Siegfried Graetschus

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Siegfried Graetschus

Siegfried Graetschus (born June 9, 1916 in Tilsit ; † October 14, 1943 in the Sobibor extermination camp ) was a German SS-Untersturmführer member of the camp team in the Sobibor extermination camp. He was killed in the Sobibór uprising on October 14, 1943 by camp inmates Arkadij Wajspapir and Yehuda Lerner .

Life

Graetschus left school after attending eight classes. He was a farmer by trade. Graetschus became a member of the SS on December 20, 1935 and of the NSDAP in 1936 .

Concentration camps and Nazi killing centers

He was busy with office work in the Nazi killing center in Bernburg in 1940/41. Then he came to the command staff in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . When he was employed in the vehicle fleet of the Buchenwald concentration camp , Graetschus was ordered with Lorenz Hackenholt , Josef Oberhauser and Werner Dubois to the Reich Chancellery in Berlin, where they and six other SS-Unterführer from SA-Oberführer Werner Blankenburg on the secret "Operation Euthanasia", the T4-Aktion . Graetschus then worked as a corpse incinerator in the Nazi killing centers in Grafeneck , Brandenburg and Bernburg . In the Belzec extermination camp , Graetschus was involved in experiments on gas vans when, under the command of Christian Wirth, a gray-painted parcel van of the Reichspost was converted into a gas vans.

Commander of the Trawniki men

After a short period of work in the Treblinka extermination camp , he was transferred to the Sobibor extermination camp in August 1942 . In Sobibór he was involved in various activities throughout the camp. There he was promoted to SS- Untersturmführer and commander of the 90 to 120 Trawniki men as the successor to Erich Lachmann , an alcoholic, thief and mentally disadvantaged. These men who guarded the camp were considered difficult to manage and unreliable.

While working in the food depot, SS men enriched themselves by smuggling gold and precious stones out of bread or other food. The commandant tolerated this with his SS men, but not with camp inmates and Trawniki men. The camp commandant Franz Reichleitner took over the investigation of a theft in one case and had three Jews and two Trawniki men in camp IV shot by "a subordinate (presumably Graetschus)" in front of the assembled team.

Graetschus dies

Graetschus played a key role in the plans of the underground committee for the "uprising in the Sobibór camp" because of his position: The armed men were supposed to kill first the deputy camp commandant Johann Niemann and then the commandant of the guards, Graetschus. The camp inmate Arkadij Vajspapir had been appointed by the military head of the underground committee Alexander Pechersky to eliminate Graetschus. When Graetschus came to the tailor's workshop, he tried on a jacket that the tailors had made for him. Arkadij Wajspapir and the seventeen-year-old Yehuda Lerner were hiding behind a curtain. Wajspapir came out and passed Graetschus, gave the impression that he wanted to go outside and hit him in the head with the edge of the ax. This blow only made him stagger, then Lerner came out of hiding and hit him on the head again with a hatchet. Graetschus went down dead. Wajspapir took his Walther pistol . They hid the body under a pile of clothes. The hatter's foreman, Chaskiel Menche, took out a knife, stabbed Graetschus' lifeless body, and then passed out from excitement. Shortly afterwards, the Trawniki's head guard, the Ukrainian Rai Klatt, entered the tailor's shop. He bumped into the pile of clothes under which Graetschus was lying, bent down and asked what it was. Wajspapir hit him on the head with the ax and Lerner hit him too. Klatt fell dead, Lerner took his pistol. They reported to the military leader Alexander Pechersky that they had done their jobs.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on www.deathcamps.org , accessed October 3, 2009
  2. ↑ a b c d Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp , p. 190
  3. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 195.
  4. ↑ Secret Reich Matter! Subject: Technical changes to the special car on www.gelsenzentrum.de , accessed on October 2, 2009
  5. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp , p. 306
  6. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp , p. 94
  7. ↑ Distel: Sobibór , p. 396 (see literature)
  8. ↑ Schelvis: Sobibór extermination camp , pp. 190/191
personal data
SURNAME Graetschus, Siegfried
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Untersturmführer, involved in "Aktion T4"
DATE OF BIRTH June 9, 1916
PLACE OF BIRTH Tilsit
DATE OF DEATH October 14, 1943
Place of death Sobibor extermination camp