The Troubled Legacy of Kurt Gerstein

Kurt Gerstein’s life remains one of the most difficult stories to classify. Was he a hero who tried to resist evil from within, or was he a collaborator who remained part of the very machine that carried out genocide? His story blurs the lines between resistance and complicity.

Gerstein was a German mining engineer who, with the rise of Hitler, initially joined the Nazi Party. But already in 1936, he showed signs of opposition. At a national conference of German mining engineers, he spoke publicly against the Nazis’ extremist policies. For this, he was arrested by the Gestapo and expelled from the party.

In 1939, however, he appealed his expulsion. By 1941, he volunteered for the SS, the very organization at the heart of Nazi terror. He was placed in the SS Hygiene Institute in Berlin, responsible for disinfection and medical supplies for SS soldiers. In January 1942, he became head of the medical equipment department, which also oversaw the distribution of Zyklon B gas, the gas later used in the extermination camps.

That August, he received orders to travel to the camps of Belzec and Treblinka to test the efficiency of Zyklon. According to his own accounts after the war, he was horrified by what he saw. He claimed that he tried to act. In one incident, he told Swedish diplomat Göran von Otter about the exterminations, hoping the shocking news would spread to the outside world. He also said that he tried to reach the Vatican’s representative in Berlin to inform the Pope. In February 1943, he claimed he sent reports to the Dutch Resistance, warning about the genocide of the Jews.

When Germany was collapsing at the end of the war, Gerstein surrendered to French forces in Tübingen. He declared that he had always opposed Nazi crimes and that he wanted to write a full account of what he had witnessed. He produced a document that became known as the “Gerstein Report.” This report was later used in the Nuremberg Trials to help convict Nazi leaders.

Yet Gerstein himself was not freed. Because of his active membership in the SS and his role in supplying Zyklon B, he remained under suspicion. The Allies could not prove whether his resistance efforts were genuine or whether he had exaggerated them after the war. He was therefore classified as a Nazi criminal and placed in custody. On July 25, 1945, while awaiting trial, he hanged himself in his cell, overwhelmed with despair.

In 1950, West Germany officially recorded him as a Nazi criminal. His widow tried to appeal, but her requests were rejected. Over the next 15 years, she gathered documents that she said proved his attempts to fight against the mass murder. In 1965, his name was finally removed from the official list of Nazi criminals.

Still, this does not make him a hero. Even if he opposed the killings and tried to resist, he remained an active SS member and did not save any Jews directly. His report claimed that he tried to slow down or block Zyklon shipments to the camps, but there is no evidence of any shortages caused by him.

Even so, Gerstein’s writings such as his letters, memoirs, and above all his “Gerstein Report”, remain among the earliest accounts of the Holocaust written by someone directly involved. In 1992, a letter he had sent in 1943 to the Dutch Resistance was discovered in the government archives, confirming at least part of his testimony.

His legacy remains complicated. Some books describe him as a man of conscience trapped in impossible circumstances. Others see him as someone who tried to clear his name only after the war. Perhaps the truth lies somewhere in between.