Kurt Gerstein

Kurt Gerstein was a German engineer, SS officer and member of the Waffen-SS hygiene service who witnessed mass killing using poison gas at Bełżec. He attempted to inform foreign diplomats and church contacts about the extermination programme.

After Germany’s defeat, Gerstein wrote a detailed report but died in French custody in 1945, apparently by suicide. His case remains morally complex because he served within the machinery of persecution while also trying, with limited effect, to expose it.

In William T. Vollmann’s Europe Central, Real and fictional lives are paired across the two regimes: Käthe Kollwitz attempts to preserve humane art under Nazism; Kurt Gerstein enters the SS and tries to expose mass murder; Friedrich Paulus is trapped with the Sixth Army at Stalingrad; and Andrey Vlasov crosses from Soviet command into collaboration with Germany.