Hans Münch
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Dr Hans Münch (1911 - 2001) was an SS Physician at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland from 1943 to 1945. He was the only accused person acquitted at the 1947 Auschwitz trials in Kraków.
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[edit] Before Auschwitz
Münch joined the NSDAP in the 1930s, mainly to advance his scientific career. He was patriotic, although not particularly political: when the war broke out, he attempted to enlist in the Wehrmacht rather than in any Nazi paramilitary organisation. However, his enlistment was refused as his work as a local doctor was considered too important.
Eventually, in 1943, he was recruited as a scientist by the SS and sent to the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS in Raisko, about 4 km from the main camp at Auschwitz. Münch claimed that, while he was vaguely aware of concentration camps like Dachau, he was not prepared for anything he found at Auschwitz.
[edit] Auschwitz
Münch continued the bacteriological research he was known for before the war, as well as making occasional inspections of the camps and the prisoners.
Along with other doctors, Münch was initially expected to make "selections" - to choose which inmates could work, which would be experimented on, and which would be exterminated. He found this abhorrent and refused to take part; this was testified to by witnesses at his trial. While Münch did conduct human experiments, these were often elaborate farces intended to protect inmates, as experimentees who were no longer useful were usually killed.
Münch's last act before the camp was abandoned was allegedly to provide one inmate, Dr Louis Micheels, with a revolver to assist his escape.
[edit] Trial
Following the abandonment of Auschwitz, Münch returned home to his village, and surrendered to authorities in 1946.
He was specifically accused of injecting inmates with malaria-infected blood, and with a serum that caused rheumatism. However, the court found that there was no specific evidence of Münch being involved with the malaria experiments, and that the rheumatism serum was a treatment, not an experiment. Indeed, witnesses testified that Münch had injected himself first, to demonstrate that the serum was not harmful. The court acquitted him "not only because he did not commit any crime of harm against the camp prisoners, but because he had a benevolent attitude toward them and helped them, while he had to carry the responsibility. He did this independently from the nationality, race-and-religious origin and political conviction of the prisoners."
Of the 41 Auschwitz staff tried in Kraków, only Münch was acquitted. He later testified at the Nuremberg Trials, reporting what he had witnessed in the extermination camp.
[edit] Later life
In later years, Münch was an active campaigner for Holocaust awareness. In 1995, on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he made a journey back to the concentration camp. He and Eva Mozes Kor, a survivor of Josef Mengele's experiments on twins, signed public declarations regarding what had happened there, and that such a thing should never be allowed to happen again.
He appeared in the 1998 film The Last Days, a documentary about Holocaust survivors.
