Lorenz Hemicker

Because he didn't live in the concentration camp, all the people that were on the construction site were living and drinking and sleeping in a hotel not far away.

So they had very comfortable conditions.

I don't know how much Ernst enjoyed them, of course.

I know from another record that he preferred a relatively simple life.

But nevertheless, he wasn't faced with all the horror of the concentration camp reality.

realities when he was there.

That was the job from other SS officers.

And it was a discovery I made at the very end of my research.

It was possible due to two circumstances.

The one was AI.

I fed a large language model with a complex prompt with all the locations where Ernst had been in his time as a prisoner of war.

There were many of them.

And of his life afterwards.

Exactly.

Ernst was captured at the end of the Second World War in Ebensee in Austria by the US Americans and then spent more than two years as a prisoner of war in their camps.

And the other thing was, after he returned from the prison the rest of his life, he was in Kierspe in North Rhine-Westphalia.

So I fetched the LMM with all this information, and I received a long list with possible locations where his denazification file might be.

And at the very end of the list, there was the Federal Archive of North Rhine-Westphalia in Dusseldorf.

And this is the other thing.

There was a very, very helpful archivist