Willi Rudolf Sawatzki

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Willi Rudolf Sawatzki (born November 10, 1919 in Perleberg ; † June 5, 1998 in Hamburg ) was a German SS-Hauptscharführer who worked in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp . In 1976 he was acquitted during the Auschwitz trials because he could not be proven to have participated in atrocities.

Life

Sawatzki was a wheelwright by trade. Since 1938 he was with the Waffen-SS and was deployed in Poland, France and the Soviet Union during World War II .

In December 1941 he was transferred to the Auschwitz concentration camp, where he initially served as a security guard and later as a block leader in the men's camp at Auschwitz II . In addition, from December 1943 to June 1944 he was a labor service leader in the so-called gypsy camp .

After the end of the war he was sentenced to death by a Soviet military tribunal on March 29, 1947 for participating in the murder of 80,000 Jews in the gas chamber . The death sentence was not carried out, however, and Sawatzki was released from Bautzen prison on April 26, 1956 .

Sawatzki then worked as a technical draftsman in Hamburg and came back to court in 1974 as part of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials. Now he has been accused of having been involved in the murder of 400 Jewish children from Hungary. These were between the ages of eight and fourteen and arrived at Auschwitz in the spring of 1944. Since there was not enough Zyklon B available for destruction at this point in time , the children were driven by truck to the pits where the prisoners' bodies were burned. The children were then thrown alive into the fire. The court ruled that Sawatzki could not be proven to be involved in this crime. On February 26, 1976, after two years of trial, Sawatzki was acquitted by a Frankfurt court for lack of evidence.

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 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ tombstone
  2. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 73
  3. ^ ZEIT ONLINE "In the name of the people - acquittal. Retrieved on August 29, 2014 .
personal data
SURNAME Sawatzki, Willi Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS Oberscharführer in Auschwitz concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Pearl Mountain
DATE OF DEATH June 5, 1998
Place of death Hamburg