Ben Stevens - The Nazi Murder Machine: 13 Portraits in Evil

Tesch, Bruno

Born August 14, 1890, Bruno Emil Tesch studied chemistry at Berlin University. He founded the company Tesch and Stabenow, in Hamburg, with Paul Stabenow. Tesch and Stabenow was basically a pest-control company specializing in fumigating commercial properties for example the cavernous warehouses in the Port of Hamburg.

While investigating how hydrogen cyanide might be used as one such fumigation agent, Tesch and two others discovered a way in which the gas could be manufactured (and sold) in solid form.

In 1925, Tesch and Stabenow received exclusive rights to distribute the insecticide crystals called Zyklon B east of the Elbe River. Stabenow left the company hed helped to create in 1927; in 1942 Tesch would assume full ownership.

Following the end of the war, it was claimed that memorandums had passed between Tesch and a senior Wehrmacht officer, concerning the viability of using Zyklon B to kill humans.

Zyklon B insecticide crystals .

Arrested by the British occupation authorities on September 3, 1945, Tesch was subsequently released on October 1, 1945. The relief he must undoubtedly have felt was short-lived, however for he was re-arrested on October 6.

Evidence against him had become damning: in particular, it was proved that Tesch had, in 1942, written a travelogue detailing his knowledge of the killing of people by means of Zyklon-B.

He was tried by a British military tribunal in Hamburg, March 1 8, 1946. Found guilty, Tesch was executed by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint on May 16, 1946.

The Nazi Murder Machine: 13 Portraits in Evil

Ben Stevens

Nanbanjin

Introduction

We are barbarians pitiless The world can only be ruled by fear

So declared Adolf Hitler, the Fuhrer of Germany. A leader of millions, served by men and women of such appalling savagery, such merciless evil, that they make the words barbarians and pitiless seem all but redundant.

This book features the collected biographies of thirteen such servants of Hitler. Included are names almost as infamous as Hitlers own Heinrich Himmler , Joseph Goebbels yet also the cowardly, but wholly sadistic Irma Grese (female guard at the Auschwitz concentration camp, in sole charge of some 30,000 inmates) and Bruno Tesch , one of the owners of the pest-control company Tesch and Stabenow, who amassed a fortune through the sale of the Zyclon-B gas crystals, used in the concentration camp gas chambers, to the Nazis.

For some years, the information contained in this book existed as notes, collected as part of my extensive research for my novel The Whistler: A Murderers Tale .

I dedicate this book to all those who suffered so vilely at the hands of the Nazis, and so that those who read these accounts may also say Never again .

Ben Stevens, Nagasaki City, Japan, 2014.

The Nazi Murder Machine: 13 Portraits in Evil

Becker-Freyseng, Hermann

Blobel, Paul

Brandt, Rudolf

Dirlewanger, Oskar (the most evil man in the SS)

Eichmann, Adolf

Goebbels, Joseph

Gring, Hermann

Grese, Irma

Heydrich, Reinhard

Himmler, Heinrich

Hoess, Rudolf

Mengele, Josef (the Angel of Death)

Tesch, Bruno

Becker-Freyseng, Hermann

Becker-Freyseng, pictured wearing military uniform. Although a physician, he was given the official rank and title of Captain, Medical Service of the Air Force by the Nazis.

Becker-Freyseng qualified as a physician at the University of Berlin in 1935 (when he was then aged twenty-five), and rose to prominence when he became a consultant to the Luftwaffe, being recognized as an expert in aviation medicine.

In 1938 he assisted with a series of important experiments concerning the effects of pure oxygen, and soon became a leading figure in the Nazis human experimentation program. (He had already, voluntarily, become a member of the Nazi Party.)

The experiments which took place under Becker-Freysengs direction commonly required inmates selected from the Nazi concentration camps. These inmates could be placed in a pressure chamber, where the effects of high altitude flying on the human body would be measured and observed. Others were subjected to freezing temperatures, or deliberately infected with tuberculosis. (This last experiment often involved Jewish and gypsy children.)

Other inmates were forced to drink copious amounts of salt-water, with some also having it injected into their veins. All forty of these inmates (whom Heinrich Himmler had personally selected, at the special request of Becker-Freyseng and several other Nazi physicians) were then subjected to a liver autopsy, while they were still alive and without the use of any anesthetic.

Becker-Freyseng had the results of these hideous salt-water experiments published in a paper entitled Thirst and Thirst Quenching in Emergency Situations at Sea .

Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Becker-Freyseng was one of the twenty-three Nazi physicians whose cases were heard at the so-called Doctors Trial. Found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, he was subsequently sentenced to twenty years imprisonment. (Of the twenty-three defendants, seven were sentenced to death and the same number acquitted. The others received prison sentences of varying lengths.)

Karl Brandt, Adolf Hitlers personal physician, is sentenced to death by hanging at the end of the Doctors Trial.

In 1946, however, Becker-Freyseng suddenly found that his punishment had been suspended, in return for his co-operation in assisting the Americans with Operation Paperclip a series of projects relating to space travel. For this, he was required to move to the US.

Diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1960, Becker-Freyseng died from this condition the following year, aged fifty-one.

Blobel, Paul

Blobel was born August 13, 1894 in Potsdam, a city bordering the German capital of Berlin. He served in the First World War, with such conspicuous bravery that he was ultimately awarded the Iron Cross.

At the end of the war, he studied architecture, a profession he went on to practice from 1924 1931. Upon losing his job, he joined the Nazi Party and the Schutzstaffel (SS). Blobel rose rapidly through the ranks to become Commanding Officer of Sonderkommando 4a , a military unit active in Ukraine.

The Sonderkommando 4a were tasked with following Wehrmacht (Defense Force) troops into Ukraine, where they would subsequently liquidate all racial and political undesirables.

In August 1941, Blobel ordered the creation of a ghetto in Zhytomyr, a city to the northwest of Ukraine, for 3,000 Jews. All of these Jews were murdered one month later.

Another massacre of Jewish women and children occurred at Bila Tserkva, a city in central Ukraine, August 22, 1941.

Blobel then organized the Babi Yar (Old Womans Ravine) massacre in Kiev, September 29 30, 1941, in which 33,771 people died. Part of what took place was described by one of the twenty-eight known survivors, Soviet-Jewish actress Dina Pronicheva.