Walter Neff

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Walter Neff (born February 22, 1909 in Westheim , † August 31, 1960 in Munich ) was a German prisoner functionary and head nurse in the Dachau concentration camp . Neff was a leader in the Dachau uprising of April 28, 1945.

Life

Neff was a farmer by profession and from the 1930s he worked as an estate manager on a farm in Austria. After Austria was annexed to the German Reich , Neff was arrested in March 1938. Neff had previously reported a bomb attack planned by the National Socialists on a gendarmerie post, which led to the arrest of the suspects. On March 14, 1938, Neff was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, where he had to spend nine months in solitary confinement due to more stringent protective custody . After solitary confinement was lifted on December 24, 1938, Neff was assigned to the penal company, to which he belonged until the end of the intensified protective custody in March 1939. After a short stay in the infirmary, where Neff was able to regenerate a little, he was transferred to work on the "plantation" by the protective custody camp leader Adam Grünewald , where medicinal herbs were planted. There he worked in the agricultural testing department. From 1940 Neff was employed as a room elder and soon afterwards received a position as a prisoner nurse in the infirmary through the camp elder Georg Scherer .

From 1941 Neff worked as a head nurse in the infirmary and was commissioned to set up a tuberculosis research station in Block 5. This order was based on an order from Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler , who wanted to test the benefits of homeopathic therapies on inmates suffering from tuberculosis. On the orders of the doctor Rudolf Brachtel, he selected 50 seriously ill inmates to be gassed in the NS killing center in Hartheim . On the other hand, Neff released 26 sick inmates from the TBC station when another selection was imminent. However, these were denounced by the block elder Robert Wagner and then gassed. However, Neff was able to help many of the inmates at the tuberculosis ward. In his honor the inmate Emil Frantisek Burian composed the so-called "TBC march" in 1941/1942 with a text by inmate Hans Helmuth Breiding :

“What is going on here in the house today?

Because everyone is so happy and just smiles.
Says what happened there.
There is no rest in the whole house.
And all the doors open and close.
Even the weakest can walk.
Because we sing our new beautiful song that
pervades all rooms from mouth to mouth.
And that's why everyone is singing along happily,
and joining in with us and keeping pace,
because today we are all jolly.
We are the patients
but you are our master!
If we could only be right,
we would thank you even more!
Be the guardian of
our minds!
That suffering does not affect us - Walter Neffl

That we don't suffer from suffering - Walter Neff! "

At the end of February 1942, Air Force doctors informed Neff that medical experiments on prisoners were planned in the tuberculosis block. In order to prevent worse things from happening and at the request of fellow inmates, Neff decided to stay at this post. Under the doctor Dr. Sigmund Rascher Neff was responsible for the medical care of the prisoners who were Rascher's victims in attempts at negative pressure and hypothermia. As a result, Neff became a kind of experimental assistant to Rascher, who, however, also helped experimental victims within the scope of his possibilities and sabotaged an experiment. At Rascher's instigation, Neff was released from the Dachau concentration camp by Himmler on September 15, 1942 and moved into an apartment in Dachau. However, he was conscripted as a civilian employee of the Waffen-SS and had to continue to work as a police reserve under Rascher in the Dachau concentration camp. Neff, who briefly wore a police uniform in the camp, was finally able to work in civilian clothes in the Dachau concentration camp. On October 7, 1942 he wrote to Himmler:

"Allow me, Herr Reichsführer, to express my deepest thanks to you for your position on my protective custody matter and for the helpfulness of all SS departments. The future must prove my most honest will to justify the trust placed in me. They give me freedom and bread, but most of all the belief in Germany's leadership that makes me happy, which has always been unshaken in me. Heil Hitler, obediently Walter Neff "

Through a newspaper report about a child abduction in the spring of 1944, Neff was able to provide relevant information about Rascher's wife based on a personal description of the Munich criminal police. Karoline Rascher was able to prove several cases of child abductions after criminal investigations. As a result, the Raschers were arrested on the basis of child abductions and other accusations. Rascher was executed on April 24, 1945 in the Dachau concentration camp by Theodor Heinrich Bongartz .

From the beginning of 1944 at the latest, Neff was the command leader of a Dachau work detail in butcher . After a prisoner escaped from his work detachment in October 1944, Neffs was forcibly transferred to a tank hunting detachment. Neff left his unit without authorization in early March 1945 and returned to Dachau. There, together with his friend Georg Scherer, he was a leader in the Dachau uprising shortly before the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, which took place in Dachau on April 28, 1945. The aim of the failed uprising was to save Dachau from destruction and to prevent the final liquidation or evacuation of the Dachau concentration camp.

After the end of the war

After the end of World War II , Neff was arrested by members of the United States Army on June 14, 1946 on the basis of incriminating statements by a fellow inmate and imprisoned in the Dachau internment camp . From there he was transferred to Nuremberg as a witness for the prosecution in the Nuremberg doctors' trial , where he testified on December 17, 1946 about the attempted hypothermia in the Dachau concentration camp. Neff reported on more than 300 test persons of these cruel experiments, of which up to 90 died as a result of the experiments. During the process, the Dachau city council stood up for Neff because of his services to the Dachau uprising. After six months he was interned again in Dachau and, after having made a failed attempt to escape, released in November 1947. After he left the internment camp, he was arrested and imprisoned again by the German police, but released after a few days due to exonerating statements by a former fellow inmate. He then lived in Dachau, married and worked in various fields.

Before the Munich jury court on December 30, 1948, Neff was sentenced to a month's imprisonment in the first instance for aiding and abetting bodily harm, which, however, was deemed to have served due to pre-trial detention. A revision resulted in the termination of the proceedings in which former prisoners also testified for Neff.

“Walter Neff, whose case was symbolic for many, confessed in his closing remarks that he would not act any differently today if he were sent to a concentration camp again. The audience, all of them former prisoners from the Dachau camp, applauded him. Then the usher lit a large stable lantern, because in Munich there was still a power cut at this evening hour. It was the lamp of Diogenes with which the judges withdrew to their consultation room in order to resolve the conflict between law and humanity. They took a middle course and sentenced Walter Neff to a minimum of one month in prison for aiding and abetting bodily harm. His pre-trial detention was credited and he was immediately released. The symbolic judgment in the tragic case of Walter Neff did not satisfy anyone. "

Neff, who last worked as an administrator in Georg Scherer's clothing factory, wrote several manuscripts about his time in the Dachau concentration camp. He died in a Munich hospital at the end of August 1960.

"Whom fate compelled to serve Satan as a henchman in hell, whom it compelled to judge life and death without being called to do so [...] himself and his actions become mad."

Zámečník describes Neff as an "ambivalent personality" because on the one hand he helped many prisoners and rendered outstanding services to the city of Dachau, but on the other hand he also became an assistant to Dr. Rascher made for his inhuman attempts. Neff himself was accused at the Nuremberg doctors' trial of killing at least two prisoners. Neff admitted this and justified killing these inmates with sleeping pills because of their incurable disease. By influencing Dr. Neff also succeeded more quickly in assigning him to Rascher's experimental series of detainees who were hated and feared in the camp because of their brutality. The brutal block elder Robert Wagner was brought to light by Neff Dr. Suggested faster as a test subject for the negative pressure experiments. Instead of a Jewish prisoner named Cohen, Rascher finally took the block elder Wagner as a test victim , for whom the prisoner clerk Hermann Langbein filled out the death report that same evening.

Works

Manuscripts by Walter Neff:

  • Doctor of death. Zwei-Brücken-Verlag, Miesbach 1949, can no longer be found but preserved as a manuscript in the archives of the Dachau Memorial.
  • Right or wrong. Manuscript without date, archive of the Dachau memorial, Doc.No. 8.207.
  • Block 5 becomes a test station. Manuscript without date, Archive of the Dachau Memorial, Doc.No. 158.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Anna Andlauer: Walter Neff. In: Hans-Günter Richardi (Ed.): Curricula vitae - fates of people who were in the Dachau concentration camp: fates of people who were in the Dachau concentration camp , 2001, Dachau documents vol. 2, p. 31.
  2. ↑ See Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, the Nazi medicine and its victims. Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 32.
  3. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 273.
  4. ^ TBC march - Walter Neff, composition: Emil Frantisek Burian, text: Hans Helmuth Breiding, (1941/1942); Quoted in: songs from concentration camps. at www.volksliederarchiv.de
  5. ↑ See Anna Andlauer: Walter Neff. In: Hans-Günter Richardi (ed.): CVs - fates of people who were in the Dachau concentration camp: fates of people who were in the Dachau concentration camp. 2001, p. 32f.
  6. ^ Letter from Walter Neff to Heinrich Himmler dated October 7, 1942. Quoted from: Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 275.
  7. ↑ See Anna Andlauer: Walter Neff. In: Hans-Günter Richardi (ed.): CVs - fates of people who were in the Dachau concentration camp: fates of people who were in the Dachau concentration camp. 2001, p. 31
    Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 283 f.
  8. ^ Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 386 f.
    Walter Neff: The Dachau Uprising ( Memento from May 27, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
  9. ↑ a b c Hans-Günter Richardi: Walter Neff - His courage saves thousands of prisoners' lives on April 28, 1945 and saves Dachau from senseless defense by the SS. On www.zbdachau.de ( Memento from September 22, 2009 in Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ Cf. Angelika Ebbinghaus, Karl Heinz Roth: Medical Crimes in front of the court - The human experiments in the concentration camp Dachau. In: Ludwig Eiber, Robert Sigl (eds.): Dachauer processes - Nazi crimes before American military courts in Dachau 1945 - 1948. Göttingen 2007, pp. 133, 138 f.
  11. ↑ Cf. Edith Raim: West German investigations and trials on the Dachau concentration camp and its satellite camps. In: Ludwig Eiber, Robert Sigl (Hrsg.): Dachauer processes - Nazi crimes before American military courts in Dachau 1945 - 1948. Göttingen 2007, p. 219.
  12. ↑ From a report in the Abendzeitung on December 31, 1948; quoted from: Hans-Günter Richardi: Walter Neff - His courage saved the lives of thousands of prisoners on April 28, 1945 and saved Dachau from senseless defense by the SS. on www.zbdachau.de ( Memento from September 22, 2009 on the Internet Archives )
  13. ^ From the foreword to the manuscript Right or Wrong by Walter Neff, quoted from: Ernst Klee: Auschwitz, the Nazi medicine and its victims. Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 32.
  14. ↑ See Stanislav Zámečník: That was Dachau. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 272 ​​f.
personal data
SURNAME Neff, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German prisoner functionary and head nurse in Dachau concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH February 22, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Westheim
DATE OF DEATH August 31, 1960
Place of death Munich