Max Schmidt (SS member)

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Max Schmidt (born April 11, 1920 in Steinfeld; † 2002 ) was a German SS-Oberscharführer in Auschwitz , who led the death march of prisoners from the Fürstengrube concentration camp .

Life

Schmidt was the son of a farmer from Sarau , where he grew up. From 1939 he belonged to the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler , a division of the Waffen-SS . In August 1941 he was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp , where he was later a trainer for the guard battalion. In April 1944 he succeeded Otto Moll as the last camp leader of the Fürstengrube concentration camp , a satellite camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp. On July 19, 1944, Schmidt was commended in a commandant's order for preventing concentration camp inmates from escaping.

In the course of the "evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp", Schmidt led the death march of prisoners from the Fürstengrube concentration camp on January 19, 1945 . First the prisoners had to march to Gleiwitz and were transported from there in rail wagons via Vienna and Mauthausen to the Mittelbau concentration camp . Many prisoners did not survive the transport due to the severe frost. The survivors were transferred to the Blankenburg-Regenstein satellite camp, where they had to do forced labor . Shortly before the liberation of the Mittelbau concentration camp, camp leader Schmidt gathered around 200 to 400 survivors of the Fürstengrube camp and drove the prisoners to Magdeburg , where a column of prisoners from the Blankenburg-Oesig satellite camp of the Mittelbau concentration camp , led by Johann Mirbeth, joined them. The prisoners were brought to Lübeck in an Elbe barge . From there the prisoners were driven to the vicinity of Ahrensbök , where they arrived in mid-April 1945. Many prisoners were shot during the death march. Some of the survivors were housed in barns or some prisoners connected to him on the estate of Schmidt's father. At the end of April 1945 Schmidt took 48 prisoners from western countries to Lübeck in a truck, where they were disembarked to Sweden by the Swedish Red Cross. Most of the prisoners were taken to the ship Cap Arcona , which was sunk by mistake on May 3, 1945 after attacks by the Royal Air Force .

At the end of the war, Schmidt hid in Sarau with the help of Jewish prisoners connected to him . Then he went into hiding and used the pseudonym Max Hinz . According to his own information, he was then undetected as a prisoner of war and after his release he worked as Max Hinz for a farmer and then as a miner in the Ruhr area. Eventually he moved back to his hometown and started working as a farmer. Investigations against him were carried out by the Kiel Regional Court in 1964 and closed in 1973 due to the statute of limitations. Another preliminary investigation initiated by the Kiel Public Prosecutor in 1989 was also closed shortly thereafter.

The Bremen university professor Jörg Wollenberg , who met survivors of the death march in Neuglasau as a child, interviewed Schmidt several times from March 1995: "He told me that he had come to Fürstengrube in 1944 as a war-disabled SS man who was no longer" fit for the front " there he took over a command which he - as he soon discovered - did not feel up to. When I asked why he drove exhausted, exhausted, terminally ill prisoners through Holstein in the spring of 1945, Schmidt replied that it was necessary "to prevent worse things." In fact, after the war there were some prisoners who testified in his favor ”.

In the Ahrensbök memorial, which was set up on the initiative of Group 33, there is not only information about the Ahrensbök concentration camp but also a permanent exhibition on the death march from Fürstengrube since 2001. At that time, Schmidt lived as an honorable citizen in his hometown.

literature

  • Gerhard Hoch : From Auschwitz to Holstein. The Jewish prisoners from Fürstengrube. Hamburg 1990/1998. Review by Christine Weber-Herfort .
  • Norbert Fick, Jörg Wollenberg: Ahrensbök. A small town under National Socialism. Concentration Camp - Forced Labor - Death March . Yearbook for local history - Eutin; Eutin 2004 (pp. 199-200).
  • Jörg Wollenberg: Searching for traces from Ahrensbök to Auschwitz and back. The other memory and the limits of finding the truth. Jahrbuch für Heimatkunde - Eutin, Eutin 2007 (pp. 257–298) (excerpts online) .
  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dates of birth according to Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 359
  2. ↑ Year of death after: Jörg Wollenberg: The other memory and the limits of finding the truth: Securing evidence behind the walls of oblivion . In: Heidrun Herzberg, Eva Kammler: Biography and Society: Thoughts on a Theory of the Modern Self , Frankfurt am Main 2011, p. 201
  3. a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 359
  4. Andrea Rudorff: Fürstengrube. 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 , pp. 223f.
  5. Christine Weber-Herfort: Search for motives, question of responsibility . In: Information on Schleswig-Holstein Contemporary History , Kiel 1994, Issue 26, pp. 88–90
  6. Andrea Rudorff: Fürstengrube. In: Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror. History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps . Vol. 5, p. 225.
  7. ^ Jörg Wollenberg: Homeland from Ostholstein. In: the Friday of January 25, 2002
  8. Frank Keil: The long silence in the country . In: taz -online from July 28, 2010