Stefan Baretzki

Stefan Baretzki
Baretzki at the Judenrampe at Auschwitz II-Birkenau during a selection
Born (1919-03-24)24 March 1919
Cernăuți (Czernowitz), Kingdom of Romania
Died 21 June 1988(1988-06-21) (aged 69)
Bad Nauheim, West Germany
Cause of death Suicide
Known for SS guard at Auschwitz
Criminal charge Murder
Penalty Life imprisonment and eight years
SS career
Allegiance  Nazi Germany
Service/branch Waffen-SS
Years of service 1942–1945
Rank Rottenführer
Unit Auschwitz concentration camp

Stefan Baretzki (24 March 1919 – 21 June 1988) was an SS guard at Auschwitz of Romanian Volksdeutsche origin. He was conscripted into the Waffen-SS and stationed at Auschwitz concentration camp from 1942 until 1945, where he participated in mass murder by making selections and also beat and murdered prisoners on his own initiative. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, he testified against his former superiors and committed suicide in prison.

Life

Stefan Baretzki was born into a Bukovina German family in Cernăuți (Czernowitz), then part of the Kingdom of Romania, in 1919.[1] Hermann Langbein noted that Baretzki was born in the same town as Viktor Pestek, an Auschwitz guard executed by the Nazis because he helped a Jewish prisoner escape.[2] Baretzki had only an elementary school education and never spoke German well, according to Langbein.[1] He was conscripted into the SS in 1941, after an announcement in his church encouraged him to resettle in Breslau, then part of Germany, as part of the Heim ins Reich policy.[3][1] He served as a block officer in Auschwitz II-Birkenau from 1942 to 1945.[4]

Baretzki and other Volksdeutsche guards were shown antisemitic propaganda films such as Jud Süß and Ohm Krüger. Encouraged by the films, guards would beat up Jewish prisoners the next day. Baretzki stated at his trial that when Volksdeutsche guards asked why prisoners were sent to Auschwitz, they were told that all were dangerous criminals convicted of sabotage. When asked how small children could be guilty, it was explained that they were too uneducated to understand and it would be clear later. They were also told that all things that Adolf Hitler authorized were legal. Baretzki claimed not to believe these assurances, and considered going into hiding when he went to Romania on leave in 1943. He did not, according to Baretzki, because he feared repurcussions against his family.[5] According to Rebecca Wittmann, Baretzki's admission that he knew that mass murder of Jews was illegal sealed his conviction.[6]

Baretzki on the Judenrampe during a selection. He is at the right of the photo, carrying a baton that he frequently used to beat inmates.[7]

At his trial, Baretzki described how he would treat inmates that had been transferred from subcamps because they had become too starved or ill to work. He did not allow any of them to register into the camp and instead held them in a quarantine block until they died, not even allowing them to enter the barracks because the starving prisoners would create a mess.[8] Baretzki was known to practice a sport he called the "rabbit hunt", in which prisoners were ordered to remove their caps. Anyone who did not do so quickly enough was beaten and murdered while "trying to escape".[9]

However, at other times, he attempted to help inmates, such as bringing water to women confined to the "Mexico" section of the camp; these efforts were thwarted by the commandant of Auschwitz II-Birkenau, SS-Obersturmführer Johann Schwarzhuber. Schwarzhuber told Baretzki that he should not have any compassion for Jewish prisoners.[10] In the spring of 1944, Viktor Pestek was arrested after returning to the camp and trying to rescue additional inmates. Baretzki claimed that he had seen other SS men beating Pestek,[11] but Ryszard Henryk Kordek, a prisoner, said that Baretzki had raised the alarm over Pestek's return and Baretzki was one of the guards who beat Pestek.[12] During the liquidation of the Theresienstadt family camp in July 1944, Baretzki asked his superiors to spare the lives of the children imprisoned there. A selection was held for teenage boys and some were saved, but Franz Lucas intervened to prevent saving the girls. Asked to explain his actions at his trial, Baretzki stated that he had often attended theatrical performances at the children's block in the family camp.[13]

After the evacuation of Auschwitz, Baretzki was transferred into the SS division "30 January" and captured by Soviet forces in early May. Released on 17 August, he settled near Koblenz and worked in a coal shop. In 1953, he was briefly imprisoned for assault; two years later, he was fined for resisting arrest. In 1956, he was fined again for assault. He never married.[1]

Trial

A warrant for Baretzki's arrest was issued in on 3 March 1960, and he was arrested a month later.[14] He was the lowest-ranking of twenty-four men indicted at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials; his defense attorneys were Eugen Gerhardt and Engelbert Jorschko.[1][15] Because the defendants were tried under ordinary criminal law, a distinction was made between individual acts of cruelty, which was punished as murder, and participation in the program of mass extermination, which was only charged as being an accomplice to murder.[16] As one of the more brutal SS guards, Baretzki could be proved to have murdered on his own initiative, and therefore received a harsher sentence than many of his superiors.[17] In the German press, gruesome stories of the brutality of individual guards, including Baretzki, came to overshadow the larger point of prosecutor Fritz Bauer: that every SS guard, even those who did not personally commit shocking acts of sadism, was a voluntary participant in the system of extermination.[18]

Baretzki was found guilty of five counts of murder: he beat a starving prisoner to death and, on 21 June 1944, drowned four prisoners in a water tank of section BIId. He was also convicted as an accomplice to the mass murder of Jews on eleven occasions. He assisted in the murder of at least 3,000 people by participating in the liquidation of the Theresienstadt family camp in March 1944. During five selections on the Judenrampe, he was an accomplice to at least 1,000 murders. On five incidents he was found to have assisted in block selections in which worn-out inmates were selected for death; in each of these incidents, more than 50 people were murdered. In addition, the court found that was guilty of three other crimes, including punishing prisoners in section BIId of the camp who attempted to communicate with inmates in other parts of the camp by forcing them to perform strenuous exercises, during which he shot at least five prisoners. The court did not assign additional punishment for these crimes, but used them as further evidence for Baretzki's brutality. Testimony from Otto Dov Kulka and other witnesses, who observed Baretzki killing prisoners, could not be corroborated. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and eight years.[1][19]

Because the court described him as a "simpleton" and "less intelligent than all the other defendants", Baretzki's admission that he knew that the mass murder of Jews was a crime was used to prove that the other defendants knew that their actions were criminal.[20] He was the only defendant to testify against other defendants, offering damning testimony about the conditions at the camp.[21] About Dr. Franz Lucas, who initially denied having participated in selections, Baretzki stated, "I was not blind when Dr. Lucas made selections on the ramp... Five thousand men he sent to their deaths in half an hour, and today he wants to stand as a savior."[lower-alpha 1] Baretzki said that Lucas only changed his behavior during the final months of the war, when it was clear that Germany would lose. As a result, other witnesses came forward stating that Lucas had selected inmates to live or die. Lucas eventually admitted to having done so on four occasions, but on orders and against his personal conviction. The court found that he had participated in murder.[23][22]

Baretzki also testified against Kurt Knittel, who was in charge of the propaganda department at Auschwitz. When he was dismissed from a government post in education following public outcry, Knittel sued the government to be reinstated. Called as a witness, Baretzki testified that Knittel had said that Jewish women and children had to be murdered because they were an inferior race. According to Baretzki, "we learned how to murder from Herr Knittel's lectures".[24]

While in prison, he helped Langbein with his research into the camp. Baretzki told Langbein that he hoped that Auschwitz would never happen again. According to Langbein, he accepted his guilt and said that serving jail time was the only thing that he could do for the prisoners that he had murdered. Baretzki said that he only appealed his sentence due to the pressure of fellow defendants on whom he was financially dependent for legal fees. The appeal failed,[25] and Baretzki committed suicide in jail in Bad Nauheim on 21 June 1988.[7][26]

References

Notes
  1. ↑ German: Ich bin doch nicht blind gewesen, als der Dr. Lucas auf der Rampe selektiert hat. … Fünftausend Mann, die hat er in einer halben Stunde ins Gas geschickt, und heute will er sich als Retter hinstellen.[22]
Citations
  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Langbein, Hermann (27 January 1995). "Kleiner Mann ganz groß". Die Tageszeitung (in German). pp. 15–17. Retrieved 25 September 2018.
  2. ↑ Langbein 2004, p. 442.
  3. ↑ Langbein 2004, p. 297.
  4. ↑ Wittmann 2012, p. 131.
  5. ↑ Langbein 2004, pp. 285-286, 308.
  6. ↑ Wittmann 2012, pp. 125–126, 327.
  7. 1 2 "Photo of Stefan Baretzki during a selection on the ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, spring 1944". Jewish Museum in Prague. July 2015. Retrieved 25 September 2018.
  8. ↑ Langbein 2004, p. 36.
  9. ↑ Wittmann 2012, p. 146.
  10. ↑ Langbein 2004, p. 323.
  11. ↑ Langbein 2004, p. 446.
  12. ↑ Kárný 1997, p. 175.
  13. ↑ Langbein 2004, pp. 83-84, 357.
  14. ↑ Wittmann 2012, pp. 279–280.
  15. ↑ Wittmann 2012, pp. 131, 284.
  16. ↑ Wittmann 2012, pp. 24, 233.
  17. ↑ Wittmann 2012, p. 140.
  18. ↑ Wittmann 2012, pp. 178, 248.
  19. ↑ Wittmann 2012, pp. 233–234, 285.
  20. ↑ Wittmann 2012, p. 314.
  21. ↑ Langbein 2004, pp. 290, 323.
  22. 1 2 Strothmann, Dietrich (26 March 1965). "Der "gute Mensch von Auschwitz"" [The "good man of Auschwitz"]. Zeit Online (in German). Retrieved 25 September 2018.
  23. ↑ Langbein 2004, pp. 357–358.
  24. ↑ Langbein 2004, p. 515.
  25. ↑ Langbein 2004, pp. 511, 517.
  26. ↑ Morris 2018, p. 366.
Bibliography
  • Kárný, Miroslav (1997). "Die Flucht des Auschwitzer Häftlings Vítězslav Lederer und der tschechische Widerstand" [The Escape of Auschwitz Prisoner Vítězslav Lederer and the Czech Resistance]. Theresienstädter Studien und Dokumente (in German) (4): 157–183.
  • Langbein, Hermann (2004) [First published in German in 1972]. People in Auschwitz. Translated by Zohn, Harry. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press in connection with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. ISBN 978-0-8078-6363-3.
  • Morris, Heather (2018). Le tatoueur d'Auschwitz. City Edition. ISBN 9782824646886.
  • Wittmann, Rebecca (2012). Beyond justice: the Auschwitz trial. Harvard University Press. ISBN 9780674045293.
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