Kurt Gerstein
| Kurt Gerstein | |
|---|---|
Kurt Gerstein wearing SS2 "Germania" collar tab
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| Born | 11 August 1905 |
| Died | 25 July 1945 (aged 39) |
| Allegiance |
 Nazi Germany
|
| Service/branch | Schutzstaffel |
| Years of service | until 1945 |
| Rank | SS-Obersturmführer |
| Unit | Death's Head Units |
Kurt Gerstein (11 August 1905 – 25 July 1945) was a German SS officer and member of the Institute for Hygiene of the Waffen-SS and Head of Technical Disinfection Services. He witnessed mass murders in the Nazi extermination camps Belzec and Treblinka. He gave information to the Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter, as well as to members of the Roman Catholic Church with contacts to Pope Pius XII, in an effort to inform the international public about the Holocaust. In 1945, following his surrender, he wrote the Gerstein Report covering his experience of the Holocaust. He died, an alleged suicide, while in French custody.
Kurt Gerstein was born in Münster, Westphalia on 11 August 1905, the sixth of seven children in a Prussian middle-class family, described as strongly chauvinistic and "totally compliant to authority". His father, Ludwig, a former Prussian officer, was a judge and an authoritarian figure. Ludwig Gerstein proudly proclaimed that in his family's genealogical tree there was only Aryan blood and exhorted future generations to "preserve the purity of the race!" As late as 1944 he wrote to his son Kurt: "You are a soldier and an official and you must obey the orders of your superiors. The person who bears the responsibility is the man who gives the orders, not the one who carries them out." Kurt Gerstein married Elfriede Bensch, a pastor’s daughter, on 31 August 1937. They had a daughter, Adelheid.
Kurt was no more tolerant of discipline in secondary school than within the family. However, in spite of earning many bad reports, he managed to graduate at the age of 20. Going directly on to study at the University of Marburg for three semesters, he then transferred to the technical universities in Aachen and Berlin/Charlottenburg where he graduated in 1931 as a mining engineer. While he was in Marburg he joined, at his father's request, the Teutonia, "one of the most nationalistic student associations in Germany". While he was uncomfortable with the frivolity of the fraternity students, he didn't seem to mind their ultra-nationalism. In 1936 he moved to Tübingen where he started studying medicine at the local University and lived with his wife, Elfriede Gerstein, née Bensch, after he had married her on August 31, 1937. However he interrupted his medical studies in 1938.
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