29 Facts About Stefan Baretzki

Stefan Baretzki was an Auschwitz guard of Bukovina German origin.

Stefan Baretzki was conscripted into the Waffen-SS and stationed at the Auschwitz concentration camp from 1942 until 1945.

Stefan Baretzki was the lowest-ranking of the twenty-four defendants in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials.

Stefan Baretzki's murders were sensationalized in the German press, taking the focus off of the systematic crimes of the Nazi regime.

Stefan Baretzki was born in 1919 into a Bukovina German family in Cernauti, then part of the Kingdom of Romania.

Hermann Langbein, an Austrian historian and Auschwitz political prisoner, noted that Stefan Baretzki was born in the same town as Viktor Pestek, an Auschwitz guard executed by the Nazis because he helped Siegfried Lederer, a Czech Jew, to escape.

Stefan Baretzki had only an elementary school education and never spoke German well.

Stefan Baretzki was conscripted into the SS in 1941, after an announcement in his church encouraged him to resettle in Breslau, then part of Germany, as part of the Heim ins Reich policy of resettling Volksdeutsche in Greater Germany.

Stefan Baretzki served as a block officer in Auschwitz II-Birkenau from 1942 to 1945.

Stefan Baretzki stated at his trial that when Volksdeutsche guards asked why prisoners were sent to Auschwitz, they were told that all of them were dangerous criminals convicted of sabotage.

Stefan Baretzki claimed not to believe these assurances and considered going into hiding when he went to Romania on leave in 1943.

Stefan Baretzki did not do so because, according to him, he feared repercussions against his family.

At his trial, Stefan Baretzki described how he treated inmates who had been transferred from subcamps because they had become too starved or ill to work.

Stefan Baretzki did not allow any of them to register for the camp.

Stefan Baretzki held them instead in a quarantine block until they died, not even allowing them to enter the barracks because the starving prisoners would create a mess.

Stefan Baretzki was known to practice a sport he called the "rabbit hunt", where prisoners were ordered to remove their caps.

Stefan Baretzki claimed that he had seen other SS men beating Pestek.

Ryszard Henryk Kordek, a prisoner, contradicted this saying that Stefan Baretzki had raised the alarm over Pestek's return, and was one of the guards who beat him.

Stefan Baretzki was the lowest-ranking of twenty-four men indicted at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials; his defense attorneys were Eugen Gerhardt and Engelbert Jorschko.

Stefan Baretzki was convicted as an accomplice to the mass murder of Jews on eleven occasions.

Stefan Baretzki assisted in the murder of at least 3,000 people by participating in the liquidation of the Theresienstadt family camp in March 1944.

Otto Dov Kulka and other witnesses testified that Stefan Baretzki killed other prisoners, but he was not charged with these murders.

Stefan Baretzki was sentenced to life imprisonment and eight years.

Stefan Baretzki was the only defendant to testify against other defendants, offering damning testimony about the conditions at the camp.

Stefan Baretzki said that Lucas changed his behavior during the final months of the war only when it was clear that Germany would lose.

Stefan Baretzki testified against Kurt Knittel, who was in charge of the propaganda department at Auschwitz.

Stefan Baretzki told Langbein that he hoped Auschwitz would never happen again.

Stefan Baretzki said he only appealed his sentence due to pressure from his fellow defendants, on whom he was financially dependent for his legal fees.

The appeal failed, and Stefan Baretzki committed suicide at a hospital in Bad Nauheim on 21 June 1988.