Werner Dubois

Werner Dubois (born February 26, 1913 in the area of ​​today's Wuppertal ; † October 22, 1971 in Münster ) was involved as a German SS squad leader in the criminal actions " T4 " and " Reinhardt ".

Life

Werner Dubois, son of a printer, grew up with his grandmother because his father was badly wounded in World War I. After attending primary school, he began an apprenticeship as a brush maker, which he did not complete. After a subsequent apprenticeship in agriculture, he worked in agriculture in Frankfurt / Oder. After joining the SA in 1933 and seven months of national labor service , he returned to work in agriculture. In the mid-1930s he joined the National Socialist Motor Corps (NSKK) . After completing a course as an assistant driving instructor, I received an unsuccessful application as an auxiliary driving instructor at Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler . In 1936 he came to the motorsport school "Ostmark" and was used from the beginning of January 1937 in the motor vehicle relay of the SS-Totenkopfverband Brandenburg . In this area of ​​activity he was employed as a driver and mechanic in the Oranienburg group command and from March 1938 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . He also worked as a security guard in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. In 1937 he joined the NSDAP and the SS .

Action T4 and Action Reinhardt

In 1939 Dubois was transferred to “Aktion T4” and worked as a “corpse burner” and driver of the “Gekrat” buses for transporting corpses and urns for the euthanasia centers in Bernburg , Hadamar , Brandenburg and Grafeneck . In 1941 he married the T4 employee Edith Fischer, whose mother was also a T4 employee. The marriage, which was divorced in 1951, had two children. After being transferred to "Aktion Reinhardt", Dubois was sent to the Belzec extermination camp in April 1942 . There he did duty in the gas chambers and was responsible as the driver for the transport of food. After the liquidation of the Belzec camp, Dubois was assigned to the Sobibor extermination camp from June 1943 . Here he provided ramp and hospital service and was deployed in the firing pits and in the forest command (organization of camouflage material for the camp). When five prisoners from the forest detachment managed to escape, Dubois was in charge. During the prisoner uprising in Sobibor on October 14, 1943, Dubois was seriously injured as a result of ax and knife attacks as well as gunfire and was then taken to the hospital in Chelm Lubelski for a long time to recover.

Adriatic Coastal Operation Zone

After the "Aktion Reinhardt" ended, Dubois was transferred to the Adriatic Coastal Operations Zone in Trieste in January 1944, as had most of the "Aktion Reinhardt" personnel . Here he was a member of the " Special Department, Operation R ", which served the "extermination of Jews", the confiscation of Jewish property and the fight against partisans . In the course of the approaching end of the war, the units of the "Sonderabteilung Einsatz R" withdrew from northern Italy at the end of April 1945 and Dubois returned to Germany.

post war period

After the end of the war , he was held in American captivity from May 1945 to December 1947 . He then worked as a locksmith. In the early 1950s he married again, but the marriage remained childless. In the Belzec trial , Dubois and seven other defendants were tried at the Munich Regional Court from August 1963. He was released from prosecution in January 1964 because of the putative emergency , although he stated in court that he was under no threat of death. However, he stated that Christian Wirth forced him to shoot six Jews who were no longer able to walk. For Dubois, who was sworn in personally by Adolf Hitler , an order was law. In the Sobibor trial in 1966 Dubois was finally sentenced to three years imprisonment for complicity in the collective murder of at least 15,000 people. Dubois died in Münster in 1971.

literature

• Information material from Bildungswerk Stanislaw Hantz eV: Belzec , Reader - based on a previously unpublished manuscript by the historian and director of the Belzec memorial, Robert Kuwalek.
• Ernst Klee: The Personal Lexicon for the Third Reich: Who Was What Before and After 1945 . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005. ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .