Karl Fritzsch

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Karl Fritzsch
SS-Hauptsturmführer
UnitSS-Totenkopfverbände
Commands heldSchutzhaftlagerführer Auschwitz Camp Deputy [1]
Children3
Other workFirst suggested and experimented with using Zyklon B gas for the purpose of mass murder

Karl Fritzsch (10 July 1903 – reported missing 2 May 1945) was a German member of the

Nazi paramilitary organization, the Schutzstaffel (SS) from 1933 to 1945. He was a deputy and acting commandant at the Auschwitz concentration camp. According to Rudolf Höss, Fritzsch first suggested using poisonous gas Zyklon B
for the purpose of mass murder.

Early and personal life

Karl Fritzsch was born in Bohemia into the family of a stove builder. His father moved constantly on work assignments, so Fritzsch never received a formal education. For some years, he worked as a labourer on river ships along the Danube. Fritzsch's marriage in 1928 to Franziska Stich produced three children, but ended in divorce in 1942.[1]

Nazi career

Auschwitz-Birkenau
at the end of World War II

Fritzsch joined the Nazi Party and the SS (NSDAP # 261135 SS # 7287) in 1930 at the age of 27. He became a career SS man. Almost as soon as it opened, Fritzsch acquired a position at the Dachau concentration camp in 1934.[1]

Due to his camp experience, Fritzsch became deputy to

standing cells in the basement of the Bunker, i.e. the Block 11, or 13 prison, until they died.[1] Fritzsch addressed the first 758 inmates of the camp, brought in June 1940, with the following words: "You came here not to a sanatorium, but to a German concentration camp, from which there is no other way out but through the chimney. If someone doesn't like it, they can go straight to the wires. If there are Jews in the transport, they have the right to live no longer than two weeks, priests a month, the rest three months." Another time, Fritzsch said: "For us, all of you are not human, but a pile of dung (...). For such enemies of the Third Reich as you, the Germans will have no favor and no mercy. We will be delighted to drive you all through the grates of the crematorium furnaces. Forget your wives, children and families, here you all savor like dogs."[2]

On July 29, 1941, a camp count found that three prisoners were missing and Fritzsch sentenced 10 remaining prisoners to

Auschwitz prisoner Karol Świętorzecki recalled the first Christmas Eve behind the camp barbed wire, in 1940, was also one of the most tragic. "The Nazis set up a Christmas tree
, with electric lights, on the roll-call square. Beneath it, they placed the bodies of prisoners who had died while working or frozen to death at roll call. Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch referred to the corpses beneath the tree as 'a present' for the living, and forbade the singing of Polish Christmas carols."

According to testimony of his superior,

Auschwitz using Zyklon B was devised on site.[1]

On 15 January 1942, Fritzsch was transferred to KZ Flossenbürg as Schutzhaftlagerführer. From early August until October 1942, he was temporary substitute commander of the camp. In October 1943, Fritzsch was arrested as a part of an internal SS investigation into corruption. An SS court charged him with murder. As a punishment, Fritzsch was transferred to front line duty (SS-Panzergrenadier-Ersatzbatallion 18). It is assumed that he fell during the battle of Berlin in May 1945.[1]

Disappearance

It is commonly believed that Fritzsch perished in the

MI6 caught him in Norway. In his 2007 memoirs, For He Is an Englishman, Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman, Captain Charles Arnold-Baker recorded that as an MI6 officer in Oslo he arrested Fritzsch: "We picked up, for example, the deputy commandant of Auschwitz, a little runt of a man called Fritzsch whom we naturally put in the custody of a Jewish guard – with strict instructions not to damage him, of course."[3]

On 4 May 2015, Dutch journalist Wierd Duk [nl] published an article on his investigation of Fritzsch's disappearance. In it, he cites a report from 1966 by the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in which Berlin inhabitant Gertrud Berendes claims that Fritzsch had shot himself on 2 May 1945 in the basement of a house at Sächsische Strasse 42 in Berlin. She mentioned that her father and a neighbour had buried Fritzsch in the Preussenpark and she had sent his personal belongings to his wife. In a separate report from 1966 by the Kriminalpolizei Regensburg, Fritzsch's wife states that she had no reason to doubt her husband's death and that she had received his wedding ring and personal letters.[4] However, Duk's book De Beul en de Heilige on Fritzsch that was supposed to be launched first at the end of 2015 and then in 2016 at publisher Prometheus, was postponed indefinitely and has since been removed from the publishers' list of forthcoming books.[5]

References

  1. ^ a b c d e f Jeremy Dixon; Tom Segev; Danuta Czech (21 February 2006). "Fritzsch, Karl SS-Hauptsturmführer (1903–1945)". ARC: Auschwitz Perpetrators. Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  2. ISBN 978-3-11-096315-1
  3. ISBN 978-1-905217-44-1
    .
  4. ^ Wierd Duk (4 May 2015). "Uitvinder Zyklon B als vernietigingswapen pleegde zelfmoord in mei 1945" (in Dutch). Archived from the original on 4 May 2015.
  5. ^ "bol.com - De beul en de heilige, Wierd Duk - 9789035142589 - Boeken". www.bol.com. Archived from the original on 4 September 2017. Retrieved 24 April 2018.

Bibliography

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