Eduard Weiter Signed Document - Dachau

Eduard Weiter Signed Document - Dachau
Document from Dachau concentration camp signed bySS-Obersturmbannfuhrer Eduard Weiter. Weiter was the last regular campcommandant of Dachau concentration camp. On 1st March 1943 he was appointedcommander of KZ Dachau but left most od the daily work to his protectionofficer Michael Redwitz.The document reads:Concentration camp Dachau Dachau on 15.November 1943Headquartersto: site management.The damage to the newly bricked chimney for the existing crematorium wasinspected together with Mr. Strauss and the measures to be taken werediscussed.Since the chimney stove works as a result of the great heat, it must not befirmly connected to the outer jacket.The repair order must be presented to me as soon as possible.Signed Weiter SS-ObersturmbannfuhrerEduard Weiter (18 July 1889, Eschwege – 2 May 1945, Itter) was a Germanbureaucrat who became a Schutzstaffel Obersturmbannführer and concentrationcamp commandant during World War II.The son of a horsewhip maker, Weiter worked as a book salesman whilststudying part-time until he joined the German Imperial Army at the age of20. He served as a soldier for ten years, seeing action on the Eastern, Western and Balkan fronts during the course of World War I. He served asdivisional and then regimental paymaster and following the reductions in theGerman military that followed the Treaty of Versailles he took up a similarposition in the Bavarian police.SS careerWeiter continued as an anonymous bureaucrat until in 1936 he retired fromhis paymaster role, the Bavarian police having been incorporated as a unitinto the Wehrmacht. He then took a role with the SS, although once again asa paymaster and even at this point Weiter wrote that he had no particularpolitical beliefs or identity. Indeed, he did not join the Nazi Party until1937. Weiter did win the favour of Oswald Pohl but his ambivalence topolitics slowed down his advancement and even when, during the Second WorldWar, he was put in charge of administering Dachau concentration camp it wasstill a bureaucratic role away from the actual camp.Despite this Weiter succeeded Martin Weiss as camp commandant on 30September 1943. Inmate accounts suggest that Weiter's regime wascharacterised by the same anonymity that had defined his career as he wasrarely seen around the camp. Conditions did decline however, notably due toovercrowding as other more easterly camps were closed but Weiter made littleattempt to expand Dachau to cope with this influx. It is also likely thatWeiter personally killed the dissident Georg Elser, whose death wasofficially announced by Weiter as having been caused by an air raid. Afterthe war a letter to Weiter from Heinrich Müller was discovered in which theorder was given that Elser was to be killed and that the death was to beblamed on a bombing raid. Inmate leaders would later testify that Weiter hadspoken to them shortly before leaving Dachau in an attempt to get them totestify to his lack of direct cruelty at any subsequent trial.Weiter did not face trial as he fled Dachau immediately before itsliberation and made it to castle Schloss Itter in Austria where he died inmysterious circumstances. According to Paul Reynaud on Wednesday May 2,1945, after drunkenly bragging about the recent executions he had ordered atDachau, Weiter shot and killed himself. He was unceremoniously buriedoutside the walls of the castle in an unmarked grave. However historian TomSegev states that he may have been killed by a fellow SS member angry at hislack of ideological conviction.This Typed document from Dachau measures 125mm x 205mm