Oswald Kaduk
Oswald Kaduk (born August 26, 1906 in Königshütte , Upper Silesia , † May 31, 1997 in Langelsheim , Lower Saxony ) was a German SS sergeant and report leader in the Auschwitz concentration camp .
Life
Kaduk was the son of a farrier. After attending primary school, he learned the butcher's trade and then worked at the city slaughterhouse. After being temporarily unemployed, from 1927 he worked for the municipal fire brigade in Königshütte.
Report leader in Auschwitz concentration camp
In 1939 Kaduk volunteered to join the General SS . During the Second World War he was drafted into the Waffen SS in Berlin in March 1940 . He came to the Eastern Front, but was transferred to Auschwitz in July 1941 after various illnesses and hospital stays . Initially employed in the guard station, Kaduk became block leader and finally report leader.
“In the late summer of 1944 a prisoner was missing from the evening roll call. The prisoners who stood up had to stand there until the missing person was finally found. Kaduk and another reporter beat the inmate so badly that he fell to the ground several times. [...] Finally the prisoner lay on his back, but he was still alive. Kaduk and the other Rapportführer then stepped on the prisoner's chest with their boot heels with full force until - according to the findings of the Frankfurt jury - his ribs cracked. Kaduk and the other only stopped [...] when the prisoner was dead. "
After the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, he was deployed in the Mauthausen concentration camp .
post war period
After the end of the war , Kaduk worked under a false name in a sugar factory in Löbau . In December 1946 he was recognized by a former prisoner and arrested by a Soviet military patrol. A Soviet military court sentenced him on August 25, 1947 to 25 years of forced labor . In April 1956 he was pardoned and released early from Bautzen prison.
He went to West Berlin and worked as a nurse in the Tegel-Nord hospital. Because of his willingness to help, he soon had the name "Papa Kaduk" there.
He was arrested again in July 1959. In the first Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt am Main , Kaduk was one of the main suspects. The Frankfurt jury court sentenced him on August 20, 1965 to life imprisonment for murder in ten cases and joint murder in two cases of at least 1002 people. In addition, he lost his civil rights for life. Because of the seriousness of the offenses, various requests for clemency were rejected by the responsible prison chamber. After being transferred to the open prison in 1984, he was released from the Schwalmstadt prison in Hesse in 1989 because he was incapable of imprisonment .
In the process of exonerating him, Kaduk stated that he was "just a henchman" himself. The real culprits were free. "When I think of State Secretary Globke, I ask myself why people measure with double standards."
In 1997 Oswald Kaduk died in the Lautenthal district of Langelsheim in the Harz Mountains .
In the film report “Three German Murderers. Recordings on the Banality of Evil ”(1978/99) by Ebbo Demant were interviewed fourteen years after the Auschwitz trial and during their imprisonment, Kaduk, Josef Klehr and Josef Erber about Auschwitz and their self-image as former members of the SS camp personnel.
literature
- Ebbo Demant (Ed.): Auschwitz - "Straight from the ramp ..." Kaduk, Erber, Klehr: Three perpetrators put on record. Rowohlt, Hamburg 1979, ISBN 3-499-14438-7 .
- 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 .
- Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
- Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Ullstein-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .
- Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. Oswiecim 1998, ISBN 83-85047-35-2 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Oswald Kaduk in the catalog of the German National Library
- Biography and photo of Kaduk
- Short portrait of Oswald Kaduk at www.auschwitz-prozess-frankfurt.de
Individual evidence
- ^ Peter Reichel: Coming to terms with the past in Germany. The confrontation with the Nazi dictatorship from 1945 until today. Beck'sche Reihe 1416, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-406-45956-0 , p. 164
- ↑ Demant, p. 73.
- ^ Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz death books . Volume 1: Reports , 1995, pp. 283f
- ↑ Ronen Steinke: Murder is the sum of all parts. 50 years after the Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung from June 1, 2013.
- ↑ Kurt Nelhiebel : The decoupling of war and expulsion. On Manfred Kittel's interpretation of recent European history , in: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswwissenschaft , volume 1, 58th year 2010, pp. 54–69, here p. 56 ISSN 0044-2828 Online at the Else-Lasker-Schüler-Gesellschaft PDF ; 3.6 MB, according to FR of March 10, 1964
- ↑ Text version: Ebbo Demant (ed.): Auschwitz - "Straight from the ramp ..." Kaduk, Erber, Klehr: Three perpetrators on record , Hamburg 1979.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kaduk, Oswald |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German SS-Unterscharführer Rapportführer in Auschwitz, mass murderer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 26, 1906 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Königshütte , Upper Silesia |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 31, 1997 |
| Place of death | Langelsheim |