Wilhelm Kersten

Camp manager Wilhelm Kersten on a plaque at the Jamlitz memorial

Wilhelm Kersten (born November 5, 1906 in Lübeck , † January 18, 1970 in Nuremberg ) was a German SS-Hauptscharführer and camp leader of the Lieberose concentration camp .

Life

Wilhelm Kersten was the son of a businessman . He went to middle school for nine years. Then he joined the one-year visit to a business school. Kersten completed a commercial apprenticeship from 1922 to 1925. In the following years he worked as a salesman and branch manager in the tobacco trade in Lübeck, Bad Oeynhausen and Cologne . In 1938 he married. At that time he was working as a branch manager at the sewing machine company Singer in Goslar .

In 1933 he became a member of the SS and initially belonged to a motor storm. After the beginning of the Second World War he was accepted into the Waffen SS for the Dachau Totenkopfdivision . A year later he took part in the western campaign , but was declared unfit for service in the fall of 1940 due to a phlebitis.

In May 1941 he began working in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp - first at the post office and then in the camp's regular guard duty. In 1943 he received the post of report and labor deployment leader in the Falkensee satellite camp . In the spring of 1944 Anton Kaindl appointed him camp leader of the Lieberose concentration camp near Jamlitz . In this function he was responsible for the poor living conditions in the camp. In autumn 1944 he briefly came into conflict with the SS. He was accused of having appropriated the valuables of the newly admitted Jewish prisoners. After a month of investigations into him, he returned to his post. Kersten was involved in crimes committed in the final stages of the concentration camp system. After he had received an order from camp commandant Kaindl at the beginning of February 1945 to select and murder sick and weak prisoners , the block leaders shot 1,342 Jewish prisoners between February 2 and 4, 1945 in Lieberose on orders from Kersten. In April 1945 he was transferred to Oranienburg and accompanied the death march of over 33,000 prisoners from Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

After the war he was arrested by the British authorities under the pseudonym Erich Berg. In June 1946 he was taken to the Neuengamme internment camp . On 8 April 1948 that sentenced him saying Superior Court Hamburg-Bergedorf because of his SS membership to one year and nine months in prison, which were considered served by the internment. Kersten returned to Lübeck in 1948, where he and his brother-in-law opened a grocery store. In 1950, the Lübeck public prosecutor's office investigated him for mistreating prisoners. On December 13, 1954, he was sentenced to seven months probation . In the 1960s, further interventions by former prisoners led to investigations against Kersten again. In the first trial before the Fulda Regional Court , he was acquitted in 1965. He died in 1970 shortly before charges were brought in Nuremberg for his involvement in the " final phase crimes ".

literature

• Gunther R. Lys: Secret Suffering - Secret Struggle: a report on the Lieberose subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3938690765
• Günter Morsch (Ed.): The concentration camp SS 1936–1945: Work-sharing perpetrators in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86331-403-3

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936–1945: Work-sharing perpetrators in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Berlin 2018, p. 276.
2. ^ ^{A b c} Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936-1945: Division of labor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Berlin 2018, p. 277.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Gunther R. Lys: Secret Suffering - Geeheimer Kampf: a report on the Lieberose subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , Metropol, 2007, p. 209.
4. ^ ^{A b c} Günter Morsch: The Concentration Camp SS 1936-1945: Division of labor in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp . Berlin 2018, p. 277.