Rolf Günther ( Erfurt , Germany , 8 of January of 1913 - Ebensee , May 1945 ) was a German officer in the SS Nazis who served as Sturmbannführer ( Major ) and acted as deputy to Adolf Eichmann in the Holocaust Jew War World .
Beginnings in Nazism
Günther joined the SA in 1929 , barely 16 years old, which is why Adolf Eichmann considered it “the personification of hardness”. Later formalized its entrance to the SS with the number 290.130 and to the Nazi Party with the file number 472.421. Its last ascents went to SS Haupsturmführer (Captain) 1 of July of 1937 and to SS Sturmbannführer ( Mayor ) 20 of April of 1941 . He functioned as an assistant to Adolf Eichmann even having authorized signature for the memo of Section IVB4 of the Gestapo , which was responsible for the deportation of the Jews detained in territory of the III Reich and to send them to the concentration camps .
Participation in the Holocaust
Günther was responsible for the deportation of Jews from Greece and clandestinely from Turkey to the Auschwitz concentration camp , with the assistance of Alois Brunner where they were mostly killed on arrival by gas chambers .
His office was in the main offices of Section IVB4 , on Kurfürstenstrasse. 116, Berlin . Phone. No. 25 9251. Within this section worked a sub-section of which Günther was supervisor from the opening until the end of the war.
Günther was responsible for sending Kurt Gerstein and Professor Wilhelm Pfannenstiel to the death camp of Belzec to test the prussic acid ( Zyklon B ) as agent disinfecting clothes. In addition to this, Gerstein and Pfannenstiel received reports that Zyklon B could be useful as a killing method in the gas chambers , instead of using the carbon monoxide that was being used in Belzec .
In his memoirs, Rudolf Höß stated that he had been able to conclude in the figure of two and a half million Jews exterminated at Auschwitz by the information provided to him by General SS Richard Glücks , who in turn had obtained it from Eichmann. “Eichmann and his permanent Delegate Günther were the only ones who possessed the necessary information to calculate the total number of people destroyed.” Höß subsequently stated that the figure provided by Glücks was too high, which has been confirmed by historians and researchers.
Dieter Wisliceny considered that Günther was the only one of the equipment that had influence on Eichmann.
The end
According to news from the Red Cross International and the American authorities, Günther committed suicide in 1945 , while detained in the hands of the Americans in Prison Ebensee.
He was younger brother of Hans Günther who also was SS Sturmbannführer under the orders of Adolf Eichmann . Rolf Günther is named in the testimony on the gas chambers of the SS Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein .
References
- Section IVB4 in Axis Forum History by Marcus Wendel
- Me, Adolf Eichmann. A historical memory . Author Adolf Eichmann (Memoirs), Planeta Editorial, ISBN 84-320-3620-X , Collection Document, 1980
- “Eichmann interrogated”, transcriptions from the archives of the Israeli Police, Da CAPO Press, New York, ISBN 0-306-80916-8 , 1999. (in English).