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A former member of Hitler's SS has gone to court claiming his reputation has
been ruined by a book - not because it exposed his part
in the Holocaust but because it accused him of abandoning
a woman he had an affair with when she became pregnant.
Erich Steidtmann, 92, was furious to be portrayed as a
philanderer. He launched a lawsuit in Leipzig saying his
'honour had been besmirched' in the book An Ordinary Life
In the resulting legal battle he has revealed himself as the last known survivor
of the SS squads to wipe out the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.
As the publisher of the memoir and its author prepared
their defence, they found pictures of him at the centre
of one of the worst crimes in history.
Steidtmann's story surfaced because he happened to read
the book by Lisl Urban. A Sudeten German, she was a secretary
for the Gestapo in Prague, described by her as a 'hotbed
of frivolous sexual encounters', one of which she had
with an SS man she nicknamed Eick, 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 to document his experiences in tracking
down partisans.
The couple spent 1942 rowing, dining out and staying in - and Urban fell pregnant.
But Eick was posted to Warsaw to guard the Jewish ghetto,
the Nazi way station for their extermination camps. Urban
had hoped they would marry, but Eick spurned her for
a Polish woman. For his illicit liaison he says he was
court-martialled and ordered to serve on the Eastern
Front. Nowhere does former art teacher Urban refer to
Eick as Steidtmann, but he recognised himself.
He alleges Urban's baby was
not his but 'a cuckoo's egg'. He added: 'To claim this
of a captain of the uniformed police is such a reprehensible
act that even at 92 I have a right to protect my reputation.'
In trying to preserve his
reputation as an 'honourable serviceman' 'Eick' outed
himself as the bodyguard of Juergen Stroop, tasked by
Hitler with destroying the ghetto after the Jews rose
up in January 1943. Over four months, 13,000 people were
shot or burned to death and the remaining 50,000 sent
to death camps.
Steidtmann was exonerated
in a postwar trial as having 'minimal involvement' in
crushing the uprising, but the Simon Wiesenthal Centre
in Israel is now pressing for him to be retried, claiming
the trial did not know of his closeness to Stroop.
observer.guardian.co.uk
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