1.3.1899 Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski is born

He gave the first impetus to the creation of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. He had civilians murdered on purpose to inflate the statistics on enemy casualties. He also participated in the Night of the Long Knives. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski, who was born on 1 March 1899, successfully avoided the courts for many years.

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was born 121 years ago in Lauenburg into the family of Otto Johann Joseph von Zelewski, a landowner, and his Lutheran wife Elisabeth Eveline. He added von dem Bach to his name only at the end of 1933. Zelewski disliked it because it sounded Polish and worked hard to remove it. His grandfather was Michal Zelewski, a Polish nobleman of the Kashub family who owned several villages in the 18th century. Erich had five siblings - three sisters and two brothers. Several times during his military career he tried to manipulate the family tree to impress his superiors.

After the death of his father, young Erich was cared for by an uncle who forced him to join the army. He was also deployed during World War I, for example during the Battle of Tannenberg in East Prussia and the Battle of Gorlice. However, during the fighting he was hit by a battle gas, which interrupted his military career. When he recovered, however, he joined the 10th Grenadier Regiment of König Friedrich Wilhelm II. He was appointed commander of the regiment's machine gun company. He was wounded a total of two times during World War I and received several decorations such as the Prussian Cross First Class.

Especially being hit by battle gas had a long-term negative effect on his health. Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski remained in the army after the war. He fought in the Freikorps and participated in the suppression of the Silesian uprising. He left the army in 1924 at his own request and returned to his farm in Düringshof. The same year, however, he enlisted in the border guards. He joined the Nazi party in 1931 and became a member of the SS. His SS membership card had the number 9831 and his NSDAP membership card 489 101.

He participated in the Night of the Long Knives

Bach-Zelewski was soon promoted and by the end of 1933 had reached the rank of Major General. He was also helped by winning a seat in the Reichstag for the district of Breslau. He was annoyed that all three of his sisters married Jewish men. In 1946, during an interrogation, he said that this ruined his reputation in the army and he had to leave the Reichswehr. In 1934, he participated in the Night of the Long Knives. He mainly wanted to get rid of Anton von Hohberg and Buchwald, with whom he had long-standing disputes. Bach-Zelewski served in various positions in the Nazi Party, initially in East Prussia and after 1936 in Silesia.

He was not personally involved in the invasion of Poland, although units under his command were involved in the murder of prisoners of war during the September campaign. At the end of 1939, SS chief Heinrich Himmler offered the already experienced military leader the post of commissar for Silesia. He was tasked with the confiscation of Polish private property or mass resettlement. In August 1940, for example, up to 20,000 Poles were forced to leave their homes in the town of Živec. Furthermore, on his direct order, 35,000 Jews were murdered in Riga on 31 October 1941, and further massacres also took place in Minsk and Mogilev.

Bach-Zelewski also gave the first impetus to the construction of a concentration camp at Auschwitz, as the existing prisons were overcrowded. The first transport arrived there on 14 June 1940 and Bach-Zelewski visited the camp two weeks later. In February 1942, he returned to Berlin, where he sought medical attention. Bach-Zelewski reportedly had intestinal problems and suffered hallucinations associated with shooting Jews. He asked Himmler to withdraw him from summary executions and send him to the anti-Partisan wars.

Heydrich's successor?

In June 1942, after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague, Hitler wanted Bach-Zelewski to take Heydrich's place as leader of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. But Himmler was against it because of the current military situation. He persuaded Hitler to keep Bach-Zelewski active in the army. As early as July 1943 he was in charge of all anti-Partisan actions in Belgium, Belarus France, Norway, Ukraine and Yugoslavia. He purposely had civilians shot in order to inflate the statistics concerning casualties on the enemy side. The result was that there were significantly more dead than weapons seized. The Germans did manage to encircle the partisan-held areas, but it took too long. Their real enemies thus managed to escape in many cases.

At the beginning of August 1944, Bach-Zelewski took command of all German units fighting the Warsaw Uprising. The German forces consisted of 17,000 men organized into two battle groups. They murdered over 200,000 civilians and an unknown number of prisoners of war. After more than two months of heavy fighting and the complete destruction of Warsaw, Bach-Zelewski managed to take control of the city, for which he was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. From the destroyed city he took the heart of the Polish composer Fryderyk Chopin, which he placed in his private collection.

A key witness in the Nuremberg Trial

As the end of the war approached, Bach-Zelewski tried to escape. But on 1 May 1945, he was arrested by the American military police. In exchange for his testimony against his former superiors at the Nuremberg Trial, he himself was never tried for any war crimes. He also avoided extradition to Poland and the USSR and left prison in 1949. "At Nuremberg, for example, he said that if for several years it was drummed into people's heads that the Slavs were an inferior race, and that the Jews - they were not people at all, it must inevitably end in the mass murder of Slavs and Jews," says Čeněk Klapal in his book Unforgotten Crimes.

In 1951, Bach-Zelewski declared that he had helped Hermann Göring commit suicide in 1946. As evidence, he handed over to the authorities cyanide capsules with serial numbers not far from those used by Göring. However, the authorities never managed to verify whether Bach-Zelewski was telling the truth. Most historians say he did not. In 1949, a denazification court sentenced him to ten years in a labor camp, which he never "served." In 1958 he was convicted of killing Anton von Hohberg und Buchwald during the Night of the Long Knives. He was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison. In 1961, he was sentenced to another ten years of house arrest for the murder of ten German communists, which he was alleged to have committed during the 1930s. He died in a Munich prison on 8 March 1972.

Sources: www.findagrave.com, www.holocaustresearchproject.org,

Čeněk Klapal: Unforgotten Crimes