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Kasriel K. Eilender, M.D.

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THE BARBER OF GOERLITZ - A MEMOIR

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Chapter Four

The Extraordinary Testimony 

          of a Mass-Murdering Ex-Gardener

Alfred Metzner

Arrested 

& Interrogated

March 10, 1947 

Testimony Describing

War Crimes

------

The Military

Police Chief Schibilla

took pictures

all day during the

 slaughter.

Slonim was a district capital that was a mother ghetto to which satellite ghettos belonged, among them Dereczyn and many other smaller communities in the region. Many people used to say that they had been in the Slonim Ghetto, when actually they had been in one of the satellites.

The commissioner of Slonim district in occupied White Russia, Gerhard Erren, belonged to the civilian administration. His main responsi-bility was to organize, implement and conduct the mass annihilation of its Jewish population. 

Remarkably, although Gerhard Erren never witnessed an execution, he was the planner and organizer of each execution, which took place in Slonim and surrounding many smaller communities. 

Erren followed up on each "action" as the Nazi’s called the mass murder of women, men and children. Each evening, after the execution, the commissioner chaired a meeting, which included representatives of the army, military police, as well as the local auxiliary police. Some individuals were praised and rewarded for the efficiency with which so many victims were killed. He also reprimanded those who fell behind in the number of killings.

White Russia was divided by the occupying authorities into other districts similar to Slonim and were administered by a general commissioner Wilhelm Kube. He was a lawyer and close friend of Hitler. He was a rabid anti-semite and did not live much longer than his victims. In September of 1943 during a big party at his residence in Minsk, the capital of White Russia, a female Russian partisan who apparently worked for a while as a maid put an explosive device under his mattress. When Kube went to sleep he was killed.

In the summer of 1942, it was feared that the time for the Jewish people in the Ghetto of Dereczyn was running out. News came that the Slonim Ghetto was in flames and it was thought that Dereczyn would be next. Some time remained, however, because the murder machine did not have enough steam or people to do everything simultaneously and because some individuals were still useful to the Nazis.

The Dereczyn Ghetto had over 3,000 people crowded into about 40 houses. About 500 people lived outside of the Ghetto.

In charge of the police team was a heavyset man, not so young, called Schibilla. He was a Polizeimeister by rank. He had a Jewish mistress and one remark of his sufficed to predict what the fate of the Jews was going to be. One Jew drowned himself instead of suffering and Schibilla remarked, "He is a smart man, he did the right thing."

The slogan that a drowning man will grab a razor blade to save himself has some merit. For a long time before the event of the final solu-tion for this community, people had been building shelters in little houses, in bigger houses, some in cellars, attics, behind false walls, in empty barrels, using all kinds of ingenious ideas to hide. A small number of people thus had been saved and escaped to the forests. However, the Germans discovered most of the shelters and the people perished. 

The "civilian commissioner" Erren and his helpers and advisors had planned the mass murder action of Dereczyn Ghetto, and they prepared pits and graves for the bodies. Several hundred mobilized collaborators led by German police officers and some other volunteers, among them an army sergeant, a notorious murderer called Muck, surrounded the ghetto in the early morning hours of July 29, 1942. 

The murder method was clearly described in the testimony of Alfred Metzner, who took an active part in many "actions" including Slonim, Dereczyn and many other communities in the region. The military police chief Schibilla took pictures all day during the slaughter.

It confirms what Daniel Goldhagen stated in his book, "Hitler’s Willing Executioners" and what Professor Christian Browning described in his book, "Simple German People, 101 Police Battalion." Many of them were simple people who learned very fast how to become willing execution-ers of the regime.

Many of these Germans came from decent families, were married and had children, and yet they committed heinous crimes, killing, maiming and torturing women, children, the elderly and sick. Naturally, we should not blame the entire German nation. There have also been people who opposed this lapse of humanity toward the Jews, gypsies and Slavs. The present young German children and grandchildren of the perpetrators should not be blamed for it.

The testimony of Alfred Meizner, a former gardener, as well as a taxi driver from Berlin, who during the war had the immense power of deciding the life or death of many innocent people, is just an example of all of these actions by many simple German people in most of the occupied eastern European countries.

There were instances of German military police, army, railroad personnel, some of them volunteers, acting as many collaborators, which means mimicking the work of the Eisatzgruppen and their notorious anni-hilation SS groups. They rampaged during the war in the Soviet Union and became well known for their mass killings of mostly Jews, Russian prisoners

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