The 15th of April, 1945, southwest of Bergen, Nazi Germany. The British 11th Armored Division
liberates Bergen-Belsen – one of the worst Nazi concentration camps which would epitomize the
true bestiality and horrors of the Nazi regime and its death camps. The British forces find
13,000 unburied death bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who are sick and starved.
Thousands of other inmates will die of various diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis during
the months following the camp’s liberation. The British forces capture male and female Nazi
personnel responsible for these horrors and force them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves.
One of them is a German Nazi doctor Fritz Klein.
Fritz Klein was born on as an ethnic German on the 24th of November 1888 in Codlea, today’s Romania,
then part of Austria-Hungary. He studied medicine at the University of Budapest
and after the outbreak of the First World War, he took part in fights on the Eastern Front,
where in March 1915 he was taken prisoner by the Russians.
After the end of the war, he lived and worked as a doctor in Romania.
World War II started on the 1st of September 1939 and Fritz Klein was
drafted into the Romanian army. From June 1941 he served as a paramedic on the eastern front
during operation Barbarossa which was a code-name for the German invasion of the Soviet Union
which Romania joined as a member of the Axis powers providing equipment and oil to Nazi
Germany as well as committing a large number of troops to the Eastern Front.
After Adolf Hitler demanded that all Ethnic Germans in the Romanian Army
be drafted into the German army, Fritz Klein joined the Waffen-SS on the 26th of May
1943. He could not join the German Wehrmacht because he did not have German nationality.
Klein was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi occupied Poland where he arrived
in December 1943. The camp’s commandant was Rudolf Hoess and Klein became a doctor in the
women's compound and later in the gypsy family camp which existed for 17 months.
Romani families deported to the Gypsy Family Camp were held together, instead of being separated
as was typical at Auschwitz. The conditions in the camp were horrible. One holocaust survivor
described it as hell on Earth. The prisoners - half-crazed with hunger - were crammed inside
the barracks which were icy cold. To keep warm all the inmates had to huddle together.
Fritz Klein still belonged to the Auschwitz personnel when
on the 2nd of August 1944 , 2,897 surviving men, women, and children
from this Gypsy family camp were murdered in the gas chambers at Auschwitz - Birkenau.
Klein was anti-Semite and approved of the Holocaust from a moral point of view.
It was during his time at Auschwitz, when he said to one of the prisoners”
"My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human
body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That's why I cut them out."
As the SS doctor, Fritz Klein was also active in selections on the ramp.
When the transport was inbound, Klein always received a message by telephone and traveled
down to the station in a Red Cross vehicle. The people from the transports were divided into
two groups: those who were fit for work and those who were not such as children up to the age of 15
as well as those who were too weak or sick. They were then later murdered in the gas chambers.
The decisions, if someone was capable of labor or was to be killed immediately,
were made simply by looking at the victims and sometimes asking a few questions.
After the war, Fritz Klein claimed that he only made decisions if someone was able to work or not.
What happened to them afterwards had nothing to do with him.
There were also selections in the camps’ hospitals at Auschwitz. The doctors would provide lists of
those patients who would be fit for labor in 1 to 2 weeks or had no chance of recovery. After the
war, of the latter group, he claimed that either nothing happened to them, or they were suddenly
taken away but he did know where. However, Klein must have known that they were murdered.
Fritz Klein left Auschwitz in December 1944 and arrived at Bergen Belsen,
which was a camp for sick people, in January 1945. Sanitary conditions were terrible
and there was no water for washing and hardly enough for drinking and cooking. Between January
and March 1945 when the prisoners were sent on death marches from the other concentration camps,
about one-third of the prisoners who arrived in the transports were already dead, and almost
80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station as they were too week
and sick to walk. On one occasion out of a transport of 1,900 inmates over 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches and there was no food when they
arrived at the camp either. The camp was so overcrowded that during winter months when it
was freezing cold, the prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor and somehow
try to share only 200 blankets in a camp of tens of thousands of prisoners.
In March 1945, due to starvation, thirst and the outbreak of typhus epidemics,
the average daily mortality rate of the prisoners was between 250 and 300.
When Klein realized that the end of war was inevitable and the allies were approaching,
he turned around completely and as with the camp’s commandant Josef Kramer,
he even tried to find food for hungry and typhoid-ridden prisoners.
Thus, when the British forces liberated Bergen Belsen, Fritz Klein remained in the camp and did
not flee as many of the camp’s guards had done. He had hoped that he would not be punished for
his crimes after the war would be over, but he was wrong.
Klein was arrested and together with other members of the SS guards, were forced over the
next few days, to bury the corpses of prisoners lying around the camp, in large mass graves.
This is how a famous photo of Fritz Klein standing in the middle of a mass grave was taken.
Klein, a doctor who should have helped people instead of participating in their
systematic murder, ended up burying thousands of dead bodies - victims
murdered by the Ciminal Nazi regime which he served until the very end.
Klein was then tried at the Belsen trial which began on the 17th of September 1945.
At the trial he claimed that did not approve killings in gas chambers,
but he did not protest either as that was no use at all.
When he was asked about the prisoners being beaten by the SS, he claimed that when he received people
into the hospital, they were beaten rather by the kapos and other inmates than the SS.
However, his lies did not help him escape justice. The British Military tribunal found Fritz Klein
guilty of crimes he committed at Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen and sentenced him to death
by hanging. He was 57 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the
sentence on the 13th of December,1945. There were no tears shed for Fritz Klein
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