Leder Erwin

Leder, Erwin Dr. Erwin Leder was born in Vienna in 1914. A physician by profession, Leder was drafted into the German army, and in the fall of 1941 was stationed in the city of Sluzk, Belarus, where among other duties, he was chief medical officer in a prison camp for Soviet soldiers. The camp held some 15,000 inmates, most of them POWs, but also citizens from the surrounding area who had been arrested by the Germans. Because of a lack of medicine and decent medical care, some 70-80 people died in the camp each day – mostly of typhus. When Leder arrived at the camp, he acquired medical and food supplies and instituted policies that lowered the mortality rate to three to five people a day. While in the camp, Leder worked closely with Dr. Raphael Gabovich, a Soviet Jewish doctor who had been taken prisoner. Leder understood that Gabovich, who identified himself by the Ukrainian name Philip Ivanovich Krivorutschko, was Jewish, but nevertheless appointed him as the assistant doctor of the POW camp. Gabovich told Leder about the difficult conditions in the city’s Jewish ghetto, and Leder decided to do what he could to help the Jews living there. With the help of two Jewish women from the ghetto who worked cleaning the building of the German headquarters where his office was located, Leder smuggled packages of medicines, medical equipment and food into the ghetto. By this act, he saved the lives of many ghetto Jews, at significant risk to himself. When Leder found out that Germans planned to kill some of the ghetto residents, he told Gabovich, who passed the news on to the Jews in the ghetto. Many of the Jews hid, and thus were saved from a murderous Aktion. Some inmates of the camp were Jews, communist commissars, and other “undesirables” whose lives depended on the Germans remaining unaware of their real identities. Some of them were hidden in the quarantine rooms of the hospital, where the guards never entered, and when other prisoners died, they received theidentity papers of the deceased, and returned to the camp under new, “safe” identities. Leder was aware of these activities, and signed the release papers of such prisoners who left the hospital under false identities, thus helping to save their lives. In July 1942, the two Jewish women that helped Leder smuggle packages into the ghetto were caught in the act by the Germans. They were shot dead immediately. Leder was suspected of giving the women the packages, but after they were killed, there was no means to prove his culpability. Instead, the Germans decided to banish Leder to the Russian front in November 1942. In 1945, he was badly wounded in combat, but survived. After the war, he returned to Vienna and continued to work as a doctor. In 1943, the Sluzk POW camp was destroyed and its inmates were transferred to other camps. Dr. Gabovich managed to escape in 1944 and rejoined the Red Army. After the war, Gabovich served as a doctor in the Ukraine and as a professor of medicine at various universities and wrote 38 medical books. In 1990 he immigrated to Israel and settled in Tel Aviv. On March 29, 1999, Yad Vashem recognized Erwin Leder as Righteous Among the Nations.