Kurt Gerstein continued to tell people what he had seen, anyone he
felt would spread the word about the atrocities:
"Taking
my life in my hands every moment, I continued to inform hundreds of
people of these horrible massacres. Among them were the Niemoller
family; Dr. Hochstrasser, the press attaché at the Swiss Legation
in Berlin; Dr. Winter, the coadjutor of the Catholic Bishop of
Berlin - so that he could transmit my information to the Bishop and
to the Pope; Dr. Dibelius, bishop of the Confessing Church, and many
others. In this way, thousands of people were informed by me."
Gerstein
also urged members of the Dutch underground to broadcast his
information by radio to Great Britain. But Kurt Gerstein was ignored
- nothing happened. All were disinclined to believe his gruesome
narrative of mass murder, it was rejected as atrocity propaganda.
All his efforts to inform the church, the Allies and the opinion
abroad proved futile as did his premise that, if the facts became
known, the extermination of the Jews would be stopped.
As months continued to pass and still the Allies had done nothing to
stop the extermination, Gerstein became increasingly frantic. He
behaved in a desperate manner, risking his life every time he spoke
of the death camps to persons he scarcely knew ..
Later during the war a despairing Gerstein risked everything
destroying shipments of Zyklon B gas to be used for the
extermination of thousands of Jewish people. The gas was buried on
the pretext that it had been spoiled in transit.
Kurt Gerstein had joined the SS to find out what was really going on
in the Nazi death camps and he lived through the war with the single
ambition of being alive at its conclusion to testify against the
Nazis and their policies of genocide.
After the war he was branded as a war criminal and a murderer, being
associated with those he himself had condemned.