On the night of August 22, 1942, a German SS officer boarded a train from Warsaw to Berlin and found himself sharing a compartment with a Swedish diplomat. The officer, Kurt Gerstein, had spent the previous day at the Belzec extermination camp, where he had watched hundreds of Jewish men, women, and children being driven into gas chambers. Now, in the cramped darkness of a passenger car, he poured out everything he had seen to Baron Göran von Otter, desperate for someone to carry the truth to the outside world. Gerstein believed he had found his moment.
He would be proven wrong. Kurt Gerstein was born on August 11, 1905, in Münster, the sixth of seven children in a Prussian middle-class family. His mother died when he was young, and his father, Ludwig, a former Prussian officer and ardent nationalist, ruled the household with a harsh hand. Ludwig instilled in his children an unwavering patriotism and proudly declared that only Aryan blood ran in the family’s genealogical tree.
The father’s nationalism shaped the son’s early life. Kurt studied mining engineering at the universities of Marburg, Aachen, and Berlin, earning his degree in 1931, and at his father’s request joined the Corps Teutonia Marburg, one of Germany’s most ultra-nationalistic fraternities. But something was shifting inside the young engineer. Reading the Bible at university, he was repelled by the drinking and carousing of his fraternity brothers.
He became active in Christian student movements. When Adolf Hitler came to power in January 1933, Gerstein felt it was his patriotic duty to support the Nazis and joined the party that May. Yet within a year, he had gravitated toward the Confessing Church, the movement that opposed the Nazi effort to unify German Protestant churches into a single pro-regime establishment. The more he embraced the church, the more he clashed with the state.
The Nazis gradually tightened their grip on church organizations, and Gerstein felt forced to choose between defending his faith and supporting his nation. He chose his church. The conflict escalated quickly. In January 1935, Gerstein attended a performance of the play “Vatican.
” Its pro-Nazi, anti-Christian message so provoked him that he stood up in the audience to denounce its neo-pagan rhetoric. SA members in the hall beat him on the spot. The following year he was arrested for conducting an anti-Nazi pamphlet campaign in defense of church autonomy, held in protective custody for five weeks, and expelled from the Nazi Party. Unable to find work in his profession, he returned to school to study medicine.
He married Elfriede Bunch, a pastor’s daughter, in August 1937, and the couple later had a daughter, Adelheid. In July 1938, he was arrested again on suspicion of anti-Nazi activities and released after six weeks. In June 1939, with the help of his father and influential Nazi and SS officials, Gerstein was readmitted to the party with provisional membership. The card allowed him to resume his career in mining engineering in the state sector, which almost always required party affiliation.
The war began that September with the invasion of Poland. In February 1941, Gerstein learned that his sister-in-law, Bertha Ebeling, had died at a psychiatric hospital in Hadamar. He had heard rumors that the regime was systematically murdering institutionalized patients with disabilities under a program of so-called euthanasia, and he correctly suspected that she had been killed. The death pushed him toward a fateful decision.
He concluded that the only way to learn what was really happening inside Nazi Germany was to join the SS, where his past opposition to the regime would seem to clear him of suspicion. From 1939, the SS had assumed responsibility for solving the so-called Jewish question, and after 1941 its leaders planned and directed the final solution, the annihilation of the European Jews, which the world now calls the Holocaust. Gerstein trained for two months in a medical corps and was assigned to the Hygiene Institute of the Waffen SS in Berlin in June 1941, where he distinguished himself through his knowledge of engineering and sanitation. He developed techniques for vermin control and for maintaining quality drinking water for combat troops.
In November 1941 he was appointed a specialist with the rank of second lieutenant, and in April 1943 he was promoted to first lieutenant. His expertise made him valuable. Because of his position, Gerstein came to learn of the implementation of the final solution. He was responsible for the delivery of large quantities of Zyklon B gas to Auschwitz and other camps, and he was invited to inspect the Operation Reinhard killing centers at Belzec and Treblinka, where the SS used carbon monoxide from diesel engines to murder prisoners in the gas chambers.
Operation Reinhard was the code name for the German plan to murder the roughly two million Jews living in occupied Poland. In August 1942, at Belzec, Gerstein observed a mass killing. He later recorded the scene in vivid detail. Naked men, women, and children were driven along an alley toward the gas chambers.
A strong SS man, speaking in a pastor’s voice, told the victims there was no danger and that they only needed to take a deep breath to widen their lungs against illness and epidemics. When asked what would happen to them, he said the men would work building houses and roads, and the women could help in the kitchen if they wished. It was enough to give some a glimmer of hope. But most, Gerstein wrote, were aware.
The smell told them of their fate. They hesitated, but they entered the chambers, pushed forward by those behind them or driven by the leather whips of the SS. A Jewish woman of about forty with flaming eyes called down vengeance on the murderers for the blood she had shed. Wirth himself struck her five or six times across the face with a riding crop.
Then she disappeared into the chamber. Many prayed. Gerstein prayed with them, pressing himself into a corner and shouting to his God. He wrote later that he would gladly have entered the chamber with them and died the same death, but he was not allowed.
First, he had to tell what he was experiencing. Gerstein recorded everything in great detail: how trainloads of Jews entered the camp, how their possessions were taken and their hair shorn, how they were made to undress and were packed so tightly into the gas chambers that they could not collapse even as they suffocated. The experience, he maintained, made him determined to inform the world. The meeting with Baron von Otter on the night train between Warsaw and Berlin lasted several hours.
Gerstein urged the diplomat to spread the information internationally. He also approached Swiss diplomat Paul Hochstrasser, Vatican officials, and the representative of the Dutch government in exile. He informed members of the Confessing Church and the political resistance inside Germany, and urged the Dutch underground to broadcast his information by radio to Great Britain. Nothing happened.
Almost everyone was disinclined to believe his gruesome narrative of mass murder and dismissed it as atrocity propaganda. As the months passed and the killing continued, Gerstein grew frantic, risking his life every time he spoke of the death camps to people he scarcely knew. Whenever his revelations reached Allied governments, they were not acted upon. Later in the war, a despairing Gerstein risked his life destroying shipments of Zyklon B meant for extermination, burying the gas on the pretext that it had spoiled in transit.
By April 1945, the Third Reich was collapsing, and Gerstein surrendered to French authorities in southwestern Germany. He declared that he had given himself up so that the Allies could use his knowledge to punish those responsible for the murders. Ironically, he became not a witness but a suspect. At the end of May 1945, he was moved from the Hotel Mohren, where he had been under house arrest, to a jail in Konstanz, and later to the Sûreté Militaire in Paris.
While in custody at the hotel, he had written what is now known as the Gerstein Report, recounting everything he had seen during his service with the SS, including his experience at Belzec and his conversations with von Otter and other foreign officials. On July 25, 1945, Kurt Gerstein was found hanged in his cell. It is likely that his anguish at being cast as a war criminal, along with his despair at failing to halt the final solution, drove him to suicide. Rumors persist, however, that fellow SS members may have murdered him for betraying information about the Holocaust.
His 1945 report was used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials against major Nazi war criminals, including Hermann Göring and Hans Frank. In August 1950, a denazification tribunal in Tübingen classified Gerstein as a Nazi offender for his assistance in the production and delivery of Zyklon B, and his widow was denied a pension. But in January 1965, nearly fifteen years later, with the help of Baron von Otter and other supporters, Gerstein’s wife obtained a posthumous pardon for him from the Federal Republic of Germany.