Peter Weingärtner

Peter Weingärtner in Allied custody.

Peter Weingärtner (born June 4, 1913 in Putinci , Yugoslavia , † December 13, 1945 in Hameln ) was SS-Hauptscharführer and block leader in the Auschwitz concentration camp .

Life

Weingärtner, a carpenter by trade, did his nine-month military service in the Yugoslav army in 1935. Then he worked again as a carpenter. From March 12, 1941, and thus during the German attack on Yugoslavia , Weingärtner was again a member of the Yugoslav army. At the end of April 1941 he was taken prisoner of war, from which he was soon released. On October 19, 1942 Weingärtner was drafted into the Waffen-SS and completed a three-month course to become a security guard in concentration camps in Auschwitz . Weingärtner was a member of the guard companies at Auschwitz concentration camp until November 22, 1943. Afterwards Weingärtner was a block leader in the women's camp in Auschwitz-Birkenau and did telephone service. In December 1944 he was guarding over 1,000 female prisoners in the external detachment "Weber", whose job it was to dig trenches to regulate the river. In the course of the evacuation, Weingärtner left the Auschwitz concentration camp on January 19, 1945 and arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on an evacuation transport at the beginning of February 1945 . There he acted as block leader in the women's camp.

On April 15, 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by British troops who found over 10,000 dead and around 60,000 survivors there. The SS camp personnel were obliged to remove all corpses and bury them in mass graves .

Weingärtner was arrested and interrogated by British military personnel. In the Bergen-Belsen Trial (September 17 to November 17, 1945) he was charged with his crimes committed in Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. Weingärtner stated in his statements that he had neither mistreated prisoners nor learned anything about selections in Auschwitz .

Weingärtner, who pleaded not guilty, was found guilty on November 17, 1945 and sentenced to death by hanging . The British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on December 13, 1945 in Hameln penitentiary .

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 1947–1949)
• 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 . , P. 428.

Web links

• Mazal: First Bergen-Belsen Trial: Protocols - Weingärtner's statement on October 23, 1945 (eng)
• Photos and features of the defendants