Wolfram Sievers

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Wolfram Sievers at the time of the Nuremberg medical trial.

Wolfram Heinrich Friedrich Sievers (born July 10, 1905 in Hildesheim , † June 2, 1948 in Landsberg am Lech ) was the managing director of the National Socialist Research Association of German Ahnenerbe .

Life

Born the son of a Protestant church musician, Sievers attended the Andreanum grammar school in Hildesheim until 1922 . In order to forestall being expelled from school because of his ethnic outlook, he left school prematurely (in the Obersekunda). He then learned the trade of bookseller. He joined the NSDAP in 1929 and quickly made a career there. Whether he resisted National Socialism as a member of the right-wing dissident group around Friedrich Hielscher is controversial. Also in 1929 Sievers, who had been a guest student at the University of Stuttgart since 1928 , became a member of the NS student union . In 1932 he became scientific secretary to Herman Wirth . Sievers, who studied history, philosophy and religious studies at the TH Stuttgart, left the church in 1933. Sievers joined the SS on November 9, 1935, where he assumed the rank of Standartenführer .

Since the establishment of the “Study Society for Spiritual History 'German Ahnenerbe” ”on July 1, 1935 , Sievers has acted as Secretary General . After a change in the statutes in 1937, the association was renamed "Das Ahnenerbe eV". Sievers' position from now on was that of "Reich Managing Director". He also became chairman of the Association of Friends of Germanic Prehistory and a member of the Friends of the Reichsführer SS .

During the Second World War Sievers was initially general trustee for the "securing of German cultural property" in the adjoining eastern regions , a euphemistic description of organized cultural property theft; In addition, he coordinated the robbery of cultural property by various scientists from the SS ancestral inheritance. Since 1942 Sievers was a member of the advisory board of the Entomological Institute of Ahnenerbes in the Dachau concentration camp . In 1943 he became deputy head of the advisory board of the Reich Research Council . In these functions he was one of the people responsible for the human experiments and concentration camp murders. (His Personal Assistant was obersturmführer Wolf-Dietrich Wolff [* 1913. After 1945, department manager for data processing of a chocolate company in Hannover], the Lost procured for deadly poison gas experiments in Natzweiler and the transfer of prisoners from Auschwitz to Natzweiler organized and hydrocyanic acid to murder and meat removal machines to process the murder victims and to build a skeleton collection).

After the Second World War he was in the physician process charged in connection with fatal human experiments, on 20 August 1947 as a war criminal sentenced to death and in the June 2 the following year prison Landsberg executed .

Commemorative plaque with 86 names of those murdered

Sievers 'testimony in the first Nuremberg trials was one of the most important impulses for the Nuremberg doctors' trial. During his interrogation, attention was drawn to a “ skeleton collection ” of the anatomy professor August Hirt at the University of Strasbourg . Wolfram Sievers had given the order to murder 112 Jewish prisoners in the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in order to prepare their skeletons. It is thanks to a resistance fighter who secretly took notes that the victims could be identified decades later.

literature

Web links

Wikisource: Interrogation of Wolfram Sievers  - Sources and full texts (English)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Volker Strebel: Being German as an office. On the correspondence between Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Hielscher , review by Literaturkritik.de , December 12, 2005.
  2. ↑ Ina Schmidt: The Lord of Fire. Friedrich Hielscher and his circle between paganism, new nationalism and resistance against National Socialism . SH-Verlag, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89498-135-0 (based on her dissertation written by Stefan Breuer ). See also the review by Berthold Petzinna .
  3. ↑ Kater 2001, p. 525 f.
  4. ↑ Michael H. Kater: The "Ahnenerbe" of the SS 1935-1945. A contribution to the cultural policy of the Third Reich . 4th edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57950-5 , p. 29.
  5. ↑ Michael H. Kater: The "Ahnenerbe" of the SS 1935-1945. A contribution to the cultural policy of the Third Reich . 4th edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57950-5 , p. 32.
  6. ↑ Michael H. Kater: The "Ahnenerbe" of the SS 1935-1945. A contribution to the cultural policy of the Third Reich . 4th edition. Oldenbourg, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-486-57950-5 , p. 30.
  7. ↑ a b c d e Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 583.
  8. ↑ Wolfram Sievers | skull-collection.com . In: skull-collection.com . ( skull-collection.com [accessed January 25, 2018]).
  9. ^ Ernst Klee: German Medicine in the Third Reich. Careers before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 3-10-039310-4 , pp. 294-298 and 306 f.
  10. ↑ Healthy public feeling . In: Der Spiegel . No. 11 , 1965 ( online ).
personal data
SURNAME Sievers, Wolfram
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sievers, Wolfram Heinrich Friedrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German prehistoric historian; Managing Director of the Research Association of German Ahnenerbe and war criminals
DATE OF BIRTH July 10, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Hildesheim
DATE OF DEATH June 2, 1948
Place of death Landsberg am Lech