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Adam Grünewald

SS officer

Adam Grünewald (20 October 1902 in Frickenhausen am Main – 22 January 1945 in Veszprém) was a German Schutzstaffel officer and National Socialist German Workers' Party concentration camp commandant.

The son of a carpenter who died when he was 8, Grünewald apprenticed as a baker but found work difficult to come by when the First World War ended and the demobilised soldiers entered the labour market. Attracted to the nationalist propaganda prevalent at the time Grünewald joined the Freikorps before signing on with the army for a 12-year stint. Leaving the army as a staff sergeant in April 1931 Grünewald again struggled to find employment and so joined the Sturmabteilung. He rose to the rank of Obersturmbannführer in the SA before switching to the SS shortly after the Night of the Long Knives.

In 1943, Grünewald succeeded Karl Chmielewski as commandant of Herzogenbusch concentration camp (aka Kamp Vught). However like his predecessor, he too, was removed. He found guilty of excessive cruelty to prisoners for his role in the Bunker Tragedy in January 1944. The charges were partly motivated the regime's desire reduce public anger over the incident, which could fuel the local resistance.

Grünewald was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison. He was spared a harsher sentence on the grounds of his military service and the court accepting his claim that he "didn't wish for the death of ten women."

In March 1944, after serving nearly a month in prison, Grünewald was pardoned, but stripped of his rank and ordered to fight on the Eastern Front as a common soldier. He finished the war with the 3rd SS Division Totenkopf and died during a German counteroffensive in the siege of Budapest. His final rank was SS-Sturmbannführer.

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