Wilhelm Emmerich

Wilhelm Emmerich (born February 7, 1916 in Tiefenbach , † May 22, 1945 in Schwarmstedt ) was a German SS Oberscharführer who was deployed in National Socialist concentration camps .

Life

Emmerich was a baker by profession and a member of the NSDAP . In 1940 he was transferred from Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the main camp of Auschwitz . From June 1942 to May 1943 he was second labor service leader. He was involved in the shooting of prisoners at the Black Wall . At the end of 1942, Emmerich was briefly the command leader of the Chełmek external command of the Auschwitz concentration camp, which only existed for several weeks . In this concentration camp prisoners do pond work under inhuman working conditions, in which many prisoners died. From the summer of 1943 Emmerich was briefly report leader in the Auschwitz-Monowitz concentration camp and then in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp .

Emmerich was seriously injured by the resistance of a Jew who was supposed to be murdered in the gas chamber: On October 23, 1943, a transport of 1,800 so-called exchange Jews reached the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. They had been promised to be taken to a nonexistent camp called Bergau near Dresden. After their arrival in Auschwitz, people became restless because they suspected they had been betrayed. The men were separated from women and children and, using force, were taken from the ramp to the crematoria in trucks . The women who arrived at the crematorium remained suspicious, although the head of the protective custody camp, Franz Hößler , deceived them by saying that they could leave after disinfection. Half of the women followed Hößler's request, the others were beaten and forced to undress. Franciszka Mann , a well-known dancer in Warsaw, offered resistance - there are different versions of the process described below. While she slowly undressed, she hit SS man Walter Quakernack in the face with her shoe and was able to steal the pistol from him. She shot at Quakernack, missed him, and instead hit SS man Josef Schillinger in the stomach. She also managed to shoot Emmerich, who as a result had a semi-rigid leg - Schillinger bled to death on the way to the hospital. The remaining women now attacked the other SS men who were leaving the room with their fists. Shortly afterwards, the women were shot at with machine guns that had been brought in. The survivors of this massacre were murdered in the gas chamber .

In the course of the corruption investigation by SS judge Konrad Morgen in the Auschwitz camp complex, gold was found near Emmerich, which probably came from Holocaust victims. Although Emmerich was imprisoned for some time, he was "released from prison without a verdict".

After the evacuation of the Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, he was assigned to the Mittelbau concentration camp . After the evacuation of this camp, he ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945 , where he was assigned as a report leader. A few weeks after the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was handed over to the British Army, Emmerich died of typhus on May 22, 1945 in the Schwarmstedt reserve hospital .

At the instigation of his widow, in 1949, to secure her claims to a survivor's pension, a court proceedings against the deceased Emmerich were carried out. Since these claims could only be enforced if the person concerned was not denazified as the main culprit or accused , the Baden-Württemberg Ministry for Political Liberation initially followed their information and initially did not judge Emmerich as the main culprit or accused. Testimony from Auschwitz survivors led to the trial being resumed - Emmerich was described by them as particularly brutal, ruthless and sadistic. Based on these statements, Emmerich, as the perpetrator in the Auschwitz concentration camp, was ultimately classified as the main culprit.

Emmerich was also honored on a memorial plaque for 39 soldiers who died in the Second World War in the Tiefenbach parish church of St. Johannes. In 2017 his name was deleted from the board.

literature

• 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 .
• Christiane Walesch-Schneller: Wilhelm Emmerich: Craftsman of Death . In: Wolfgang Proske (Hrsg.): Perpetrators helpers free riders. Nazi-polluted from Baden-Württemberg , Volume 9: Nazi-polluted from the south of today's Baden-Württemberg . Kugelberg Verlag, Gerstetten 2018, pp. 59-65, ISBN 978-3-945893-10-4 .

Web links

Entry of Wilhelm Emmerich in the database of SS-Team KL Auschwitz .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Denazification documents Wilhelm Emmerich: Bü 8 in the inventory EL 905/3 (Central Court Chamber of North Württemberg: Other file numbers, procedural files) in the State Archives Ludwigsburg
2. ↑ ^{a b} Jerzy Dębski, Państwowe Muzeum Oświȩcim-Brzezinka: Death books from Auschwitz: Remnants, KG Saur, 1995, p. 251
3. ↑ ^{a b c d} Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons , Frankfurt / M. 2013, p. 106f.
4. ^ Andrea Rudorff: Chełmek . In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 5: Hinzert, Auschwitz, Neuengamme. CH Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-52965-8 , p. 209.
5. ↑ Franziska Mann: Resistance at the door of death on http://www.auschwitz.info
6. ^ Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Frankfurt 1980, p. 340
7. ↑ An exemplary case: Wilhelm Emmerich ( Memento of the original from December 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at www.landesarchiv-bw.de 
8. ↑ BNN of February 16, 2018, p. 27: No more commemoration of Nazi criminals