The Hamburg company Tesch &Stabenow supplied concentration camps with the poison gas Zyklon B. With the trial of the bosses from March 1, 1946, entrepreneurs are brought before the court for their involvement in the Holocaust for the first time.
by Irene Altenmüller
The cans of deadly poison gas were carefully wrapped and labelled. Then the manufacturer's name:"Tesch u. Stabenow, Hamburg 1 - Messberghof". During the Second World War, the company supplied several concentration camps with Zyklon B. The Nazis murdered more than 900,000 people in Auschwitz alone with the poison, originally used to combat vermin.
Zyklon B generates good sales for Tesch &Stabenow
To this day, the name of the hydrogen cyanide gas Zyklon B stands for industrially organized mass murder. For the pest control company Tesch &Stabenow, or "Testa" for short, Zyklon B is one thing above all:a lucrative business. In the years 1942/43, the Hamburg company's profits skyrocketed - from 40,000 Reichsmarks to 120,000 Reichsmarks in 1943. A particularly good customer is the SS - the organization manages the concentration camps. In 1943 alone, the company delivered 12,000 kilograms of Zyklon B to Auschwitz.
Zyklon B poison gas:"Effective" for mass destruction
Bureaucratically organized mass murder:The trucks needed a special permit to deliver poison gas.Initially, the SS used the drug to fight pests such as rats, bedbugs and cockroaches in the concentration camp barracks. From September 1941, she used Zyklon B for the first time in order to destroy human lives in a targeted manner. In a first "test" 600 Soviet prisoners of war are gassed in Auschwitz. The camp commander, Rudolf Höss, found the means so effective that he decided that Zyklon B should be the primary means of murder in Auschwitz in the future. Soon the Nazis were killing hundreds of thousands of Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, prisoners of war and other prisoners in specially built gas chambers with the Hamburg company's poison gas.
Agonizing death by asphyxiation
Death from the hydrocyanic acid gas Zyklon B is horrifying. Cramping pains are followed by excruciating suffocation. In the gas chambers, the stronger fight their way upstairs, where they can breathe a little longer. The weak stay down and die first, causing the corpses to pile up in pyramids in the gas chambers.
Tesch &Stabenow courses on concentration camp operations
Hundreds of thousands of people were murdered in Auschwitz with Zyklon B in seven gas chambers.At that time, the chemist Bruno Tesch was head of the company Tesch &Stabenow. He travels to various concentration camps several times. There he gives courses where the SS men learn how to use the poison gas. SS man Wilhelm Bahr took part in one of these "disinfector courses" under Tesch's leadership. In September and November 1942, he took part in the gassing of a total of 448 Soviet prisoners of war with Zyklon B in the Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg, as he confirmed after the war. Since there is no gas chamber in Neuengamme, he throws the Zyklon B through a skylight into the sealed arrest bunker. Bahr is executed for his crimes in 1946.
Himmler is personally committed to the company
After the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, concentration camp guards presented the poison gas stocks.When the offices of Tesch &Stabenow were destroyed in an air raid on Hamburg on March 30, 1945, it became clear how important the company was to the SS. SS boss Heinrich Himmler personally asked the Hamburg building police to support the company in the reconstruction. In a letter he explains that it is "in the interest of the Reichsfuhrer SS that the company Tesch &Stabenow is able to resume work as soon as possible".
1. to March 8, 1946:Tesch on trial as a war criminal
A few weeks later the war ended. With the "War Crime Investigation Unit", the British are deploying a team of investigators in northern Germany to arrest Nazi criminals, as shown in the documentary drama "Nazi Hunters - Journey into the Darkness" in the ARD media library. It was not until September 3rd that Bruno Tesch and Karl Weinbacher, second managing director of the company, as well as the technician Joachim Drosihn were arrested on September 3rd, 1945 in the company premises. A former accountant for the company, Erich Sehm, reported them. From March 1 to March 8, 1946, they had to answer as war criminals before the British military court for their alleged involvement in the mass murder in the concentration camps. It is the first war crimes trial of British military justice in Hamburg's Curiohaus.
What did Bruno Tesch know?
There, Tesch denies having known that Zyklon B was used to murder people. He believed that the poison was only used for disinfection and delousing. But several witnesses weigh heavily on him:A secretary, for example, remembers that Tesch told her after a dictation that Zyklon B was also used to murder people. And Erich Sehm, the former accountant, describes in court how he accidentally came across a business trip report in the company documents in 1942. In it, Tesch made the suggestion to "leading personalities of the Wehrmacht" that hydrogen cyanide should be used for the murder of people "just as we do for the extermination of vermin".
Executed on May 16, 1946
The witnesses do not incriminate his deputy Weinbacher. However, the court-martial followed the prosecutors' view that Weinbacher "must have known everything that Tesch knew." On March 8, 1946, the judges sentenced Tesch and Weinbacher to death by hanging. On May 16, 1946, they were executed in the Hameln penitentiary. The court acquitted the technician and long-time employee of the company, Joachim Drosihn.
Bronze plaque at the Meßberghof commemorates the merchants of death
Only after a long debate was a clearly visible commemorative plaque attached to the facade of the Meßberghof in 1997.The Meßberghof - the commercial building where Tesch &Stabenow was based - has been preserved to this day. The imposing brick building, which was originally named after the well-known shipowner and head of Hamburg's Hapag, Albert Ballin, is located in Hamburg's Kontorhaus district, opposite the well-known Chilehaus. The Nazis had renamed the building in 1938 because of Ballin's Jewish origins.
Since 1997, a simple bronze plaque has been a reminder that the company Tesch &Stabenow, which supplied the poison gas Zyklon B to concentration camps in the 1940s, had its headquarters there - after initial resistance from Deutsche Bank, the then owner of the building. The company had feared "negative effects on the rentability of the property".
"Death came from Hamburg"
At the inauguration of the plaque in June 1997, Gabriele Fenyes from the Jewish community in Hamburg explained:"Here I stand and I know that Death came from Hamburg. That's a terrible connection."