Max Kirstein

Max Kirstein (born November 7, 1890 in Bernburg an der Saale , † 1952 in Mainz ; also written as Max Kierstein ) was a trained businessman, SS-Hauptscharführer and camp commandant of the Schillstrasse subcamp , a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp in Braunschweig.

resume

Kirstein was the son of a railway attendant, attended elementary school for eight years and then learned the trade for three years. After completing his training, he worked as a salesman and decorator. Since he was patterned after an accident in 1913 for non-war usable form, he enlisted in the First World War voluntarily to the Western Front . There he was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class. He married in 1921 and lived with his wife in Mecklenburg as a farmer.

Camp commandant

Kirstein joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1937 and the Waffen SS on August 31, 1939 . He was promoted to SS-Scharführer on November 1, 1939 and to SS-Hauptscharführer on July 1, 1943 .

Kirstein was command leader in concentration camps from November 1942 to August 1944 . He was in the camps of a cellulose factory in Wittenberge and later in the Drägerwerk in Hamburg, and because of this experience, after the subcamp Schillstrasse in Braunschweig was completed on November 5, 1944, he was appointed camp commandant there.

Kirstein was feared for his outbursts of anger and directed his brutality against Jewish prisoners in particular. He insulted Jewish concentration camp inmates with 3-F (lazy, cheeky, fat) or, as another inmate Hirsch Hecht reported, also with 4-F when he described Jews: “If a Jew eats too much, he becomes fat and lazy and ultimately also cheeky ”. He hit sick Jews during his outbursts of anger, which he did not do to the French, Russian, Latvian and Lithuanian prisoners. In the Schillstrasse camp, food was cooked by the Büssing company and given out by the inmates on duty. This was changed on Kirstein's orders, and the food was handed out by the SS guards. These branched off a large part of the food. According to one employed chief engineer, Heinrich Kamrad, this went so far that the prisoners were not able to work effectively due to their constitution. He complained about this to the camp management, said Kamrad. It stands to reason that the SS crew stole the food in Schillstrasse, because in another case the SS guards of the Vechelde concentration camp sent the prisoners' food stolen to their own families. The camp leader there was under the command of Kirstein's Helmut Sebrantke , one of his most loyal followers. The French prisoner Georges Salan, who published the first French book about prisoners on Schillstrasse in 1946, assessed Kirstein as a sadist and a criminal.

Remarkably, the Schandelah subcamp in Schandelah in the Wohld district was a subcamp of the Neuengamme concentration camp, but the SS personnel were subordinate to Max Kirstein, who acted as a base manager in the region and was never held accountable for his actions.

literature

• Karl Liedke: Extermination through work: Jews from Lodz at the Büssing-NAG in Braunschweig 1944-1945. In: Gudrun Fiedler , Hans-Ulrich Ludewig : Forced Labor and War Economy in the State of Braunschweig 1939–1945 . Edited by the Braunschweig History Association. Appelhans Verlag, Braunschweig 2003, ISBN 3-930292-78-5 .
• Karl Liedke: Braunschweig (Büssing). In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-52965-8 , p. 358.

Web links

• Karl Liedke: Destruction Through Work: Lodz Jews in the Büssing Truck Factory in Braunschweig, 1944-1945, publ. v. Shoah Resource Center ( PDF file; 213 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Karl Liedke: Destruction Through Works. P. 15.
2. ^ Karl Liedke: Destruction through work. P. 228 f.
3. ^ Karl Liedke: Destruction through work. P. 229.
4. ^ Georges Salan: Prisons de France et bagnes allemandes. Nîmes: Impremerie L'Ouvriére, 1946, p. 137.
5. ^ Karl Liedke: Braunschweig (Büssing), p. 358 ff.