Wilhelm Witteler

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Wilhelm Witteler (born April 20, 1909 in Steele ; † May 13, 1993 ibid) was a German medic, SS-Sturmbannführer and camp doctor in the Dachau concentration camp . As a war criminal, Witteler was sentenced to death in the Dachau trials , later pardoned and released early in 1954.

Life

Witteler completed a degree in medicine and passed the medical state examination. He was married and the marriage had two children. Witteler was a member of the NSDAP ( membership number 2.137.040) and joined the SS in 1938 (membership number 310.314). As a member of the Waffen-SS, he belonged to the SS-Totenkopfverband . From 1939 to 1940 he was an SS doctor in Sachsenhausen concentration camp . From 1940 to 1943 he was a regimental doctor in the 3rd SS Panzer Division Totenkopf , including on the Eastern Front. Between January 1, 1944 and August 20, 1944, Witteler was the first camp doctor in the Dachau concentration camp . In this concentration camp he had already worked as a doctor in 1938. According to his own later statements, Witteler was involved in the selection of prisoners who were deliberately infected by Claus Schilling during the malaria experiments . Inmates whose death was foreseeable as a result of the experiments were transferred to the infirmary managed by Witteler. After the death of these prisoners, Witteler signed the death certificates, which contained no evidence of the malaria infection. As a camp doctor, Witteler was under the control of the infirmary with 1,500 to 1,700 prisoners; according to Witteler, between 60 and 80 prisoners died every month. In August 1944, Witteler returned to the front.

After the end of the war, from November 15, 1945, Witteler and 39 other members of the Dachau camp staff - including his successor in Dachau, Fritz Hintermayer - were defendants in the main Dachau trial, which took place as part of the Dachau trials . The US Military Tribunal was charged with "violating the laws and customs of war" against civilians and prisoners of war alike. The term “ common design ” played a central role in the prosecution : not only the individual acts of the concentration camp personnel were viewed as criminal, but the concentration camp system itself. In the course of the preliminary investigations it had proven difficult to assign individual crimes to the accused, as the concentration camp inmates only partially survived, their statements lacked the necessary precision due to the traumatization and they only partially knew the names of the perpetrators.

Witteler was sentenced to death on December 13, 1945, along with 35 co-defendants . In his case, the court found Witteler's participation in two executions as an individual act of excess as proven. Witteler had established the death of the executed. He was also the first camp doctor to be responsible for the prisoners' hygiene and disease prevention. Martin Niemöller , among others, advocated a pardon for Witteler in a letter dated January 24, 1946. Niemöller had been treated by Witteler during his imprisonment in Dachau and certified that Witteler was not an SS criminal but a "real" doctor.

In the appeal court, the sentence was later reduced to twenty years imprisonment. In a review report from March 1946, with reference to Witteler's role in the malaria experiments, it said that he was guilty of a joint crime. Witteler was credited with the fact that during his time as a camp doctor in Dachau the concentration camp inmates were not neglected to the same extent as later under Fritz Hintermayer. He then received advocacy for his early release from the silent help for prisoners of war and internees and the Working Group for Law and Economics, Munich , both organizations of the lawyer Rudolf Aschenauer . After his release from the war crimes prison in Landsberg (Lech) on March 13, 1954, Witteler returned to Essen-Steele.

literature

  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8
  • Holger Lessing: The first Dachau trial (1945/46) . Baden-Baden 1993, ISBN 3-7890-2933-5 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marco Pukrop: SS medic between camp duty and front duty. The staffing of the medical department in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp 1936–1945. Hanover 2015 (dissertation, University of Hanover), p. 592 f. ( online ).
  2. ↑ Biographical information on Witteler in: Review of Proceedings of General Military Court in the Case United States vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss (pdf, 40 MB) at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org, pp. 37f, 100f; Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 682.
  3. ^ Statement of November 4, 1945, in English translation in the Review of Proceedings of General Military Court in the Case United States vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss (pdf, 40 MB) at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org, p. 38.
  4. ↑ Review of Proceedings of General Military Court in the Case United States vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss (pdf, 40 MB) at www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org, p. 101.
  5. ↑ On "Common Design": Robert Sigel: In the interest of justice. The Dachau war crimes trials 1945-1948. Campus-Verlag, Frankfurt 1992, ISBN 3-593-34641-9 , p. 42ff.
  6. ↑ Lessing, Prozess , p. 325.
  7. ↑ Review and Recommendations of the Deputy Theater Judge Advocate (pdf, 29.4 MB) at the International Research and Documentation Center for War Crimes Trials (ICWC), p. 74.
  8. ↑ Excerpts from the report are quoted in Sigel, Interest , p. 82.
personal data
SURNAME Witteler, Wilhelm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Witteler, Willi
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German concentration camp doctor
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Steele
DATE OF DEATH May 13, 1993
Place of death Food Steele