Kurt Gerstein

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Kurt Gerstein (August 11, 1905 in Münster, Westfalia - July 25, 1945, Paris), was a member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS and witnessed mass murders in the Nazi extermination camps Belzec and Treblinka. He contacted a Swedish diplomat as well as members of the Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII in order to inform the international public about the holocaust. In 1945 he wrote the Gerstein Report about this. Afterward he committed suicide.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Gerstein completed his first degree, in Engineering, in 1931. While studying he was, like all male members of the Gerstein family, a member of the Corps Teutonia Marburg. In 1933 he became a mining inspector for the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi) government and joined the Nazi party. As a committed protestant and member of the YMCA he came into conflict with the Nazi government. He was arrested for the first time on the 4th September 1936, held in protective custody for five weeks, and expelled from the Nazi party. He was arrested a second time in July 1938 but released 6 weeks later because no charges could be found against him.

On the 4th of September 1937 he started studying Medicine at the University of Tubingen. In early 1941 he joined the SS, and rose to become Head of Technical Disinfection Services, liaising with Odilo Globocnik and Christian Wirth on technical aspects of mass murder in the extermination camps. Guilt-ridden, he made multiple attempts from 1942 through 1945 to inform others about the magnitude and details of the holocaust attrocities that he witnessed; however, his statements to diplomats and religious officials achieved disappointingly little effect. He died in a French prison in July 1945, apparently a suicide.

[edit] Books and Films

A semi-fictional movie about his emotional search for Christian values and ultimate decision to betray the SS by attempting to expose the Holocaust through informing the Catholic Church, Amen, was released in 2002, starring Ulrich Tukur as Kurt Gerstein and directed by Costa-Gavras. Amen. was largely adapated from Rolf Hochhuth's The Deputy.

William T. Vollmann's Europe Central, the National Book Award fiction winner for 2005, has a 55-page segment, entitled "Clean Hands," which relates Gerstein's story.

[edit] External links

[edit] References

  • Friedländer, Saul, Kurt Gerstein: The Ambiguity of Good. New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1969. ASIN B000GQS4Z6.
  • Joffroy, Pierre: Der Spion Gottes. Berlin: Aufbau, 2002. ISBN 3-7466-8017-4.
  • Hey, Bernd u.a.: Kurt Gerstein (1905 - 1945). Widerstand in SS-Uniform. Bielefeld, 2003. ISBN 3-89534-486-9.
  • Hochhuth, Rolf: Der Stellvertreter. ISBN 3-499-10997-2. (Novel about Kurt Gerstein and the Role of the Vatican during the Holocaust)
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