↑ Spy in the Murderer's Camp . In: Spiegel Online . tape 3 , January 13, 1969 ( spiegel.de [accessed November 27, 2019]).
  10. ↑ Le dossier Kurt Gerstein. In: Revue d'Histoire de la Shoah 2012/1 (N ° 196). Retrieved November 26, 2019 .
  11. ^ A b Valerie Hebert: Disguised Resistance? The Story of Kurt Gerstein. In: Holocaust and Genocide Studies  20 (2006) - electronic retrieval without page numbers
  12. ↑ German: Pierre Joffroy: Der Spion Gottes. Kurt Gerstein - an SS officer in the resistance? 2nd edition Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-7466-8017-4 .
  13. ↑ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - Removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945: A "secret Reich matter" in the area of ​​conflict between the turn of the war and propaganda. Göttingen 2018, ISBN 978-3-8353-3268-3 , Vol. 1, pp. 183-187.
personal data
SURNAME Gerstein, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German member of the Waffen SS, department head in the hygiene institute of the Waffen SS
DATE OF BIRTH August 11, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Muenster
DATE OF DEATH July 25, 1945
Place of death Paris