Robert Seitz (SS member)

Incineration furnace in the Majdanek concentration camp crematorium

Robert Seitz (born January 14, 1911 in Liedolsheim ; † September 17, 1977 in Karlsruhe ) was a German SS-Unterscharführer who was employed in the crematorium of the Majdanek concentration camp and the crematoria in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . Because of these functions, he was deeply involved in the Holocaust .

Life

Seitz was a postal worker and farmer by profession. He joined the NSDAP in 1931 and became a member of the General SS at the beginning of the National Socialist era in 1933 .

From June 1940 Seitz belonged to the Waffen SS . Since 1941 he had been employed by the guards at the Groß-Rosen concentration camp . In November 1941 he was transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp, where he was deployed as a command leader under the local crematorium manager Erich Mußfeldt .

In the course of special action 1005 in 1942, the corpses of inmates were exhumed and loaded onto trailers that were driven by bulldogs into a nearby forest, with the death and murder rate rising . There the bodies were burned on a grate using heating oil by a prisoner detachment under the direction of Seitz and the technical control of an SS man from Sonderkommando 1005. This happened because the crematorium in Majdanek was too small according to a post-war statement by Seitz. The prisoners of such work details were murdered after some time as "keepers of secrets" and replaced by new ones.

He was proposed by the Higher SS and Police Leader Ost Wilhelm Koppe in December 1943 for the award of the War Merit Cross, 2nd class, because he “performed his dangerous service with the use of his whole person” and “continuously participated in special campaigns”. The reference to special actions meant nothing more than participation in violent Nazi crimes.

From May 1944 he was appointed head of Birkenau Crematoria IV and V under Otto Moll , the agent for the extermination of the Hungarian Jews (so-called Hungary Action ) , while Muhsfeldt was in charge of Crematoria II and III there. According to the Jewish Auschwitz survivor Miklós Nyiszli , Seitz was one of the “most ruthless murderers in the crematoria”. In the course of the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Seitz belonged to a group of six "extermination specialists" who were transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp in January 1945.

After the end of the war he worked as a farmer near Liedolsheim. Now a pensioner, he was indicted in 1975 with 16 other accused in the Düsseldorf Majdanek trial . The allegations against the defendants were murder or aiding and abetting murder. Due to illness, he left the process.

literature

• Stefan Hördler : Order and inferno. The concentration camp system in the last year of the war . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2015. ISBN 978-3-8353-1404-7
• Elissa Mailänder: A specialist: the daily work of Erich Muhsfeldt, chief of the crematorium at Majdanek concentration and extermination camp, 1942-44 . In: Élisabeth Gessat-Anstett, Jean-Marc Dreyfus (Ed.): Destruction and human remains. Disposal and concealment in genocide and mass violence , Manchester University Press 2014, ISBN 978-0-7190-9602-0 , pp. 46-68.
• Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz death books . Volume 1: Reports , KG Saur Verlag, Munich 1995, ISBN 3-598-11263-7 .8-8.
• 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 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 375
2. ^ Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz death books . Volume 1: Reports , Munich 1995, section perpetrator biographies, p. 374
3. ↑ ^{a b} Stefan Hördler: Order and Inferno. The concentration camp system in the last year of the war , Göttingen 2015, p. 311
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Stefan Hördler: Order and Inferno. The concentration camp system in the last year of the war , Göttingen 2015, p. 435
5. ^ Andrej Angrick: "Aktion 1005" - Removal of traces of Nazi mass crimes 1942–1945: A "secret Reich affair " in the area of ​​conflict between the turn of the war and propaganda , Göttingen 2018, p. 285f.
6. ^ Elissa Mailänder: Images of perpetrators in the Düsseldorf Majdanek trial (1975–1981) . In: Simone Erpel (ed.): In the wake of the SS: Overseers of the Ravensbrück women's concentration camp. Accompanying volume for the exhibition . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-938690-19-2 , pp. 213, 217