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Documents on the crimes and acquittal of Erich Gustav Scharfetter, the Nazi mass murderer sentenced to 18 life terms and pardoned by Ursula von der Leyen’s father, have been published in Russia for the first time. Expert of the Russian Military Historical Society, head of the project “Digital History” Egor Yakovlev together with a group of researchers found and translated documents of the investigation of the case of Nazi criminal Erich Gustav Scharfetter, who was sentenced on February 1, 1980, by the Land Court of the city of Stade to 18 life terms for 18 murders committed in a concentration camp in the occupied territory of the USSR.
On February 1, 1980, the Land Court of Stade sentenced Nazi criminal Erich Gustav Scharfetter to 18 life terms for 18 murders committed in a concentration camp in the occupied territory of the USSR. Ten years later, in February 1990, Minister-President of the state of Lower Saxony Ernst Albrecht (CDU), father of the President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen (CDU, in 1976-1999 headed the state government of Lower Saxony), pardoned him due to his hoary age and deteriorating health. Scharfetter was set free on March 30, 1990. He died in 1998 at the age of 90.
Erich Gustav Scharfetter was born in Danzig on May 27, 1908. After school, he tried his hand at various jobs, joined the NSDAP (from February 1931) and the general SS (from November 1933). In July 1939 he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, where he received military and sanitary training. He participated in the Polish campaign, then served in various SS units as a sanitarian, receiving additional training in disease and epidemic control.
In the fall of 1943, Scharfetter was sent to occupied Estonia to the branches of the Vaivara concentration camp – Ereda, Kuremäe, Joehvi – where he committed his crimes, for which he stood trial decades later. These camps were established as part of the liquidation of ghettos in the Baltic States and Belarus. The commander of the Vaivara concentration camp complexes was SS Hauptsturmführer Aumeier (executed in Poland in 1948); the medical section was under the responsibility of the first camp doctor, SS Obersturmführer Franz von Bodmann. Outside security was provided by Estonian police battalions, and internal order was maintained by kapo prisoners. The German staff was small, and the main part of employees were collaborators.
After being evacuated from Estonia due to the approach of the Red Army, Scharfetter served in the Stutthof concentration camp, a branch of Troli. There he injured his leg and from the fall of 1944 he was in a military hospital. In the last months of the war he moved to Hamburg, where he stayed with his family. From 1956 he went to sea as a machinist’s mate on various vessels of the Hapag Company. After his wife wrote to him in November 1960 that the police were interested in them, Scharfetter disembarked from the Hamburg in Port Said and sought asylum in Egypt. In the following years he worked as a technician for an Egyptian state-owned company, but in November 1977 he decided to return to the FRG. He was arrested immediately upon arrival at Munich airport on the basis of a warrant issued by the Stade District Court. On December 13, 1978, the trial began.
The court dealt with the events in the camps of Kuremea (500-1000 prisoners), Joehvi (150 prisoners) and Ereda (up to 1000 prisoners). The first charge was the murder of a group of Jews in Kuremea. According to witnesses, in the winter of 1943-1944 (they had no calendar), Scharfetter arrived at the camp and requested a list of sick and incapacitated prisoners from the camp medic (who was also a local prisoner). Initially he planned to kill these people by injection, for which he prepared a syringe and drugs. With the help of camp commandant Engst, the prisoners on the list – there were 15-22 of them, witness accounts differ – were taken one by one into the barracks, where they were to receive a lethal injection.
But something went wrong: either the victims were in no hurry to die, or the syringe broke, but Scharfetter suddenly started killing them with a pickaxe, and then slit each one’s throat. One victim (a witness said it was a girl) managed to escape from the barracks, but the commandant pushed her back in and Sharfetter shot her. The bodies of those killed were handed over to a team of prisoners to be burned. A member of that team remembered that one of the victims was still giving signs of life, but Sharfetter pushed that person into the fire alive.
News of the incident spread throughout the neighboring camps, and the murderer gained a nickname “Kirkenik,” that is, “the man with the pickaxe.” His atrocities seemed monstrous even for those living in concentration camps, so many prisoners remembered him and were later able to identify him. Scharfetter denied all the accusationa, but the court found him guilty, emphasizing that he had no orders to kill these people and acted out of his own intentions. The minimum of 15 victims was taken as the number of victims from all the testimonies.
The second proven charge against Scharfetter was the murder of three sick prisoners in Joehvi in November-December 1943. Scharfetter arrived at the camp after the outbreak of typhus. The sick prisoners were sent by cars to Vaivara, after which Scharfetter disinfected some rooms and checked the temperature of the remaining prisoners. Identifying three more sick persons, he led them to the camp toilet. One witness heard gunshots and saw a sled with the bodies of the murdered men, whose throats had also been slit. Scharfetter was removing the bodies. The court found him guilty of the murder of the three prisoners.
Other episodes the court was never able to prove:
- 1. The murder of a young Estonian Jewish woman at the beginning of 1944 in Ereda. According to testimony of a witness, Scharfetter, together with another SS man, beat prisoners with rubber truncheons, after they received a few potatoes from some of the Germans, then shot one of them.
- 2. Shooting of a prisoner in Ereda, January-February 1944: according to a witness, Scharfetter shot a 16-year-old prisoner named Rubinstein for not reaching the toilet when he had severe diarrhea.
- 3 Another shooting in Ereda in 1944: according to a witness, Scharfetter shot an inmate on the spot because he could not reach the toilet due to diarrhea and urinated on the spot.
The court gave the Nazi sadist one life sentence for each murder committed. This was an uncommon case in German legal practice. Five years after the verdict, Scharfetter’s daughter began writing petitions for clemency on the grounds of her father’s age and poor health. After two unsuccessful attempts, she turned to Stille Hilfe, an organization founded in 1951 dedicated to alleviating the plight of sentenced Nazis, including through petitions for pardons or reduced sentences. One of the ideological inspirers and longtime activists of Stille Hilfe was Gudrun Burwitz, née Himmler, daughter of the Reichsführer SS.
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In 1988, one of the activists, Ruthild Lehmann-Eriksen, appealed to the President of the Federal Republic of Germany for a third pardon. Emphasizing that Scharfetter had never admitted his guilt and that his conviction was based on the testimony of “indirect” witnesses, she sought to portray her ward as “a sanitation soldier in the war who performed his duty” and fearlessly fought epidemics in the camps. Calling Sharfetter “the only political prisoner in the prison,” she painted the hardships of his life: other prisoners shun him, he is in his 80s, he had senile diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, and he was losing his memory and will to live. This soldier served honorably – just unlucky enough to be in the SS, and now the shadow of this organization, which is blamed for many crimes, falls on him. Is he not worthy of mercy? Would it be humane to let him end his days in prison?
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The Office of the Bundespräsident did not accept the petition, explaining that it did not deal with pardons – this was the competence of the federal states. In March 1989, the Minister-President of Lower Saxony, Ernst Albrecht, also rejected the petition, but Stille Hilfe did not give up. In December Ruthild Lehmann-Eriksen appealed to him again with the same request. Researchers Oliver Schröm and Andrea Röpke in their book “Stille Hilfe für braune Kameraden” state that this organization, founded by Princess Helena Elisabeth von Isenburg together with Bishop Neuheusler, always had contacts with the highest political elite and major parties, including the CDU. For some reason, the fourth time was a success: in February 1990, Albrecht decided to release the mass murderer with 18 life sentences due to his advanced age and health.
Scharfetter was not the only Nazi criminal pardoned in the FRG: similar cases took place regularly in various federal states. The Stille Hilfe played important role in this process.
