|
A FORMER member of Hitler's elite SS may have indicted himself as a mass murderer
after stepping from the shadows to complain about an elderly
woman's wartime memoir.
Erich Steidtmann, 92, was offended to be portrayed as a philanderer who fathered
a child out of wedlock in the Second World War and launched
a lawsuit in a court in Leipzig saying his "honour had been besmirched" in the book A Perfectly Normal Life.
But in doing so he has revealed himself to be the last known survivor of the
SS killing squads which wiped out the Jews in the Warsaw
Ghetto. Now the battle is on by the publisher of the
memoir, its author and Nazi-hunters to place Steidtmann
at the epicentre of one of the worst crimes in history.
The story of Steidtmann, now a pensioner in East Germany, only surfaced because
he happened to read a book by Lisl Urban. One of the
so-called Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia, Mrs Urban
worked as a secretary for the Gestapo in occupied Prague.
She described the occupied
capital as a "hotbed" of frivolous sexual encounters, one of which she enjoyed with an SS man she
nicknamed 'Eike' after her marriage broke down.
Eike was a police officer
who, he claimed, was drafted into the fighting arm of
the SS. He was sent to Prague from the eastern front
for recuperation and in order to document his experiences
in tracking down partisans.
"I adored him," said
Mrs Urban. The two spent their time in 1942 rowing, dining
out and staying in. She soon became pregnant.
However, in the autumn of
that year Eike was posted to Warsaw to guard the Jewish
ghetto, the Nazi way station for the extermination camps
of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec in Poland.
Mrs Urban had hoped they would
marry, but she said Eike became acquainted with a Polish
woman and spurned her. Nowhere in her book does the former
art teacher refer to Eike as Steidtmann, but he recognised
himself in her prose.
"I may not be named,
but my family and friends would recognise me," he said.
In court papers he alleges
that the child Mrs Urban gave birth to is not his, but "a cuckoo's egg". But 'Eike' has outed himself in the process as the right-hand man of the destroyer
of the Warsaw Ghetto, Juergen Stroop, who was tasked
by Hitler with its extermination after the Jews rose
up in January 1943.
Exonerated in a post-war trial
in Germany as having had only "minimal involvement" in the crushing of the uprising, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in America is now
pressing for him to be retried, claiming the post-war
trial in Hamburg did not know of his full role in the
crushing of the ghetto.
Joachim Jahns, the book publisher,
is trawling through German military archives trying to
find more details of Steidtmann's wartime service.
"It is ironic that
he tried to defend his honour as an SS man regarding
this woman and her child. No-one would be any the wiser
if he kept quiet. Now he could be pursued as a criminal
until he dies," he said.
CASE IS A 'PRIORITY'
THE Simon Wiesenthal Centre - named after the legendary
death camp survivor who became the world's foremost
Nazi hunter - said it was making the Steidtmann case "a
priority".
Dr Efraim Zuroff, its director,
said: "It is unfortunate that something as serious as this has come out in the form
of a book.
"While Mr Steidtmann
and his mistress were, or were not, having an affair,
tens of thousands of people were being murdered outside.
"What we should
be asking ourselves is what went on in the ghetto. We
are investigating the Steidtmann case as a priority and,
if the evidence supports it, will be demanding a prosecution."
thescotsman.scotsman.com
|
