Talk:S. S. Capt Steiner

Proposed backstory for S. S. Captain Steiner

Eduard Steiner was born on July 12, 1912 in Berlin. His mother was a bookkeeper for her husband's construction firm. He acquired both of his parents' key skills while growing, and in 1930 he went to the Technical University of Berlin to earn an engineering degree.

By the time he graduated, Hitler was in power. Eduard was not pro-Nazi at first but that soon changed as he came under the spell of Hitler the builder. By 1938 he had befriended members of the SS, who persuaded him to join the organization and train at Bad Tölz.

He did not believe all of the Nazis' anti-Semitic rhetoric, but as a "good German" he had boycotted Jewish businesses since 1933 and he was determined to earn an SS commission. To that end, he sweated over an essay which he hoped would be at a good Nazi level, strong but not Streicher-shrill. The result was, to his evaluators, a masterpiece. Eduard performed well in every other way. Some in the SS still had reservations about his late-blooming interest in Nazi ideology -- until they discovered that he was a cousin of Colonel Felix Steiner.

After completing his time at Bad Tölz, Eduard joined Colonel Steiner's regiment as a lieutenant in time for the France campaign of 1940. By 1941 this regiment had been incorporated into the Viking Division, led by General Steiner

Beginning in the summer of 1941, Viking participated in the war against Russia. Eduard was impressed with how his general kept his multi-ethnic division in good order and tried to fight clean. But few were immune to the sentiment that Russia was a cruel land and had to be treated cruelly.

Equipment troubleshooting became part-and-parcel of Eduard's job. The defect count of arriving ammunition, guns and vehicles made him wonder what was happening to German factories. In June 1942 Eduard met a former concentration camp officer named Thorsten Goermer. His stories of brutalized slave workers caused Eduard to understand why the quality of German products had become erratic. Goermer also told of corruption and debauchery among camp staff, including the leadership.

Also that June, the Nazi Propaganda Ministry publicized the massacre at Lidice for the world to know. In the presence of General Steiner and his staff, Eduard observed that any enemy recruiter hoping for idle time was bound to be disappointed. He got no argument.

Eduard served through Viking's advance into the Caucasus Mountains until he was severely wounded in November. Recuperation took the better part of a year, over which time he noted increasingly intense Allied air raids on German cities, including Berlin on 22-23 November 1943.

On the latter day, Eduard, by then a captain, left Berlin for his new assignment -- at Auschwitz. He came under the command of Arthur Liebehenshel, who had abolished some of the harsh punishments imposed by the notorious Rudolf Hoss and tried to improve camp discipline. But Liebehenshel, like Hoss, participated in mass murder.

Eduard shuttled around the Auschwitz sub-camps. Among his tasks was bringing more efficiency to the construction site of the synthetic rubber factory at Monowitz, but he made little progress. Management seemed blind to the most obvious solution: better nutrition for the slaves.

In May 1944, Hoss resumed command of Auschwitz. The mass murder rate reached new highs as the Nazis tried to cleanse Hungary, sending heavy trainloads to the extermination facility. Eduard requested a transfer. In June he was sent to Peenemunde as adjutant to concentration camp commandant Colonel Lothar Schneck. The colonel was lazy, which meant that Eduard became the de facto commandant. He quickly came to identify with Liebehenshel's earlier struggle at Auschwitz.

Eduard did what he could, but as at the Auschwitz complex the Nazi system stymied him. He did prevent a report from being filed against Professor Bauer, who had smuggled food to prisoners. When local Gestapo officers wanted to arrest Doctor Riemann on alleged ideological failure, Eduard convinced them to take no action until he had done his own investigation. In a talk with the two scientists which went on all night (that long because Eduard's indoctrination, with its emphasis on loyalty, still loomed large), Eduard agreed to defect with them. Angilbas (talk) 11:04, January 25, 2015 (UTC)