Eduard Krebsbach
Eduard Krebsbach (8 August 1894 – 28 May 1947) was a former German physician and SS doctor in the Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen from July 1941 to August 1943. He was executed for crimes against humanity committed at the Mauthausen camp. Concentration camp career. In the autumn of 1941, Krebsbach became Standortarzt (garrison doctor) of Mauthausen concentration camp, tasked with supervising medical care and all medical personnel of the camp. He was responsible for initiating mass killing by lethal injection to the heart of handicapped and sick prisoners. Under his supervision approximately 900 Russian, Polish and Czech prisoners  were murdered by lethal injections of gasoline. Because of this, inmates nicknamed him 'Dr Spritzbach' (Dr Injection). Krebsbach was also responsible for the construction of a gas chamber in the basement of the hospital in the Mauthausen camp. Krebsbach often inspected the prisoners and conducted selections for execution. A former inmate recalled Krebsbach's actions during such an inspection: Krebsbach was transferred to the Kaiserwald concentration camp in Latvia during the autumn of 1943. The reason for his transfer is believed to be his shooting of Josef Breitenfellner, a vacationing German soldier, who awoke Krebsbach from his sleep on 22  May 1943. While at Kaiserwald, Krebsbach conducted selections of camp inmates for execution, by forcing the prisoners to perform physical exercises to determine their strength and then identifying the two thousand weakest to be killed. Following the camp's closure, Krebsbach resumed a career as “Epidemic Inspector for Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania”. Soon after, he transferred to the regular army as a senior staff doctor, serving until late 1944. However this was short lived and at the end of 1944 he left the army and worked once again as a company doctor in a spinning mill in Kassel. Dachau War  Crime Trial. Following the end of World War II he was arrested and given the death penalty during the Dachau trials conducted by the US military on 13 May 1946 and was executed by hanging on 28 May 1947 at Landsberg Prison in Landsberg am Lech. The following is from the court record of the Dachau trials (quoted in Hans Maršálek, "Die Geschichte des Konzentrationslagers Mauthausen", p. 174):