Execution of Fritz Klein
- Nazi Doctor at Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp - Holocaust

24 June 2022

Category: Nazi Doctors

Fritz Klein was born on as an ethnic German on the 24th of November 1888 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 a 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.

Became doctor at Auschwitz

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.

As the SS doctor, Fritz Klein was also active in selections on the ramp. There were also selections in the camps’ hospitals at Auschwitz. Fritz Klein left Auschwitz in December 1944 and arrived at Bergen Belsen, which was a camp for sick people, in January 1945. The prisoners got almost no food during these death marches and there was no food when they arrived at the camp either.

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.

Belsen trial

Klein was arrested and together with other members of the SS guards, was forced over the next few days, to bury the corpses of prisoners lying around the camp, in large mass graves. Klein was then tried at the Belsen trial which began on the 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. 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.

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