Why Kurt Gerstein hated the Nazi regime?
The first concentration camp was established at Dachau in 1933. At first, the camp was mainly used to hold people who the Nazi regime considered politically dangerous. This category included Social Democrats, communists, and homosexuals. Jews were sent to Dachau in the early days. But it was usually because they belonged to one of these other groups. However, the Nazis soon began to boycott Jewish businesses and pass laws taking away their rights. Other groups suffered as well, especially the mentally disabled. In 1939, Hitler signed an order saying that those with mental disabilities were to be killed.
This law hit Gerstein in a very personal way. His sister-in-law was one of the more than 70,000 people with mental illnesses or disabilities that were murdered by doctors on Hitler’s orders. Gerstein claimed that he had already decided to secretly oppose the Nazis. And his sister-in-law’s death reinforced his decision to follow through with a daring plan. in 1941, Gerstein officially joined the SS. The SS was the most fanatical branch of the Nazi Party and took the lead in carrying out the Holocaust. And according to Gerstein, he joined them in order to bring the Party down from the inside.
Gerstein wrote in a letter to his wife, “I joined the SS … acting as an agent of the Confessing Church.” But if that’s true, then Gerstein was an excellent spy. It seems that none of his superiors suspected anything. In fact, Gerstein rose quickly within the Party. And he soon received a promotion to “Head of Technical Disinfection Services.” Disinfection was the word the Nazis used to describe gassing the prisoners at their concentration camps. The prisoners were often pulled off of trains and led to rooms that looked like showers. There, they were told that they needed to be disinfected.
Instead, they were killed with poisonous gas. Gerstein’s new position meant that he was in charge of providing Zyklon B, a deadly pesticide, that was used in the gas chambers at Auschwitz. There’s some debate over whether or not Gerstein really knew that the gas he supplied was actually going to be used to kill people at first. But he negotiated prices with suppliers and oversaw the delivery of the gas to the camps. Gerstein’s work took him from concentration camp to concentration camp, where he witnessed the mass murder of prisoners. Still deeply religious, these murders seem to have seriously affected him.
Once he witnessed the killings, he began looking for a way to tell people in the outside world what was happening at the camps. In 1942, Gerstein happened to sit next to a stranger on a train. That stranger turned out to be Swedish diplomat Göran Von Otter. The two began talking and Gerstein told him what he had seen in the concentration camps. Otter quickly took the report back to the Swedish Government. But for some reason, the Swedes never passed it along to the Allies. Meanwhile, 2,000 people an hour were being murdered with gas at Auschwitz while Gerstein tried to get someone, anyone, to do something.