Kurt Gerstein - : Une vie de résistant

Abstract

Kurt Gerstein (1905-1945), who had been a militant in the Biblical Circles and the Union of Young Christians (Christlicher Verein Junger Menschen) at the time of the Weimar Republic, joined the Confessing Church (Bekennende Kirche) in the Third Reich period. Criticizing the atheism and materialism of the Nazi ideology, he publicly protested against the enrolling of teen-agers in the Hitlerian Youth (Hitlerjugend), which resulted in his losing his job as mine engineer. He then started studying medicine and voluntarily joined the Waffen-SS as a chemist in order to give evidence about Nazi crimes ; the famous Gerstein Report, which he was to draw up in 1945, depicted the experimental use of Zykon B gas. Although Gerstein had passed his information on to the main leaders of the Confessing Church, to some members of the Dutch Resistance, and to two diplomats, his position remained marginal and complex, because, on one hand, he developed some taste for extreme positions, and, on the other hand, his resistance combined with a scathing criticism of the institutional Lutheran Church. It was in vain that he tried to crate an Invisible Church with a team of young supporters.