Leon Weliczker Wells

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Leon Weliczker Wells (born March 10, 1925 in Stojaniw near Radziechów , then Poland , now Ukraine ; died December 19, 2009 in Fort Lee , New Jersey ) was an American engineer. Between 1942 and 1944 he was imprisoned in the Lemberg-Janowska forced labor camp . In a special detachment 1005 he had to burn the corpses of Nazi victims; he survived the Holocaust by escaping .

Life

Weliczker's father was a timber merchant in Stoyanow, a place on the border between Poland and the Soviet Union , and in 1936 he moved with his family to the provincial capital Lviv . After the German conquest of Poland , Galicia was occupied by the Soviet Union in the autumn of 1939 due to the Hitler-Stalin Pact , and the father was expropriated as a "capitalist". In June 1941, Weliczker and his sister applied to study at Moscow University , but at the beginning of the German-Soviet War , Lviv was occupied by the Germans and the extermination of Jews began there. Weliczker's family was ghettoized and forced into forced labor . Leon was imprisoned in the Janowska-Strasse forced labor camp in Lviv and, when he was exhausted and ill, barely escaped being shot in June 1942. He was able to escape and stayed in Stoljanow and Radziechów until December 1942. He then returned to Lemberg and worked in the ghetto, which was renamed the Jewish camp by Hauptscharführer Grzymek , and whose population was being decimated every day by deportations.

In June 1943 Weliczker was assigned as an inmate of the Janowska-Strasse camp to the newly established Lviv demolition squad, which, in order to remove the traces of the murders, was to dig up and burn the victims of mass shootings and to sift out and grind their bones. The Lviv excavation team was also deployed in the surrounding villages of Bibrka , Brzuchowice , Pustomyty (Dornfeld) and Jaworiw and as far as the Stanisławów area, with the bodies also being transported to the central cremation site by truck. While in custody, Weliczker managed to keep a diary , which has been preserved. The majority of the prisoners broke out on November 19, 1943, and most of those who had fled were killed. Weliczker was kept hidden by a Polish farmer in a cellar under a cattle shed for four months together with 16 other Jews. Weliczker's six siblings and his parents were victims of the murder of the Germans and their helpers. His uncle was on 16 November 1942 in Stoyanov from the District Chief Joachim Baron von der Leyen murdered. Of the 76 members of his extended family, he was the only survivor.

After the liberation of Lviv by the Red Army in April 1944, Weliczker worked in the materials department of the Ukrainian Railway Administration in Lemberg and undertook procurement trips to Kiev and Moscow . With the Soviet historian Vladimir Pavlovich Beljajew (1909–1990) he discussed a contribution to a publication on the massacre of Polish university professors in Lviv, whose bodies had also been earthed and burned by the special command. Wells states that the 38 people were identified before their bodies were cremated and names a few of them: Kazimierz Bartel , Tadeusz Ostrowski , Włodzimierz Stożek, and Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński .

Since Galicia now again to the Soviet Ukraine fell, the Polish population was resettled , and Weliczker moved into the now of Poland managed Silesia . There he began to study engineering at the Technical University in the now Polish Gliwice . The Polish historian Filip Friedman got to read Weliczker's notes and in 1946 left the part “Death Brigade. Print extracts from Sonderkommando 1005 ”. A German edition of this part appeared in 1958, an English version was published in 1963.

In view of the post-war pogroms in Krakow and Kielce , Weliczker moved on to a DP camp in the American zone of occupation in Germany and continued his studies at the reopened Technical University of Munich . In Munich in June 1947 he and his fellow prisoners Max Hoenig and David Manucewitz arranged for the arrest of Hauptscharführer Johann Rauch, who, according to the Moscow Declaration, was transferred by the American occupying forces to the People's Republic of Poland for prosecution . Rauch's family tried to persuade Weliczker to give a favorable testimony at the trial in Krakow; Rauch was sentenced to death on June 24, 1949. Weliczker was also questioned during the investigation into the Nuremberg trial of the main war criminals , but his statement is not in the official files. At the end of August 1946 he was a spectator of several sessions of the Nuremberg Military Court. During the Einsatzgruppen trial , the leader of the Sonderkommando 1005 Paul Blobel was convicted and executed in 1951.

Weliczker received his doctorate in engineering in Munich in 1949 and then emigrated to the United States. At New York University he was an assistant at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences until 1953 and was a research fellow at the Naval Research Office. Since then he has worked as an engineer in the private sector. He now took the name Leon Weliczker Wells.

On May 1 and 2, 1961, he was heard as a witness at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem . At the time he was married and had two children.

Fonts

  • Leon Weliczker Wells: Shattered faith: a Holocaust legacy , Lexington, Ky. : University Press of Kentucky, 1995
  • Leon Weliczker Wells: And they made politics: the American Zionists and the Holocaust , Munich: Knesebeck & Schuler, 1989
  • Leon Weliczker Wells: The Register of Communities: Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Poland, Second Volume, East Galicia
  • Leon W. Wells: Hophni: his life and his adventures until he was at home in Pimlico (with: Traut Felgentreff; Frieda Wiegand), Ebenhausen near Munich: Langewiesche-Brandt 1967
  • Leon W. Wells: A son of Job , transl. From d. Engl. By H. Th. Asbeck. Munich: C. Hanser 1963
  • Leon Weliczker Wells: The Janowska road , New York: Holocaust Libr., 1999 [first Macmillan 1963] ISBN 0-89604-159-X .
  • Leon Weliczker: Mathematical preschool for engineers and naturalists: a guide to independent mathematical thinking and handling of mathematical solution methods , Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1950
  • Leon Weliczker: The transverse joint on a freely resting beam , Munich, Techn. H., Diss. 13 Aug 1949 (not for exchange)
  • Leon Weliczker: Brygada śmierci , Łódź 1946

literature

  • Jens Hoffmann: “You can't tell that”. “Aktion 1005” - how the Nazis removed the traces of their mass murders in Eastern Europe. KVV Konkret, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-930786-53-4 ( Konkret - texts 46/47 determination ).
  • Entry in American men & women of science / A biographical directory of today's leaders in physical, biological and related sciences. Gale, Detroit 1989.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Marcy Oster: Survivor who testified at Nuremberg, Eichmann trials, dies , January 24, 2010, Jewish Telegraphic Agency
  2. ^ Leon W. Wells: A son of Job. C. Hanser, Munich 1963, p. 31.
  3. ↑ Jósef Grzimek , testimony at the University of Heidelberg; Josef Grzimek see Polish Wikipedia pl: Josef Grzimek
  4. ^ Eichmann-Prozess, Session 23/4 in the Nizkor Project
  5. ^ A b Leon W. Wells: A son of Job. C. Hanser, Munich 1963, p. 216.
  6. ^ Leon W. Wells: A son of Job. C. Hanser, Munich 1963, pp. 128f.
  7. ^ Leon W. Wells: A son of Job. C. Hanser, Munich 1963, p. 284.
  8. ^ Brygada śmierci , Łódź 1946
  9. ↑ Gone in the fire. Diaries from the Ghetto , Berlin / GDR 1958, pp. 11–166.
  10. ^ Leon W. Wells: A son of Job. C. Hanser, Munich 1963, pp. 325ff.
  11. ^ Eichmann process session 22/2 , in the Nizkor Project
personal data
SURNAME Weliczker Wells, Leon
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wells, Leon W.
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish engineer and Holocaust survivor
DATE OF BIRTH March 10, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Stojaniw near Radziechów
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 2009
Place of death Fort Lee, New Jersey , USA