Their mission was to defend the IG Farben plant there: duties included supervising the emaciated concentration camp inmates who were sent out each day to be used for forced labour.
[2][7] After the war Gnielka volunteered for an Internship with the newspaper Spandauer Volksblatt [de], based in the Berlin quarter where he had grown up.
Later he moved to Munich[10] where in 1948 he met and teamed up with the cabaret artiste (subsequently better known for her work as an author and television journalist) Ingeborg Euler.
[11] During (or shortly before) the early 1960s they relocated from Bavaria to the "Dillenberger Mühle" (old mill house) at Herold, a village in the hills between Koblenz and Wiesbaden.
[9] The "dismally authentic" text concerns a group of school classmates sent from Berlin to serve as Flakhelfer directly beside the Auschwitz concentration camp complex during the closing part of the Second World War.
[15] With effect from 11 February 1957 he switched, becoming the Wiesbaden local editor for the Frankfurter Rundschau, a regional newspaper launched twelve years earlier which had already acquired a national reach.
[1] At the beginning of 1959 Gnielka received an unexpected reaction to an article he had produced the previous year for the Frankfurter Rundschau on the situation in the Wiesbaden Versorgungsamt (Social Security Office).
[13] When Wulkan left the office, on top of the little sideboard that might normally have accommodated a drink or a small portion of cheese, there was instead the bundle of papers, still tied around with the red ribbon.
They included a numbered listing compiled with characteristic care and precision which showed the names of Auschwitz detainees who had allegedly been "shot while trying to escape" ("auf der Flucht erschossen").
[5][13] On the evening of 14 January 1959, after working through the files he had received from Emil Wulkan, Thomas Gnielka arrived home looking "really green faced" (er ist "ziemlich grün im Gesicht nach Hause gekommen"), according to his wife.
Ingeborg Euler recalled that Thomas Gnielka made a telephone call to Prosecutor Bauer, and a car was sent round to collect the files later that evening.
[18] But when the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials opened in 1963 it was widely acknowledged that the entire investigation had been made possible by the handing over of those vital files by Thomas Gnielka.
Gnielka found the answers provided by Baer's sister-in-law "cautious", and her overblown praise for the human qualities of her sister's "exemplary husband" unpersuasive.
Immediately after its appearance, Richard Baer was recognised by a co-worker on the family estate and former retirement home of Chancellor Bismarck where he was employed as a "forestry concierge", using the name "Neumann".
[1] The report continued, "Nothing made him more angry than the attempts of the old die-hard [atrocity deniers] to keep on cleaning up the old rag dolls [of falsehood] and put them back in the shop window" ("Nichts konnte ihn mehr erbittern, als die Versuche der Ewiggestrigen, die alte Lumpenpuppe frisch aufgeputzt ins Schaufenster zu stellen.").
[13] Left with five children to look after, his widow now moved with the family to Frankfurt where she now plunged into a full-time career as a television journalist with Hessischer Rundfunk.