Thomas Gnielka

| death_place = Herold, West Germany | occupation = Child soldier,
journalist/reporter | education = | alma_mater = , Berlin-Spandau, Germany | employer = | party = | notable_works = | spouse = Ingeborg Euler | website = }}

Thomas Gnielka (1928 – January 1965) was a West German journalist.

Aged 15, he was one of a group of senior boys from his Berlin secondary school to be conscripted for war service. The boys were sent to a base near Auschwitz. Given a number guard assignments at the concentration camp during the second part of 1944, Gnielka became aware of various Shoah atrocities several months before the arrival of the Red army in January 1945 opened the way for the Nazi atrocities to become more widely known. He never forgot those experiences, and as an investigative reporter for a regional newspaper reporter in the 1950s and early 1960s he played a pivotal role in ensuring that these more nightmarish aspects of Nazi Germany could not simply be forgotten. A file of papers passed on by Thomas Gnielka to the state (prosecutor) Fritz Bauer triggered the Auschwitz Trials of 1963–65 in Frankfurt, although Gnielka himself died of skin cancer some months before August 1965 when the court delivered its verdicts on the twenty defendants. Provided by Wikipedia