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.