Background
Kurt Gerstein was born in Münster on 11 August 1905.
Kurt Gerstein was born in Münster on 11 August 1905.
By profession an engineer and mining assessor and from 1925 a member of a Protestant youth movement, Gerstein joined the NSDAP in May 1933 but continued to be an active member of Pastor Niemöller’s Confessional church with close links to the Christian anti-Nazi Resistance. In 1936 he was arrested by the Gestapo for distributing religious tracts and expelled from the Nazi Party. After a second spell in a concentration camp in 1938, Gerstein managed in 1941 to join the Health Department of the SS, where few questions were asked about his past. His initial motive was to find out the truth about the murder of mental patients in the euthanasia institutes such as Grafeneck and Hadamar.
In January 1942 Gerstein was put in charge of the Technical Disinfection Department within the section for ‘Health Technique’ and was responsible for handling poisonous disinfectant gases’. In the late summer of 1942 he was sent on a mission by the SS Health Department to persuade Globocnik and Christian Wirth to introduce ‘Zyklon B' gassing into Polish death camps, in place of gas engines.
In August 1942 he visited Belzec death camp (in the Lublin district) and witnessed the breakdown of the diesel motor that delivered the gas used in the mass extermination of Jews and other ‘undesirables’. Gerstein’s eye-witness report, left behind in a prison confession made in 1945, contains a uniquely detailed description of the death camps as seen through the eyes of a German official. According to his own account, Gerstein's activity as a ‘Zyklon B' demonstrator ‘was from the first an agent’s activity on behalf of the Confessional Church’. He had ‘but one desire', namely ‘to gain an insight into this whole machinery and then to shout it to the whole world’.
Returning from his inspection tour of Belzec in late August 1942, Gerstein recounted what he had witnessed to a chance companion travelling on the same Warsaw-Berlin express, the Swedish diplomat, Baron von Otter. Gerstein requested that the diplomat ‘report at once to his government and the Allies, as every day was bound to cost the lives of thousands and tens of thousands of people’. (The Swedish government though made fully aware of the technical procedures of killing and other details never passed on the information.) Gerstein also urged friends in the Dutch underground to broadcast his information by radio to Great Britain but, though the British Foreign Office knew it to be correct, the news was rejected by the British as atrocity propaganda. Gerstein also tried to report to the Papal envoy in Berlin, but the latter, most reluctant to offend the Nazis, showed him the door. All his efforts to inform his church friends and opinion abroad proved futile as did his premise that, if the facts became known, the liquidations would be stopped. Even the Protestant Bishop of Berlin, Otto Dibelius, a member of the church Resistance to whom Gerstein recounted in detail the extermination of Jews at Belzec, proved unable to act.
Overwhelmed by a sense of personal responsibility and guilt, the despairing Gerstein committed suicide in a French prison on 17 July 1945.