Martin Gottfried Weiss

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Martin Gottfried Weiss in American internment. Photo from 1945.

Martin Gottfried Weiß (born June 3, 1905 in Weiden in the Upper Palatinate ; † May 29, 1946 in Landsberg am Lech ) was a German SS-Obersturmbannführer and camp commandant of various concentration and extermination camps in the Third Reich .

Life

Weiß was born as the son of a supervisor for the Bavarian State Railways . He had two sisters and was raised Catholic. After attending elementary school, he switched to the Weiden preparatory school in 1918. From 1921 he continued his training at a mechanical engineering school in Landshut . He interrupted school in 1923 to volunteer in a training battalion in Landshut for six months. He completed his mechanical engineering training in 1924 and initially worked as an intern in an ironworks . He then worked for about three and a half years at the "Elektrizitätsgesellschaft Oberpfalzwerke".

Rise in the Nazi regime

In the summer of 1926, Weiß joined the NSDAP and, with two friends, founded a local association of the SA and the HJ in Weiden. He later began studying electrical engineering at the Kyffhäuser technical center in Bad Frankenhausen , which he completed in 1930. His performance was good, so that he was taken on as an assistant professor at the technical center. He held this position until April 1, 1932, on that day he was dismissed for lack of work. On the same day he returned to his home in Weiden and joined the SS . Furthermore, he took over the post of NSDAP block warden and became a district film warden.

From April 1933 he was part of the security team at the Dachau concentration camp , and from November 1933 to February 1938 he was a camp engineer there. In March 1938 he became an adjutant under the camp commanders Hans Loritz and Alex Piorkowski . He married in 1934 and later fathered at least two children.

Commander in Neuengamme and Arbeitsdorf

In April 1940 he was commissioned to set up the Neuengamme concentration camp , which he also headed as commandant from November of the same year. The Neuengamme camp had to produce building materials for Führerbauten in Hamburg, where Weiss became familiar with the method of “ destruction through work ”. In the brickworks, for example, the prisoners had no medical care, and they were also under the supervision of criminal prison functionaries , who were generally more feared because mostly more cruel than political prison inmates, for example . Inmates quickly deteriorated physically under the working conditions of this camp. From April 1942 to July 1942, Weiss also became the commandant of the Arbeitsdorf concentration camp .

Commander in Dachau

From September 1, 1942, Weiß took over the command of the Dachau camp. Shortly after the transfer, Oswald Pohl , the head of the SS-Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) , confronted him sharply because of the poor condition of the prisoners, which minimized their workload. White had been instructed to take better care of the prisoners' workforce. He abolished the penalty of hanging on a stake , but corporal punishment was used more (both of which were previously included in the camp regulations). Nonsensical harassment was banned. Arbitrary strikes were also to be completely abolished, which was not followed consistently, but they were reduced. Appeals were less frequent, penal companies abolished, prisoners were allowed to enter residential barracks more often, and the weight and frequency of parcel shipments to the camp were no longer restricted. In Dachau he withdrew from their posts the protective custody camp leader Franz Hofmann , report leader Josef Seuss and the camp elder Martin Schaferski and transferred them to Auschwitz , Natzweiler and Mauthausen . He transferred camp elder Karl Kapp to the weapons workshop. In the Dachau concentration camp, “new times” were propagated, the “Hofmann era” was over. Many prisoners rated the improvement in the camp as a personal merit from Weiß, who later portrayed himself as such in the first Dachau trial . Weiss had taken some of his Kapos with him from Neuengamme, some of them criminal inmates, who called him the “father of the inmates”, so a certain savior myth soon grew up around him in the camp. A final wave of Aktion 14f13 was carried out under him, which killed 342 people in the Hartheim Nazi killing center . After the war, Weiß claimed that he had nothing to do with it himself, but that the head of the political department of the Dachau camp was responsible for it. While he was in command, 35 people were hanged and 18 shot in the Dachau camp. He later testified in court that these 53 people were not concentration camp inmates, but prisoners of the Gestapo who were sentenced to death on orders from Himmler and the RSHA . This contradicted Johann Kick's testimony ; above all, it completely contradicted the existing camp regulations that were valid in all concentration camps .

Commander in Lublin-Majdanek

Weiß completed his work in Dachau on October 31, 1943. His official assumption of office as commanding officer in Lublin-Majdanek was not until November 4, 1943. On November 3, 1943, one of the most terrible massacres of the Nazi camps took place there, in which over 17,000 Jewish people were murdered in one day during the harvest festival were. Historians assume that he was already in Lublin-Majdanek that day, for example to familiarize himself with his position there before taking office. It is certain that he had to eliminate the consequences of the massacre on the first day he took office on November 4th. That day, another 25 Jews who had managed to hide were found and killed. Another 611 Jewish prisoners, 311 women and 300 men, were charged with sorting the clothes and belongings of those who were killed. The men had to fill in the mass graves of the massacre. They were later assigned to Sonderkommando 1005 to exhume the corpses and burn them at the stake. After completing this work, they were killed. Before the closure of Lublin-Majdanek, the 311 women were sent to Auschwitz , where they were killed by gas .

His predecessor in the Majdanek extermination camp was Sturmbannführer Hermann Florstedt . White was the fourth and youngest camp commandant in Majdanek. During his tenure, Majdanek served as an execution camp in which several hundred prisoners were shot. Between December 1943 and March 1944 about 180,000 so-called invalids were transported to Majdanek. He was succeeded as commandant by Obersturmbannführer Arthur Liebehenschel , who was previously commandant in Auschwitz.

Head of Office z. b. V. in the office group D of the SS-WVHA

On May 18, 1944, SS-Obersturmbannführer Weiß was appointed “Amtschef z. b. V. in Office Group D of the SS Economic and Administrative Main Office ”. Because of this position, he was delegated to the Dachau external command Mühldorf on November 1, 1944 . There, the Todt Organization built two underground factories for the manufacture of fighter planes with prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp as part of the “Jäger Emergency Program” . Because of the great material inferiority of the German Air Force, the work was carried out without any consideration for prisoners. Jewish prisoners were deployed, who were threatened with extermination through work instead of gas. If they did not die from working conditions or from typhus, if they were unable to work, they were brought to Auschwitz as disabled persons.

The area of ​​responsibility of Weiß in Mühldorf is not completely clear. According to his own statements, he was a kind of "technical intermediary" within the Reich authorities. What is certain is that his office gave him the highest rank of all who were involved in Mühldorf. In the later trial he was also accused of participating in the execution of five prisoners for sabotage in the Kaufering I camp . He did not deny his presence, but announced that he had nothing to do with it and was only there by chance.

Martin Weiß (seated from behind) on the witness stand during the Dachau trials.

At the end of April 1945 he was again in the Dachau concentration camp, presumably to relieve the local commandant Eduard Weiter and to remedy grievances. On April 28th he discussed the handover of the camp to the advancing US Army with SS-Standartenführer Kurt Becher (unsecured, Becher later only remembered that the name of the man he spoke to began with "W") . On April 28 or 29, 1945, Weiss fled Dachau. On May 2, 1945, he was arrested by American troops in Mühldorf am Inn .

White was in Dachau main process on November 15, 1945 charged with 39 other defendants (Case No. 000-50-2. US vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss et al.) And on 13 December 1945 death by the strand convicted. The sentence was carried out on May 29, 1946 in the Landsberg War Crimes Prison .

literature

Web link

Commons : Martin Gottfried Weiss  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 95
  2. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 96
  3. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 664
  4. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 137
  5. ↑ Karin Orth: The Concentration Camp SS , Munich 2004, p. 181f.
  6. ↑ Source: Statements of the defense witness H.Bickel (NOR 4, p. 5335-5359 G) and the defendant Mummethey, managing director of DEST (NOR 4, p. 5588-5589 G), source taken from: Stanislav Zámečník: (Ed. Comité International de Dachau): That was Dachau. Luxembourg, 2002., subchapter "The camp commandant Martin Weiß"
  7. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: (Ed. Comité International de Dachau): That was Dachau. Luxembourg, 2002., p. 253
  8. ↑ Cf. Dachau Trial, "White Cross Examination", Vol. 3, p. 895
  9. ↑ The massacre is described in detail in Józef Marszalek: Majdanek. History and reality of the extermination camp, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1982. pp. 138–144.
  10. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: (Ed. Comité International de Dachau): That was Dachau. Luxembourg, 2002., pp. 254-255.
  11. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: (Ed. Comité International de Dachau): That was Dachau. Luxembourg, 2002., p. 255
  12. ↑ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 664
personal data
SURNAME White, Martin Gottfried
ALTERNATIVE NAMES White, Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Obersturmbannführer and camp commandant
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Willows in the Upper Palatinate
DATE OF DEATH May 29, 1946
Place of death Landsberg am Lech