Oskar Schmitz

This article deals with the prisoner functionary Oskar Schmitz. For the poet and philosopher see Oscar AH Schmitz .

Oscar Schmitz in August 1945

Oskar Schmitz (born February 23, 1916 in Cologne , † after 1945) was a German prisoner functionary camp elder in the barracks camp of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp .

Life

After finishing his school career, Schmitz completed an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering, which he completed in May 1934. Since Schmitz had previously been involved in the communist youth movement and did not belong to any Nazi organization, he could not find a job after completing his training. Schmitz finally earned his living doing odd jobs. When he was moving stolen items to a pawn shop, Schmitz was arrested on November 27, 1934 and, after his conviction, imprisoned until December 3, 1935. After the occupation of the Rhineland , Schmitz was drafted into the Reich Labor Service . Then he tried to hire a ship in the port of Hamburg . From October 1936 to August 4, 1939 Schmitz was imprisoned again because he had stolen a car in Duisburg and drove to Hamburg. After his release from prison, Schmitz worked for Daimler-Benz in Cologne. Because Schmitz was to be drafted into the Wehrmacht after the outbreak of World War II in December 1939 , he left for Vienna .

On January 26, 1940, Schmitz was arrested again and sent to the Emsland camps under a protective custody warrant. In March 1944 he was transferred from there to the Gestapo in Vienna and sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp . From June 1944 he was employed at the Reichswerke Hermann Göring in Linz. Schmitz was wounded in a bomb attack on the Reichswerke and taken to hospital. After his recovery he was taken back to Mauthausen concentration camp. From there he was transferred to Auschwitz in November 1944 and, after the evacuation of this camp in January 1945, to Mittelbau . From March 1945 Schmitz Kapo was a work detail at the Mittelbau concentration camp in Tettenborn . After this work detachment was evacuated on April 5, 1945, the prisoners of this detachment were taken to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on the morning of April 10, 1945. There he was made elder of the barracks camp by members of the camp SS. One of his tasks was to find out what nationalities the prisoners were in the individual blocks of the barracks camp. Before the British army took over the camp, Schmitz refused to leave the camp with the Wehrmacht troops, as he feared that he would be involved in combat operations towards the end of the war.

On April 16, 1945, after the camp was taken over by the British Army, he and two other former German concentration camp prisoners were attacked in their room by eight to nine Ukrainian concentration camp prisoners, some of whom were armed with stabbing weapons. Like the other two inmates, Schmitz was forced to take off his concentration camp inmate clothing . After he was beaten, Schmitz escaped through the window of the barrack and reported the incident to a British post. Schmitz, naked except for his underpants, was brought into a room with four prisoners from the SS. There he put on an SS uniform lying around. Due to communication problems, Schmitz was later mistaken for an SS man by another guard and was imprisoned in Celle with the former deputy camp commandant Franz Hössler . Together with other SS men, Schmitz had to bury the prisoners' corpses lying around the camp grounds in mass graves on April 21, 1945. Schmitz tried to clear up the mistake that he was an SS man through the arrest warden, also a former Belsen inmate. The arrest warden turned to a British officer who promised to deal with Schmitz's case. However, Schmitz fell ill with typhus shortly afterwards and was transferred to a hospital in May 1945.

On October 19, 1945, Schmitz was questioned as part of the Bergen-Belsen trial and stated that it was only at this point in time that he could clear up the error that he had been an SS man. Schmitz was finally acquitted on November 17, 1945 in the Bergen-Belsen trial. Nothing is known about his further life.

literature

• United Nations War Crimes Commission (Ed.): Law reports of trials of war criminals, selected and prepared by the United Nations War Crimes Commission. 3 volumes, William S. Hein Publishing, Buffalo (New York) 1997, ISBN 1-57588-403-8 (reprint of the original edition from 1947 to 1949)

Web links

• First Bergen-Belsen Trial: Protocols (eng)
• Photos and features of the defendants
• Oskar Schmitz at www.buchenwald.de