Kurt Gerstein, the Nazi who tried to boycott the Final Solution

On July 15, 1945, a jailer in the Parisian prison of Cherche-midi , the same one in which the famous Alfred Dreyfuss had been imprisoned, made a macabre discovery in one of the isolation cells:the inmate who occupied it awaiting trial for war crimes had hanged himself . His name was Kurt Gerstein and he would give much to talk about in the following months for the extraordinary story that until then nobody believed and that would end up being revealed as authentic.

Gerstein had surrendered to the French in April, after leaving Berlin the previous month on the pretext of a business trip. He spent a few days in Tübingen with his family and then achieved his purpose of contacting the Allies, who were already advancing unstoppably through German territory. He identified himself as a former member of the SS but assuring that in reality he was against Nazism and at first he obtained favorable treatment, with simple house arrest. But then his relationship with the Zyklon B gas supply for the extermination camps made him a first order suspect and his arrest and trial was determined. .

The character had a life worthy of literary gloss. He was a member of the typical bourgeois Saxon family , pan-German, somewhat racist and resentful of the humiliation of the Treaty of Versailles, with an inflexible father as the good judge he was. Kurt, however, became a mining engineer . He was a somewhat sickly young man, diabetic and deeply religious, these adjectives that prevented him from fully immersing himself in the exultant and growing Nazi atmosphere that the country was experiencing.

The thriving ideology did not look favorably on religion, whose foundations were too uncomfortable, and although there was a Christian current converging with politics, in 1934 another more reluctant to it was also founded and known as the Confessing Church, in which Gerstein joined. . Something that, however, was not incompatible with the nationalism that his father instilled in him and that led him to also enter the NSDAP (German National Socialist Party), a common initiative at the time to improve professionally, although those who knew him assured that his intention was to work against that ideology from within .

In any case, shortly after he also joined the SA (the famous party militiamen popularly known as brown shirts). However, the progressive postponement of Christian movements by Nazi institutions provoked a virulent reaction in Gerstein, who sent letters of protest to the authorities, he was involved in public protest altercations and other similar activities that ended in street beatings or arrest and interrogation by the Gestapo. He was a month and a half in prison and was expelled from the party.

Without a job and with a history, he spent a period of time unemployed, a time he took advantage of by collaborating with missionaries, beginning studies -inconclusive- of Theology and marrying in the summer of 1937, a marriage by which he would have three children. All this while he simultaneously resumed his anti-Nazi work , which led him to be confined in the Welzheim concentration camp. There he got heart disease and became depressed but, above all, he came into contact with the reality of these kinds of places.

He left once again under pressure from his father and recovered by taking a family cruise to Greece during which he hinted at the possibility of emigrating to America. But he did not need it:in June 1939 a court agreed with him and authorized him to work again , thanks to which he was hired at a potash mine in Thuringia. Then World War II broke out and he quit his job to volunteer. Rejected from the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, thanks to friends he was admitted to the Waffen SS in March 1941, something that outraged the Protestant comrades of him.

However, it seems that his decision was influenced by the death of his sister-in-law, mentally ill, a victim of eugenics sponsored by the government. Apparently Gerstein had already made up his mind to try to corrode the regime from within. The fact is that, after briefly passing through Holland, he was assigned to the Hygiene Service of the General Staff of the SS thanks to the medical knowledge he had acquired with the missionaries. As an engineer, he had to design water disinfection and purification systems to combat typhus. He did a good job and was promoted in 1942.

His efficiency kept him safe from the suspicion of the Gestapo, being able to surround himself with more or less affectionate staff and doing little mischief, such as "forgetting" food rations in the fields that he inspected, for example. But in June of that year he was entrusted with a special mission:transport one hundred kilos of Zyklon-B , distributing them among four new camps that would be some of those that today we call extermination , namely Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor and Majdanek. SS General Odilo Globocnik commissioned him to redesign the gas chamber system to adapt it to the use of Zyklon, since until then the slow carbon monoxide was used.

In Belzec he had to attend for the first time a gassing of Jewish prisoners , an experience so shocking that it led him not to deliver more gas bottles - he hid them in the field - and to denounce the horror that he had seen before the secretary of the Swedish embassy, ​​with whom he coincided on the train that was taking them to Berlin. Unfortunately, the Swedish government did not believe the account, nor did the Holy See's nuncio and others contacted. And those who did believe him, like the Dutch resistance, which had been recruited through an intermediary priest, wrote a report that ended up being forgotten by the bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, Gerstein had to continue with his work and a horrifying story is told, never confirmed, according to which in 1944 he was commissioned to gather a huge amount of gas and, thinking that it would be used on the front, which could bring victory to Hitler, or against the Germans themselves if they lost the war, he suggested something that he would regret all his life:assign it to Auschwitz to disinfect inmates. Whether it's true or not -there were several suppliers and Gerstein could only contribute, well, a limited amount- at that time he wrote a letter to his father in which he assured her verbatim: «I have never participated in any of this. Whenever I received orders, I not only failed to carry them out, but made sure they were disobeyed. For my part, he left all this with clean hands and a clear conscience ».