BACH-ZELEWSKI, ERICH VON DEM (1899–1972)
Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski was a senior SS commander who took charge of “bandit fighting” against partisans and others (mostly civilians) designated as a danger to Nazi rule in occupied Eastern Europe. In August 1944, he was instrumental in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
Erich Julius Eberhard von Zelewski was born on March 1, 1899, in Lauenberg (Lębork), Pomerania, to insurance inspector Otto Jan von Zelewski and his wife Elżbieta, of Kashubian gentry background. In 1933, Erich added “von dem Bach” to his surname, and in November 1941, he removed “Zelewski” because of its Polish-sounding origin.
Zelewski’s impoverished father died on April 12, 1911, when his son was just 12 years old. Upon Zelewski’s completion of school in 1914, his uncle persuaded him to join the military, and on November 9, 1914, he enlisted in the German army. He served throughout World War I, was wounded twice, and earned the Iron Cross First and Second Class. In 1916, aged 17, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant.
After the war, Zelewski served in a Freikorps against Polish Silesian rebels. He served as a Reichswehr officer until 1924, when he left the army and returned to his farm in Düringshof (Bogdaniec). He later evinced shame that his three sisters had each married a Jewish man and claimed that this had forced him to leave the army.
He enrolled in and then served with the border guards (Grenzschutz) between 1924 and 1930. On October 23, 1925, he legally changed his surname to von dem Bach-Zelewski.
In 1930, he left the Grenzschutz and joined the Nazi Party. He became a member of the SS in 1931 and attained the rank of SS-Brigadeführer in late 1933. He served as a member of the Reichstag representing Breslau (Wrocław) from 1932 to 1944. After a quarrel with his SS staff officer, Anton von Hohberg und Buchwald, Bach-Zelewski had him killed during the Röhm Putsch on July 2, 1934.
From 1934 on, Bach-Zelewski led SS units, initially in East Prussia and after 1936 in Silesia. In 1937, he was higher SS and police leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF) in Silesia.
In November 1939, after the German occupation of Poland, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler offered Bach-Zelewski the role of strengthening Deutschtum (German influence) in Silesia, with responsibility for mass resettlement and the confiscation of Polish private property. By August 1940, as part of Aktion Saybusch, some 18,000 to 20,000 Poles from Żywiec County were forced to leave their homes.
Because Bach-Zelewski’s actions had created overcrowded prisons, his assistant, SS-Oberführer Arpad Wigand, had to find a new location for prisoners. As a result, a concentration camp was created and sited in former Austrian cavalry barracks at Auschwitz (Oświęcim). The first transport arrived there on June 14, 1940, and two weeks later, Bach-Zelewski personally visited the camp.
Later, during Operation Barbarossa, Bach-Zelewski served as HSSPF in occupied Belarus. In 1941, he became a general of the Waffen-SS and was involved in action on the Eastern Front until the end of 1942. During this period, he took part in many atrocities; from July to September 1941, he oversaw the extermination of Jews in Riga and Minsk at the hands of Einsatzgruppe B, led by Arthur Nebe, while also visiting other sites of mass killings, such as Białystok, Grodno, Baranovichi, Mogilev, and Pinsk. He regularly cabled headquarters on the extermination progress; for example, a message on August 22, 1941, stated, “Thus the figure in my area now exceeds the thirty thousand mark.”
While in a Berlin hospital to treat “intestinal ailments” in February 1942, Bach-Zelewski experienced “hallucinations connected with the shooting of Jews.” Before returning to duty in July, he asked Himmler for reassignment to antipartisan duty. Accordingly, through 1943, he took command of antipartisan units on the central front, a special command created by Adolf Hitler. Bach-Zelewski was the only HSSPF in the occupied Soviet territories to retain full authority over the police after Hans-Adolf Prützmann and Friedrich Jeckeln lost their authority to the civil administration.
Sometime in June 1943, Himmler announced the creation of bandit-fighting formations (Bandenkampfverbände), with Bach-Zelewski named as commander. Once the Wehrmacht had secured territorial objectives, the Bandenkampfverbände then ensured the security of communications facilities, roads, railways, and waterways, followed by rural communities and agricultural and forestry resources. The SS oversaw the collection of the harvest, deemed critical to strategic operations. Any Jews or communists in the area were killed. Under Bach-Zelewski, the formations murdered 35,000 civilians in Riga and more than 200,000 in Belarus and eastern Poland. His methods produced a high civilian death toll but relatively minor military gains. After an operation was completed, any military presence was removed, and partisan groups would then resume where they had left off.
In July 1943, Bach-Zelewski took command of all antipartisan actions in Belgium, Belarus, France, the General Government, the Netherlands, Norway, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, and other areas. His major focus of his activities, however, remained confined to Belarus and adjacent parts of Russia.
On August 2, 1944, Bach-Zelewski took charge of all German troops fighting the Polish Home Army of General Tadeusz Bór-Komorowski during the Warsaw Uprising. The German forces were made up of 17,000 men, including the Dirlewanger Brigade of convicted criminals. Units under Bach-Zelewski’s command killed approximately 200,000 civilians, more than 65,000 in mass executions.
Warsaw was destroyed in the process. During the campaign to reduce the city, the Woła massacre occurred—a brutal act of systematic killing by German troops of between 40,000 and 50,000 people in the Woła district of Warsaw. On September 30, 1944, Bach-Zelewski was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross for his actions in Warsaw.
With the end of the war, Bach-Zelewski hid and tried to leave Germany, but on August 1, 1945, he was arrested by U.S. military police. In return for testifying at Nuremberg against his former superiors, Bach-Zelewski was never indicted for war crimes, nor was he extradited to Poland or the USSR. He left prison in 1949.
In 1958, however, Bach-Zelewski was convicted of killing Anton von Hohberg und Buchwald during the Night of the Long Knives back in 1934 and was sentenced to four and a half years’ imprisonment. In 1961, he was arrested again and tried for the murder of six German communists in 1933. He was convicted and sentenced to an additional 10 years in home detention. Neither indictment mentioned his wartime role in Poland and the Soviet Union or his participation in the Holocaust, although he openly accused himself as being a mass murderer.
Bach-Zelewski gave evidence for Adolf Eichmann’s defense in Israel in May 1961, to the effect that operations in Russia and parts of Poland were not subject to the orders of Eichmann’s office nor was Eichmann able to give orders to the officers in charge of these units.
Bach-Zelewski died in a Munich prison on March 8, 1972, a week after his 73rd birthday.
Klaus Barbie, the infamous “Butcher of Lyon,” was head of the Gestapo in Lyon, France, and earned a reputation for his sadism and brutality during World War II.
Nikolaus Klaus Barbie was born into a Roman Catholic family on October 25, 1913, in Bad Godesberg, Germany. His parents were both teachers, and he attended the school where his father taught until moving to a boarding school in Trier in 1923. The family joined him there in 1925. In 1933, Barbie’s brother and his abusive, alcoholic father both died, which thwarted Barbie’s plans to study theology or enter academia. Unemployed, he was drafted into the Nazi labor service (Reichsarbeitsdienst); membership was compulsory for all young German men and women. A strong nationalist, Barbie joined the local Hitler Youth group in April 1933. In September 1935, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD, security service) branch of the SS.
With the outbreak of war in 1939, Barbie rose quickly in the SD. In May 1940, he was sent to the SD office in The Hague, Netherlands. There, his main task was to arrest Jews and German political refugees who fled to the Netherlands, and he organized and participated in mass arrests and deportations of Jews. After his promotion to SS-Obersturmführer, Barbie returned to Germany to be trained in counterinsurgency work. In November 1942, he was sent to Dijon, and after German forces took over Vichy France, he was deployed to Lyon as head of the local Gestapo, in charge of 25 officers. His operational area covered Lyon, the Jura and Hautes-Alpes police departments, and Grenoble.
In Lyon, Barbie became renowned for his brutal policies aimed at French resistance fighters and Jews. He personally tortured prisoners—men, women, and children—and has since been blamed directly for the deaths of 4,000 people. Barbie also oversaw the deportation of Jews to the death camps in the East. In April 1944, he ordered the residents of the Jewish children’s home at Izieu to be transported to Auschwitz. Forty-one children, aged 3 to 11, were gassed.
Barbie’s postwar notoriety came primarily from the arrest and death by torture of Jean Moulin, the highest-ranking member of the French Resistance. Hot needles were shoved under Jean Moulin’s fingernails. His knuckles were broken by catching them in a door hinge and slamming the door until the knuckles broke. His handcuffs were screwed so tightly that they broke through the bones of his wrists. Moulin would not talk; he was whipped and beaten until his face was an unrecognizable pulp. Unconscious and mute, he was shown to other resistance leaders being interrogated at Gestapo headquarters; this was the last time Moulin was seen alive. For this work, Barbie was awarded the First Class Iron Cross with Swords, with the decoration presented by Adolf Hitler himself.
As American forces approached Lyon in August 1944, Barbie ordered the execution of 120 prisoners. Fleeing the city, he later returned to execute 20 former collaborators. After the war, he was recruited by the Western Allies. Initially he worked until 1947 for the British. He was later protected and employed by American intelligence agents because of his “police skills” and anticommunist zeal in being able to infiltrate communist cells in the German Communist Party. In 1949, France requested that Barbie be extradited to stand trial for his crimes. With American assistance in stalling and bureaucratic red tape, Barbie had time to flee to Bolivia with his family in 1951. Assuming the name Klaus Altmann, he remained unidentified for 20 years.
In 1971, Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld succeeded in locating Barbie, but at this time, he enjoyed the protection of Bolivia’s right-wing government. After long negotiations and pressure from France’s socialist government, it was only in February 1983 that the newly elected Bolivian government of Hernán Siles Zuazo arrested and extradited Barbie to France to stand trial.
In 1984, Barbie was notified that he was to be tried for crimes committed while in charge of the Gestapo in Lyon between 1942 and 1944. Many of the charges were dropped due to new laws protecting people accused of crimes under the Vichy regime and in French Algeria.
On May 11, 1987, however, Barbie’s trial in Lyon commenced, a jury trial before the Rhône Cour d’assises. The trial was filmed because of its historical value. The lead defense attorney, Jacques Vergès, argued that Barbie’s actions were no worse than the ordinary actions of colonialists worldwide and that his trial was selective prosecution. During his trial, Barbie stated, “When I stand before the throne of God, I shall be judged innocent.” Overall, he was held responsible for some 26,000 killings. Found guilty on July 4, 1987, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. On September 25, 1991, at the age of 77, he died in prison in Lyon of leukemia.
Rudolf Batz was an SS officer who commanded Einsatzkommando 2 in the Baltic and was therefore one of those responsible for the mass murder of Jews in the Baltic States (particularly Latvia) between July 1 and November 4, 1941.
Batz was born in Bad Langensalza, Thuringia, on November 10, 1903. He graduated from school in March 1922 and studied law at the Universities of Munich and Göttingen, graduating in 1934. In the meantime, on May 1, 1933, he joined the Nazi Party. On December 10, 1935, he joined the SS and was assigned to the legal department at Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. In June 1936, he became a deputy Gestapo leader in Breslau (Wrocław), and from the beginning of October the same year, he also served as a political adviser to the government in Breslau. Moving to Linz, Austria, in mid-July 1939, he took charge of the Gestapo there, prior to a further transfer to the state police headquarters in Hanover in December 1939. In 1940, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer, rising to Obersturmbannführer in 1942.
Although based in Hanover, Batz also received temporary assignments outside Germany. In mid-October 1940, he was sent to The Hague, in the occupied Netherlands, where he served in a security policing function; this lasted until early January 1941. Then in November 1941, he was appointed to command Einsatzkommando 2 (EK2) in Einsatzgruppe A. There were four Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing squads), comprising around 3,000 men, divided into several Einsatzkommandos. Their task was to exterminate Jews, Polish intellectuals, Roma, communists, and other “enemies of the Reich” behind the advancing German combat troops.
EK2 comprised about 40 men. After the start of Operation Barbarossa in the summer of 1941, EK2 was given responsibility for the mass murder of Jews in the Baltic States. Batz’s second in command, Gerhard Freitag, would later testify that Batz presided over the planning and execution of Jewish men, women, and children. In August 1941, Batz and Freitag reported to SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker (the head of Einsatzgruppe A) that they and their men had exceeded the death toll by up to two or three times that of other units, who were not pulling their weight in the murder process.
During his time with EK2, Batz retained his office in Hannover, but in September 1943, he was sent to Kraków to command the Security Police and Security Service there. In this role, his task was to suppress the Polish resistance movement; where he could, he also organized the deportation of Jews to extermination camps. Two months later, however, in November, he returned to Hanover as head of the Gestapo. Here, he organized the deportation of Jews from the city and its adjacent region. The first transport from Hanover was sent to Riga.
At the beginning of 1945, Batz was transferred to Dortmund as Gestapo head. At this stage of the war, his main role was the control and punishment of forced laborers and anti-Nazi resisters. Under his command, hundreds were murdered.
With the end of the war, Batz assumed a false identity. Married and the father of three children, he lived undetected for 15 years in the Federal Republic of Germany. On November 11, 1960, however, he was arrested and charged with crimes against humanity over his involvement in the mass murder of Jews in Latvia. While in custody awaiting trial, he committed suicide in his prison cell on February 8, 1961.
Erich Bauer was an SS-Oberscharführer at the Sobibór death camp. He was renowned as one of the worst murderers operating in the gas chamber, where he was known as the Gasmeister.
Hermann Erich Bauer was born in Berlin on March 26, 1900. During World War I, he served as a soldier in the German army before being captured by the French and living out the conflict as a prisoner of war. With the ascent to office of the Nazis in 1933, Bauer, at that time a tram conductor, joined the Nazi Party and the SA. In 1940, he began working with the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program, learning how to kill through the introduction of lethal injections and gas those with physical and/or psychological disabilities. At the start, he was assigned duties as a driver, but he moved into other areas of the process as he gained experience and knowledge of the program.
Early in 1942, Bauer received a new assignment when he was transferred to occupied Poland and the Lublin district, under the command of SS- und Polizeiführer Odilo Globocnik. In April 1942, he was deployed to the death camp at Sobibór and given the SS rank of Oberscharführer. He was to remain at Sobibór for the next 19 months, until the camp was closed in December 1943.
Given his experience in the T-4 program, Bauer was placed in charge of gassing procedures in Lager III at Sobibór, while he still drove trucks from time to time. Cruel and uncouth, he was generally remembered as a heavy drinker who cared little for his personal appearance and was frequently unkempt while on duty. He was naturally sadistic toward those under his command and often whipped, beat, and shot at the prisoners. He also kept attack dogs, trained to target the prisoners upon command. As gassings were taking place, he was usually seen on the roof checking the progress of the extermination procedure. It was from this that he picked up the nickname Badmeister (Bath Master); after the war, other survivors remembered he was also called Gasmeister (Gas Master).
Because of his brutality and unpredictability, the prisoner underground identified Bauer as one of the first who would have to be eliminated in the event of any uprising. As things turned out, when the uprising took place on October 14, 1943, Bauer was not present; he had gone to nearby Chełm to search for supplies. Returning sooner than expected, however, Bauer found that another SS-Oberscharführer, Rudolf Beckmann, had already been killed. Bauer opened fire at the two Jewish prisoners unloading his van, and the uprising began in earnest. The result would ultimately see 11 SS officers killed, the camp guards overpowered, the armory seized, and the inmates bursting through the wire and making a break for the forest outside. About 300 out of the 600 inmates managed to escape, with about 60 surviving to see the end of the war.
Within days of the uprising, Heinrich Himmler ordered the Sobibór site closed, the remaining prisoners killed or sent to other death camps, and the guards redeployed. The killing apparatus was to be dismantled, and the site was to be planted with trees.
Bauer was sent to other duties, and when the war ended in 1945, he was arrested by American forces in Austria. Imprisoned through the following year, he was released during 1946 and sent to his native Berlin to clear up debris left by the massive bombing the city had suffered in the last year of the war.
Two former Sobibór prisoners, Samuel Lerer and Esther Raab, recognized him in 1949; he was rearrested and sent for trial in 1950. Despite his protestations of innocence during the trial, Bauer’s claims to have been only a truck driver did not convince any of those in the courtroom. On May 8, 1950, he was sentenced to death for crimes against humanity, a sentence commuted to life imprisonment, owing to the fact that the Federal Republic of Germany had since abolished the death penalty.
Over the next 21 years of his custody in Berlin’s Alt-Moabit Prison, Bauer spoke publicly about his time at Sobibór, admitting his involvement in the mass murders with words such as “I cannot exclude any member of the Sobibór camp staff of taking part in the extermination operation” and “Each of us had at some point carried out every camp duty in Sobibór.”
Erich Bauer died while still serving his sentence in Berlin’s Tegel prison on February 4, 1980.
Kurt Becher was chief of the Economic Department of the SS Command in Hungary during the German occupation in 1944. In this capacity, he negotiated with the Hungarian Jewish community in the failed Blood for Goods initiative, the acquisition of the massive Manfred Weiss industrial complex at Csepel, and the Kasztner train.
Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was born to a wealthy equestrian family on September 12, 1906, in Hamburg. After completing his education, he worked in a Hamburg food store as a clerk from 1928 until the outbreak of World War II. He was a competent horse breeder and rider, and after the Nazi seizure of power by Adolf Hitler in 1933, Becher joined the Reiter-SS (the SS cavalry regiment) in 1934.
In 1937, Becher became a member of the NSDAP. From 1939 on, he was in the SS- Totenkopfverbände first equestrian unit in Poland. This infamous unit was used in Warsaw and in the war against the Soviet Union after 1941 to fight guerillas. In the fight against resistance fighters in the Pripet Marshes (Belarus), standing orders read that “Every partisan is to be shot. Jews are to be deemed partisans.” During this early phase of the Final Solution, about 14,000 Jews were murdered by Becher’s unit. His promotions were rapid. From SS-Obersturmführer, he was promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer in mid-March 1942, and then he was transferred to the SS leadership office. In 1944, Becher was promoted twice: first to SS-Sturmbannführer on January 30 and then to SS-Obersturmbannführer in October. That same year, he was awarded the German Cross in Gold.
In the spring of 1944, Becher headed the Waffen-SS Equipment Branch, reporting to Oswald Pohl. Following the German invasion of Hungary in March 1944, Pohl, acting on orders from Heinrich Himmler, sent Becher to Hungary to acquire 20,000 horses and other war material for the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS.
Becher played a crucial part in taking control of the massive Manfred Weiss armaments firm at Csepel. Although owned by a Jewish family, it was under majority Aryan control by that family’s non-Jewish members. Both Himmler and Hermann Göring were interested in this enterprise, with its 20,000 workers, coal mines, munitions, and Messerschmitt engine plants. Germany could not appropriate Hungary’s industrial plants, as treaty obligations meant that Germany was not to violate Hungary’s sovereignty; accordingly, negotiations took place between Becher and Ferenc Chorin, representing the Weiss family, over how to proceed.
The agreement reached was mixed. In return for the purchase for 3 million Reichmarks of the Aryan 51 percent controlling share, the SS would permit 46 members of the Weiss family to leave Hungary, taking some of their valuables and foreign currency. Nine of the 46 family members would be held as hostages until the agreement was signed, and the remainder would be given safe passage to neutral Portugal and Switzerland. The nine hostages were to follow on May 17, 1944, the date when the transaction was to be completed. The deal was signed on May 17, 1944.
The 51 percent controlling interest was to be administered by Becher’s holding company for 25 years, and then it would be returned to the Aryan branch of family. Becher and the SS would get 5 percent of the gross income for their service as trustees. This agreement was approved by both Himmler and Adolf Hitler, but it upset Göring, the German Foreign Office, and Döme Sztójay’s Hungarian government, as it removed this massive valuable enterprise from their control.
Becher was also appointed by Adolf Eichmann to head negotiations with Rezső (Rudolf) Kasztner and the Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee of Budapest for ransoming 15,000 Hungarian Jews incarcerated in Bergen-Belsen and their transfer to Switzerland.
On April 25, 1944, Eichmann summoned Rescue Committee member Joel Brand and offered a deal under which the Nazis would “sell” 1 million Jews in exchange for certain goods to be obtained from outside Hungary. In this Blood for Goods scheme, the Jews would not be permitted to remain in Hungary but would be delivered, via Germany, upon receipt of certain goods. Britain called Brand to a meeting in Cairo, imprisoned him in a military prison, and interrogated him for several days.
The mission failed, however, on three grounds. First, the Allies saw this offer as Germany obtaining war material from the Allies; second, the USSR could interpret these discussions as the Western Allies jointly negotiating with the enemy and ignoring the Russians; and third, Germany would use a rejection of the proposal as justification for extreme measures against the Jews. On June 15, 1944, Britain formally briefed the Soviet Union of the proposition, and the USSR immediately vetoed it. On July 19, 1944, the BBC picked up the story and stressed that the “monstrous offer” of the Germans to barter Jews for munitions was a loathsome attempt to blackmail and sow suspicion among the Allies. Kasztner and Joel Brand’s wife, Hansi, were imprisoned in Hungary when Brand failed to return promptly.
On June 14, 1944, Kasztner was informed by Eichmann that he was willing to allow 30,000 Hungarian Jews to be held in Austria as a demonstration of his goodwill. In return, he demanded an immediate payment of 5 million Swiss francs. Eichmann’s offer was based on the instructions he had received from Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the RHSA, who was desperate for slave labor to service Austrian industries. The selection of which Jews would be chosen as slave labor was left up to the Jewish leadership. From June 25 to 28, 1944, several transports of approximately 20,000 Jews were directed to Strasshof, a concentration camp near Vienna. About 75 percent of them survived the war.
Kasztner then resumed negotiations with Eichmann to save more Jews. Following discussions with Dieter Wisliceny, Eichmann agreed to allow a special group from Kolozsvár (Cluj) to come to Budapest. Kasztner could not resist the chance to save his family, friends, and most deserving members of the Kolozsvár community, and 338 were taken to Budapest on June 10, 1944. The Jewish Relief and Rescue Committee had to pay Germany a general figure of 5 million Swiss francs, plus 1,000 more for every individual to be included in the transport. About 150 places were “sold” to wealthy individuals. The valuables were delivered to the SS in three suitcases and received by Becher, and the transport left Budapest on June 30, 1944, with 1,684 Jews on board. Certain prominent persons were included, together with many friends and relatives of Relief and Rescue Committee members. They arrived in Bergen-Belsen on July 8, 1944, and were given privileged status.
Kasztner depended on Becher to transport the chosen Hungarian Jews from Bergen-Belsen to Switzerland, in what came to be called the Kasztner Transport. With the approval of Himmler, Becher also met with the head of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in Switzerland, Saly Mayer, and the War Refugee Board representative, Roswell McClelland, on November 4, 1944. Becher regarded the meeting as highly important, as McClelland represented President Franklin D. Roosevelt. At this meeting, Becher also confirmed that the SS had by now annihilated the Slovakian Jews.
In January 1945, Himmler appointed Becher as special Reich commissioner for all concentration camps. Then on March 11, 1945, he empowered Becher to arrange with Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen, a cease-fire between the advancing British army and German forces nearby. The camp was surrendered to the British on April 15, 1945.
Becher was arrested by the Allies in May 1945 and imprisoned at Nuremberg, but he was released owing to Kasztner’s intercession on his behalf.
Becher collected large sums of money, jewelry, and precious metals as the war came to an end. Almost all of this came from Hungarian Jews and was estimated at around 8.6 million Swiss francs in what became known as the Becher Deposit. It was alleged that Becher hid this plunder before he was captured, but another explanation is that it was purloined by U.S. troops.
Becher became a prosperous businessman in Bremen and headed the Bremen Stock Exchange with a reported $30 million, making him one of the wealthiest men in West Germany in 1960. He was the president of many corporations, including the Cologne-Handel Gesellschaft, which did extensive business with the Israeli government.
Becher came to public attention once again in 1961, when he served as a witness for the prosecution during the Jerusalem trial of Adolf Eichmann. Becher provided his testimony from his home in Germany, because he was unwilling to travel to Israel itself.
On August 8, 1995, age 86, Becher died in Bremen, reportedly a wealthy man, without ever having to stand trial in court for his deeds.
BECKER-FREYSENG, HERMANN (1910–1961)
Hermann Becker-Freyseng was a German physician who became a medical adviser to the Luftwaffe and participated in medical experiments on Dachau concentration camp internees before and during World War II.
Becker-Freyseng was born in Ludwigshafen, Germany, on July 18, 1910. He graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Berlin in 1935. The following year, he was given the rank of captain in the Medical Service and was posted to the Department of Aviation Medicine. His first important research was his work with Hans-Georg Clamman in 1938 on the physical effects of pure oxygen. Becker-Freyseng became an expert on the effects of high-altitude, low-pressure conditions on human beings.
In 1938, he joined the Nazi Party. Hubertus Strughold, a physiologist and prominent medical researcher who served as chief of aeromedical research for the Luftwaffe, engaged Becker-Freyseng to work in his human-experimentation program. This began a connection in which Becker-Freyseng’s colleagues came to hold him in high esteem. He conducted over 100 experiments on himself, some of which drove him to unconsciousness and the brink of death.
Becker-Freyseng’s key area of experimentation was low-pressure-chamber research. The Department of Aviation Medicine was established in 1936, with Becker-Freyseng initially just attached before he was promoted to coordinator.
Becker-Freyseng’s work in Nazi concentration camps became infamous. He both conducted and supervised several experiments involving unwilling prisoners. Experiments undertaken by him or under his supervision—in particular, the various low-pressure chambers designed to mimic the effects of high-altitude experiments—were performed on inmates of Dachau concentration camp. These often resulted in fatalities. Other experiments recorded the effects of extremely cold temperatures on the human body. One of Becker-Freyseng’s more sinister experiments involved forcing 40 internees to drink salt water to measure their bodies’ reactions. Some also had salt water injected directly into their bloodstreams. The subjects were then subjected to liver biopsies without the benefit of anesthesia to measure that organ’s reaction to the salt water. All subjects of the experiment died.
At the end of World War II in 1945, Becker-Freyseng was taken into custody by U.S. occupation authorities and put on trial for his medical experiments. In 1946, at the Doctors’ Trial, he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20 years in prison. In 1946, however, Becker-Freyseng’s name was on a list with other German doctors, scientists, and engineers as part of Operation Paperclip, a joint British-American operation conducted with the objective of seizing Germany’s top scientists and technologists and transporting them back to Allied countries. Operation Paperclip aimed to prevent these persons from working for the Soviets during the early Cold War period.
Becker-Freyseng was given responsibility for collecting and publishing the research undertaken by him and his colleagues. The resulting book, German Aviation Medicine: World War II, appeared just after Becker-Freyseng began his prison sentence. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1960 and died on August 27, 1961, in Heidelberg, Germany.
Gottlob Berger was a senior Nazi official responsible for SS recruiting during World War II. A zealous antisemite, he was a champion of the Final Solution.
Gottlob Christian Berger was born on July 16, 1896, at Gerstetten, Württemberg, one of eight children of sawmill owners Johannes and Christine Berger. Educated in Nuertingen between 1910 and 1914, he became a physical education teacher. He served in the German army from the start of World War I, was wounded four times, and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. In 1919, as a first lieutenant, he was discharged as 70 percent disabled. He had three brothers, two of whom died in the trenches of World War I and the other was executed in the United States in September 1918 on a charge of espionage.
Upon demobilization, Berger returned to teaching, but he had trouble adjusting to civilian life. Between 1919 and 1921, he was a leader of the Einwohnerwehr (Citizens’ Defense) militia in North Württemberg. This was a far-right paramilitary organization operating throughout Weimar Germany, established with the goal of defending the country against the possibility of a communist takeover. While engaged in this activity, Berger maintained his gymnastic and physical education interests, and in 1921, now qualified as a sports trainer, he married his fiancée, Maria. Together they would raise a family of four children.
Berger joined the Nazi Party in 1922, and in the spring of 1923, he started a local SA group in his hometown of Gerstetten. After the failed 1923 Beer Hall Putsch and the ban on the NSDAP, he worked as a teacher near Tübingen. He rejoined the Nazi Party in the late 1920s, and in 1931, he joined the SA.
After the Nazi seizure of power in January 1933, Berger led operations involving the roundup of political “undesirables” and Jews. In July 1934, he began work with the head of SA training, Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger. In 1936, on Krüger’s recommendation, Berger was recruited into the Allgemeine-SS by Heinrich Himmler. This saw Berger first assigned as head of regional SS physical education; he was soon transferred to Himmler’s staff as leader of the sports office. In 1938, Himmler appointed Berger to the SS Main Office (SS-Hauptamt, or SS-HA, the central command office of the SS), to head up recruitment.
Berger set the Waffen-SS on a sound basis. His recruiting methods allowed the Waffen-SS to sidestep Wehrmacht controls over conscription. With the onset of war, he managed to extend Waffen-SS recruiting to “Germanic” volunteers from Scandinavia and Western Europe. From here, he recruited Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) from outside the Reich. Others would follow in succeeding years.
Berger sponsored and shielded his friend Oskar Dirlewanger, whom he placed in charge of a unit of convicts that later perpetrated war crimes. Berger’s recruiting methods upset senior officers of the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS, but by the end of the war, the latter had grown to an impressive total of 38 divisions.
Within the SS, Berger was known as one of Himmler’s “Twelve Apostles,” nicknamed der Allmächtige Gottlob (“the Almighty Gottlob,” a play on “Almighty God”), for his closeness to the Reichsführer and because he was one of 12 leading Nazis who dabbled in Völkish spirituality.
Berger ran the SS-HA office in Berlin from 1940 and was heavily involved in activities relating to “Eastern Territories.” The year 1942 saw the publication of the pamphlet Der Untermensch (The Sub-Human), which Berger coauthored with Himmler. It was written to assist soldiers after the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941 and described those the Nazis were in the process of conquering as spiritually and mentally lower than animals.
On March 6, 1942, Himmler transferred to Berger the responsibility of recruiting more Waffen-SS divisions, together with police units and guard battalions, along with the establishment, leadership, and training of various SS units in other parts of Europe.
On July 28, 1942, Himmler wrote to Berger that Adolf Hitler had given him instructions that the occupied eastern territories must become free of Jews and that Himmler was to be personally responsible for this task.
On August 10, 1942, while continuing in his role as chief of the SS-HA, Berger was selected to be chief of political operations in the occupied eastern territories. This appointment, which lasted until January 1945, enabled the SS to incapacitate any resistance to SS domination in Eastern Europe. Berger now proposed a plan to kidnap and enslave 50,000 Eastern European children between the ages of 10 and 14, under the codename Heuaktion (Operation Hay Harvesting). On June 14, 1944, Alfred Rosenberg issued orders implementing Berger’s idea, and the plan was carried out.
Berger was also present when Himmler spoke, on October 4, 1943, to a secret meeting of SS officers in Posen (Poznań), in occupied Poland, that Germany was exterminating the Jews.
On July 20, 1944, Berger was given responsibility for the administration of German prisoner-of-war camps. Following the failed attempt on Hitler’s life that same day, the Führer turned to Himmler to head the Replacement Army (Ersatzheer), providing fill-in troops for the combat divisions of the regular army. Himmler quickly delegated his responsibility over the prisoner-of-war camps to Berger, who, in turn, allowed the camps to continue as they were, with the same staff and procedures.
In August 1944, Berger was deployed to serve as military commander of German troops in Slovakia dealing with the Slovak National Uprising. The Slovakian government had until now been procrastinating over the deportation of Slovak Jews, and when Himmler nominated Hermann Höfle as the officer to suppress the revolt, Berger relinquished the role of military commander on September 19, 1944. Deportations of Jews then resumed, and between September 1944 and March 1945, 11 transports deported 8,000 Slovak Jews to Auschwitz, another 2,700 to Sachsenhausen, and 1,600 to Terezín (Theresienstadt).
Berger was then appointed as one of two chiefs of staff to organize the Volkssturm (Home Guard) in Germany. In the final months of the war, he commanded German forces in the Bavarian Alps, which included remnants of several of the Waffen-SS units he had helped recruit. He surrendered to U.S. troops near Berchtesgaden and was promptly arrested.
Berger was put on trial in the Ministries Trial at Nuremberg in 1947. He claimed that he knew nothing about the Final Solution until after the war, even though it was proved that he had been present at Himmler’s 1943 Posen speech. Berger’s defense counsel attempted to mitigate Berger’s actions by claiming that the Cold War bore strong parallels to the Nazi fight against “Jews and Bolsheviks” and that it was possible that the United States would soon have to fight the Soviet Union. Berger, for his part, displayed no remorse for his actions.
In 1949, Berger was convicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity, atrocities, and offences committed against civilian populations. His conviction included being involved with the SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, being a conscious participant in the concentration camp program, conscripting nationals of other countries, transporting Hungarian Jews to concentration camps, and recruiting concentration camp guards. He was also convicted under the charge of using child and youth slave labor, including the Heuaktion.
Given credit for the nearly 4 years during which he had been in custody awaiting trial, Berger was sentenced to 25 years in prison. On January 31, 1951, his sentence was commuted to 10 years’ imprisonment on the dual grounds that he had intervened to save the lives of Allied officers and men who were due for execution and that he had saved 21 Prominente prisoners from Colditz, including Viscount Lascelles and the Master of Elphinstone (both nephews of King George VI), and Giles Romilly, a nephew of British prime minister Winston Churchill. Berger arranged for them to be evacuated from Colditz and transported south, where they were handed over to advancing U.S. Army troops.
Gottlob Berger was released from Landsberg prison in December 1951 after serving six and a half years. He died at the age of 77 in his hometown of Gerstetten on January 5, 1975.
Dr. Karl Rudolf Werner Best was a German jurist, police chief, SS-Obergruppenführer, and Nazi Party leader from Darmstadt, Hesse. As a leading constitutional theoretician and jurist in the Third Reich, he gave respectability and legitimacy to the political police and the concentration camps. He considered that as long as the Gestapo was carrying out the will of the Führer, it was acting legally.
Best was born on July 10, 1903, in Darmstadt. In 1912, his parents moved to Dortmund and then to Mainz, where he completed his education. His father, a senior postmaster, was killed during the first few days of World War I. After the war, Best founded the first local group of the German National Youth League and became active in the Mainz group of the German National People’s Party. In his involvement with the German youth movement, Best was inspired by its return to nature, its Germanic legends, and its Völkish worldview.
From 1921 to 1925, he studied law at Frankfurt am Main, Freiburg, Giessen, and Heidelberg, where he received his doctorate in 1927. In 1929, he was appointed a judge in Hesse but was forced to resign when the so-called Boxheim documents were found in his possession. The documents bearing Best’s signature set out a blueprint for a Nazi putsch and the subsequent execution of political opponents. The disclosure of the Boxheim documents embarrassed Adolf Hitler at a time when he was seeking power by legal means. Despite this, Best was made police commissioner for Hesse in March 1933, and by July 1933, he was appointed governor.
Over the next six years, Best advanced rapidly, becoming chief legal adviser to the Gestapo and chief of the Bureau of the Secret State Police at the Reich Ministry of the Interior. He helped the Gestapo destroy much of the old Weimar legal system and showed them how to use orders for preventive detention without judicial checks.
In 1934, Hitler decided that his internal opposition in the party had to be eliminated. On June 30, 1934, the SS and Gestapo acted in coordinated mass arrests against Ernst Röhm and the SA in a purge that became known as the Night of the Long Knives. Best was sent to Munich to arrest SA members in the southern part of Germany, and at this time up to 200 people were killed.
By 1935, Best was Reinhard Heydrich’s closest collaborator in building up the Gestapo and the Security Service (SD). Then in April 1936, he assumed a leading role in ideological training for the Gestapo. Using biological metaphors, he described the role of the Gestapo and the political police as fighting “disease” in the national body; among the implied sicknesses were communists, Freemasons, and the churches. Above and behind all these stood the Jews.
On September 27, 1939, the security agencies of the Reich were folded into the new Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA), which was placed under Heydrich’s control. Best was made head of Department I: Administration and Legal, dealing with legal and personnel issues relating to the SS and security police. Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler relied on Best to develop and explain legally the activities against enemies of the state and in relation to Nazi Jewish policy. In this capacity, he was charged after the war with complicity in the murder of thousands of Jews and Polish intellectuals.
As a Himmler favorite, Best was being groomed for the very top of the SS, but an internal power struggle saw him dismissed by Reinhard Heydrich in 1939. He left the RHSA on June 12, 1940. He then served for two years as civil administrator in occupied France, involved in fighting the French Resistance and in the deportation of Jews, and in this time period he was nicknamed the “Butcher of Paris.”
In November 1942, Best was appointed the Third Reich’s supreme power in Denmark. In this role, he supervised civilian affairs. He kept this position until the end of the war in May 1945, even after the German military had assumed direct control over the administration of the country on August 29, 1943.
As a response to an increase in sabotage attacks in 1943, Best was instructed by Berlin to deliver a statement to the Danish resistance by eliminating the country’s Jewish population. With limited German troops at his disposal and fearing a civil uprising if he deported 8,000 Danish Jews to certain death, he went about fulfilling Hitler’s order to the letter, although not in the spirit the führer intended.
Best’s urgent and repeated requests for additional SS battalions were not met. During the time in question, from September through early October 1943, all available SS troops had been deployed by Heinrich Himmler to Italy, where they were needed to shore up Benito Mussolini’s puppet regime, and thus could not be spared for Denmark.
Best knew that unless he could mount a swift roundup with surgical precision, requiring ruthless and massive SS involvement, his future career would be in jeopardy. He therefore sent his naval attaché, Georg Duckwitz, to Sweden to arrange safe passage and accommodation for Denmark’s Jews, and then Best himself walked into a Jewish tailor’s shop in Copenhagen and warned the tailor and his family that a roundup of the Jews was imminent and told them to flee. The word then spread quickly through the Jewish community.
Almost all Danish Jews survived the Final Solution by escaping to Sweden, ferried over at night by the boats of their non-Jewish Danish neighbors. Only 477 out of more than 7,000 Danish Jews were finally rounded up by German troops, who were forbidden by Best to break into Jewish apartments. Half-Jews were let go, and patrols were not especially vigilant.
It is arguable that Best undermined the Final Solution outcome not out of an altruistic desire to save human life but out of a pragmatic need to maintain a stable status quo in occupied Denmark and to preserve the Reich’s influence. His success depended on the willingness of the Danish people to save their Jewish neighbors—to refuse to see them as anything but fellow Danes. That, in the end, is perhaps the true miracle of the Danish rescue.
To avoid the deportation of Danes to German concentration camps, the permanent secretary of the ministry of foreign affairs, Nils Svenningsen, proposed in January 1944 the establishment of an internment camp within Denmark. Best accepted this proposal but on the condition that the camp should be built close to the German border. Frøslev prison camp was opened in August 1944. In deliberations on May 3, 1945, when preparing for the impending German defeat, Best then fought to avoid implementation of a scorched earth policy in Denmark.
After the war, Best testified as a witness at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg and was later extradited to Denmark. In 1948, he was sentenced to death by a Danish court, but his sentence was reduced to five years in prison (of which four years had already been served). This created outrage among the Danish public, and the Supreme Court changed the sentence to 12 years. Best was granted a clemency release in August 1951.
He then returned to West Germany, working for a time in a solicitor’s office and then as a lawyer for Stinnes & Co., one of the largest German trading concerns. In 1958, he was fined 70,000 deutsche marks by a German denazification court for his past actions as a leading SS officer, and in March 1969, Best was held in detention while new investigations were carried out concerning his responsibility for mass murder. He was released in August 1969 on medical grounds, although the accusations were not withdrawn.
In 1972, he was charged again when further war crimes allegations arose, but he was found medically unfit to stand trial and was released. After that, he became part of a network that helped former Nazis. He died on June 23, 1989, in Mülheim.
Hans Biebow was the Nazi chief administrator of the Łódź ghetto in Poland, principally responsible for organizing deportations of Jews from there to the Chełmno extermination camp. During his time at Łódź, the Jewish population of the ghetto disintegrated from 200,000 to less than 1,000. As head of the ghetto’s Judenrat (Jewish Council), Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski had a close, though subordinate, relationship with Biebow and reported directly to him.
Biebow was born on December 18, 1902, in Bremen, Germany, the son of an insurance company director. He graduated from secondary school and commenced work at his father’s district branch of the Stuttgart Insurance Company. That was far from successful, however, as the insurance industry had fared badly in the economic circumstances of the 1920s crash and there was little work available. After working in several jobs in the food industry, he started his own small business in Bremen in the coffee trade.
Following the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, the Nazis created ghettos in major cities in which they forced the Jews to live. One of the largest of these ghettos was in Łódź. Biebow, who was recognized as a skilled administrator by his Nazi Party superiors, became the overseer of the ghetto after it was established in April 1940. Initially, he was put in charge of food stocks but was soon made head of the ghetto government.
It was in this capacity that Biebow realized that the ghetto could make a profit for the Germans. He saw an opportunity to benefit from the establishment of over 100 factories and workshops manned by Jewish slave labor to produce goods for the German war effort. Establishing and leading a German staff of some 250 people, Biebow’s transformation of the ghetto into something more akin to a slave labor camp managed to forestall its liquidation until the summer of 1944.
Biebow was not alone in his conviction that producing goods needed by the German army was the best way for the ghetto to avoid liquidation. Mordecai Chaim Rumkowski, the head of the Łódź ghetto Judenrat, was also convinced that producing needed goods was the only way for the Jews entrapped in the ghetto to survive. Thus, Biebow and Rumkowski had similar goals for a high level of productivity from the ghetto and seemed to have a good working relationship as a result. Rumkowski and the Jewish Council established 117 different workshops that used the Jews as slave labor to help manufacture military equipment for the German front lines. The strategy of running the ghetto as a support for the German army was successful, in that Łódź was the last ghetto in Poland to be liquidated.
Biebow derived significant personal wealth from his unfettered exploitation of slave labor and expropriation of Jewish valuables and property. The Jews were promised food and medical supplies in return for their work in the workshops, but his policy of food distribution was the direct cause of widespread starvation. The quality and quantity were less than minimal, and often large portions were completely spoiled. Ration cards for food were quickly put into effect on June 2, 1940, and by December 1940, all provisions were rationed. Allegedly, Biebow pocketed much of the money allocated to buying enough food, leading tens of thousands of Jews to die from some combination of mass starvation, overcrowding, exposure to the elements, arbitrary shootings and beatings, and disease that was the inevitable result of horrid sanitary conditions.
Biebow brought that same enthusiasm to his task of arranging and transporting thousands of Jews from the ghetto to the Chełmno and Auschwitz extermination camps, even as he was trying to keep ghetto production going for as long as possible. He was ruthlessly efficient and saw that his orders to transport Jews to their death were carried out without delay and unhampered by moral concerns. He also organized the collection of personal possessions and clothing of Jewish victims at Chełmno to be warehoused and eventually sent to Germany.
When it became apparent that Germany was going to lose the war, Adolf Hitler called up German men capable of fighting. This increased the need for trained workers, even if Jewish, and so the factories in the Łódź ghetto continued turning out needed goods and equipment. Yet deportations continued, and the ghetto was completely liquidated by August 1944.
Biebow escaped into hiding in Germany in 1945, but he was recognized by a ghetto survivor in Bremen and subsequently arrested. At his trial from April 23 to April 30, 1947, he was found guilty on all counts and was executed by hanging in Łódź on June 23, 1947.
Born in Hamburg on December 17, 1901, Walther Bierkamp was a lawyer who headed the SiPo and SD in Düsseldorf and who commanded Einsatzgruppe D for a full year across 1942 and 1943.
During 1919 and 1921, Bierkamp was a member of Hamburg’s far-right nationalist Freikorps Bahrenfeld and an active participant in the Kapp Putsch of 1921. He studied law in Göttingen and Hamburg, passing the first state examination in 1924 and the second in 1928. He joined the civil service, where he started as Oberregierungsrat (senior entry-level lawyer). Over time, he became head of the Criminal Investigation Department in Hamburg, and as a public prosecutor, he joined the NSDAP on December 1, 1932. In February 1937, he became chief of Hamburg’s Kripo, and then on April 1, 1939, he entered the SS.
On February 15, 1941, Bierkamp was named inspector of the SiPo and the SD in Düsseldorf, a position he held until September 1941, when his responsibilities were compounded by a move to Paris and he was given the same offices for Belgium and Northern France. He remained on station as Höherer SS- and Polizeiführer (higher SS and police leader, or HSSPF) and held all offices until April 1942. On May 3, 1942, he was promoted to SS-Oberführer and was released on June 24, 1942, before accepting his next command.
On June 30, 1942, Bierkamp relieved Otto Ohlendorf as commander of Einsatzgruppe D in southern Ukraine and Crimea. When the 11th Army began its summer offensive toward the Caucasus, Einsatzgruppe D moved in behind it. In August, the first major action took place against Jews in the region. Gas vans were employed against children from orphanages in Krasnodar and Yeysk as well as residents of Pyatigorsk. Then on August 21 to 22, 500 people were murdered in the Krasnodar Forest, followed by the inhabitants of Mineralnyje Wody on September 1, and the Jews of Yessentuki and Kislovodsk on September 9 to 10. In all, the campaign realized a death toll of more than 6,000 Jews.
By January 4 to 5, 1943, Jewish survivors in the region, who had lived long enough to be used as slave labor, were murdered in Kislovodsk; by then, the number of Jewish victims had grown to about 10,000. In May 1943, to accompany the start of the German army’s summer offensive, Einsatzgruppe D was renamed Kampfgruppe Bierkamp (Bierkamp Combat Group) in honor of their commander. This name was kept for a short time until June 15, 1943, when upon his return from Einsatzgruppe duties, Bierkamp was sent to Kraków as HSSPF for the Generalgouvernement.
As the war situation deteriorated and the Soviets began to advance of Poland, Bierkamp saw that drastic measures would need to be taken if the remaining Jews in the Generalgouvernement were not to fall into Russian hands. Thus, in addition to overseeing the final “cleansing” of the Jews of Kraków, he issued a decree on July 20, 1944, ordering that Jews working at forced labor in the arms industry be immediately transported to death camps. If this was not possible, he demanded that they “will be liquidated on the spot, and their corpses will have to be eliminated by incineration, blasting or by other means.” On November 9, 1944, Bierkamp received his final promotion, to SS-Brigadeführer and police major general.
In this capacity, he was sent to command police and security services in Stuttgart until February 20, 1945, when he was sent as HSSPF to Breslau (Wrocław), where he took over on March 17, 1945. With the further advance of the Russians, the territory he was controlling was largely overrun; although by his title, he remained HSSPF Southwest until mid-April 1945. From April 14, 1945, until the war’s end, Bierkamp was stationed in Hamburg.
On the night of May 15 to 16, 1945, Walther Bierkamp committed suicide in Scharbeutz, a municipality in Schleswig-Holstein not far from the city of Lübeck.
Herbertus Bikker was a Dutch member of the Waffen-SS who served as a prison guard at Camp Erika near Ommen from June 19, 1941, until April 11, 1945.
He was born into a large farming family on July 15, 1915, in Wijngaarden, the Netherlands. His mother died when he was six years old. His father gave him a strict education, but as he had to help on the farm, he only completed primary school. Prior to World War II, he became a member of the Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging in Nederland (National Socialist Movement in the Netherlands, or NSB), and in early 1940, Bikker was imprisoned by the Dutch police for security reasons. After the German occupation of the Netherlands, he was released.
In 1941, with the start of Operation Barbarossa, Bikker enlisted as a Dutch volunteer in the Waffen-SS and served on the Eastern Front. When wounded, he was discharged from further military service and returned to the Netherlands.
Between July 1942 and May 1943, Bikker was put in charge of the Control Commando, which ran Kamp Erika. By 1943, he had recovered from his war wounds, and as a member of the Ordnungspolizei (uniformed Nazi police), he served in Nijmegen, Tiel, and Maastricht. In August 1944, he returned to Kamp Erika. A later report, by Jan Meulink for the Ministry of Justice, stated that Bikker abused his prisoners; Meulink noted that witnesses described him as “a plague, by the way he hit prisoners, mistreated with a carabiner, or stamped” on them, crippling healthy inmates. For his actions in hunting down resistance fighters and for his brutal behavior toward inmates, he was known as the “Butcher of Omman.” He was responsible for the murder of 27-year-old Dutch resistance fighter Jan Houtman, who was killed on November 17, 1944, and the death of another resistance fighter, Herman Meijer, on October 12, 1944.
On May 10, 1945, Bikker was arrested by the Dutch army, but he escaped and worked with a farmer until discovered in late 1945. In June 1949, he received the death penalty for his crimes as a guard in Kamp Erika, including torture, deportation, and treason, as well as two murders. The punishment was converted to life imprisonment on December 7, 1949.
On December 26, 1952, Bikker, along with several other criminals, escaped from the Dome Prison in Breda, and that night they crossed the border into West Germany, where they reported to the police. The next day a German district court judge fined them 10 deutsche marks for illegal crossing. Under a decree from 1943, foreign members of the Waffen-SS automatically received German nationality, and as Germany did not extradite its own nationals, Bikker, with German citizenship, fell outside the grasp of Dutch justice.
In 1957, Bikker was summoned to appear before a Dortmund court, but the case was discontinued due to “lack of evidence.” Dutch courts were reluctant to hand over their evidence to German courts, because they distrusted the many former Nazi judges who had continued in their posts after the fall of the Third Reich. Bikker allegedly also received assistance in Germany from former SS members who were once again occupying influential positions.
In 1972, Bikker threatened the Dutch investigative journalist Ben Herbergs with an ax in a barn behind Bikker’s home in Hagen, Westphalia. Herbergs had located Bikker in Germany after a political uproar had arisen in the Netherlands about the freeing of other Nazi war criminals. Bikker had agreed to a “short conversation from fellow countryman to fellow countryman” with the Dutch reporter and a German photographer, and he spoke frankly about his work and his illegal family visits to the Netherlands. When he discovered a tape-recording device with loose microphone cable, Bikker flew into a rage; he grabbed heavy tools and an ax and barred the access door, but the Dutch reporting team escaped.
For decades, prosecutors sought Bikker’s return. In 1994, a Dutch journalist and Nazi hunter, Jack Koistra, traced Bikker to his residence in Hagen. After this was reported on Dutch television, the Dutch minister of justice sought Bikker’s immediate extradition; this was again rejected by German authorities. In November 1995, German and Dutch members of anti-fascist groups, together with a few surviving resistance fighters, protested outside Bikker’s home, shouting that “Herbertus Bikker is a murderer.” The demonstrators were fined for demonstrating without a permit.
Stern editors Werner Schmitz and Albert Eikenaar noted the way this demonstration was handled, and it was due to their investigative journalism that Bikker again came before the courts. But it was Bikker’s own boast, in a 1997 interview with Schmitz, of having shot Jan Houtman that started a lawsuit against him. Describing the events on November 17, 1944, Bikker told Schmitz that he gave Houtman “the final shot.” After the publication of the Stern interview in 1997, chief prosecutor Ulrich Maass from the Nazi crimes central office began investigations at the state attorney’s office in Dortmund.
It took another six years before the case commenced. In the meantime, some of the eyewitnesses to Jan Houtman’s murder had died. Houtman’s widow had also died three years earlier. But an important witness, who had already provided written evidence five years previously, was able to appear at the district court in Hagen on October 10, 2003, to testify.
On September 8, 2003, in the German district court of Hagen, almost 59 years after Jan Houtman’s murder, the trial of the now 88-year-old Herbertus Bikker opened. He stood accused of shooting Houtman to death on November 17, 1944. The indictment read that Houtman had been injured trying to escape a labor camp and was lying on the floor of a nearby barn when Bikker caught up with him, pulled out his pistol, and shot Houtman saying, “And now a good death.” Bikker’s only chance to evade prosecution and trial was to claim diminished responsibility due to illness. When a doctor attested that Bikker was medically fit to stand trial, his case came to court. However, after Bikker had a breakdown and fainted in court, neurologists advised against him standing trial due to illness. For that reason, the hearing was adjourned on February 2, 2004.
Bikker lived in Hagen as a pensioner until his death on November 1, 2008, in Haspe, Germany. His passing was not announced until April 2009.
The trial shed light on the brutal occupation of the Netherlands by Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist regime and the terrible consequences resistance fighters suffered at the hands of both the military secret service and their Dutch collaborators. That so much time elapsed before Bikker was obliged to stand trial showed the diffident attitude of German authorities to those responsible for Nazi crimes.
Dorothea Binz was a prison guard at Ravensbrück concentration camp during World War II, where she gained a reputation as one of the most brutal women within the Nazi system.
Dorothea “Theodora” Binz was born on March 16, 1920, in Gross-Dölln, Brandenburg, to a German middle-class family. The middle daughter of Walter Binz, she attended school until she was 15, missing much schooling along the way due to tuberculosis. Upon leaving school, she worked for a while as a kitchen aide and then as a housekeeper, which she is reputed to have hated.
Physically, she had beautiful blond hair and blue eyes, the ideal of the Nazi woman. Binz joined the Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, or BdM), the female counterpart of the Hitler Youth (Hitlerjugend), and became influenced by Nazi doctrine. She wanted to join the SS and applied for a job as a kitchen hand in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück in August 1939. On September 1, 1939, she was sent to Ravensbrück to undergo training as a guard. During her time there, at least 50,000 women died.
The senior officers under whom Binz served included Emma Anna Maria Zimmer, Johanna Langefeld, Maria Mandl, and Anna Klein-Plaubel. At times, she worked with Dr. Herta Oberheuser and the Polish prisoners (nicknamed “the rabbits”) at Ravensbrück in various parts of the camp, including the kitchen and the laundry. After 1942, she oversaw the training of new guards at Ravensbrück. In August 1943, she was promoted to deputy chief wardress. As a member of the command staff between 1943 and 1945, she directed training and assigned duties to over 100 female guards and introduced training for recruits destined for other concentration camps, such as Buchenwald and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Binz reportedly trained some of the cruelest female guards in the system, including Ruth Closius-Neudeck and Irma Grese.
Binz supposedly supervised the bunker where women prisoners were tortured and killed. She earned the reputation of being sadistic and of being extremely cruel. Smashing heads and shooting or maltreating prisoners for no apparent reason (and often for no reason at all) became a daily occurrence; it appears that she fully enjoyed her abuse of power. She would walk through the camp with a whip in one hand and her leashed German shepherd dog in the other. She could kick a prisoner to death with her heavy boots or choose to have the prisoner executed, and she was especially cruel to Soviet prisoners of war, whom she dubbed “Russian pigs.” Binz maintained a special truck to take prisoners to the gallows and took pleasure in watching their death.
While at Ravensbrück, she had an affair with a young married SS officer, Edmund Bräuning, and their favorite pastimes included “romantic” walks through the camp, arm in arm or hand in hand, as they showed amusement at seeing women who were flogged. Stripped prisoners went to Ravensbrück’s “bunker”—torture cells—where they were handed over to Binz and her junior officers. Camp survivors testified how Binz and her team regularly tortured prisoners by immersing them in ice-cold water.
As the Allies advanced in 1945, Ravensbrück was evacuated. Survivors were sent on a death march, from which Binz fled, but she was caught by British troops in Hamburg on May 3, 1945. She was imprisoned for a time in Recklinghausen, a subcamp of Buchenwald, until she was tried with other SS and camp personnel by a British court at the Ravensbrück War Crimes Trials. She was convicted of perpetrating war crimes and sentenced to death by hanging. On May 2, 1947, the sentence was carried out in the prison of Hameln by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint. To avoid any signs of martyrdom, the bodies of Binz and the others were buried in the Hamelin prison yard. In 1954, the bodies were reburied in holy ground at Am Wehl Cemetery. Originally the graves had iron crosses placed over them, but after a succession of visits from neo-Nazis, all 200 crosses were removed on March 3, 1986. The graveyard is now a grass field.
Paul Blobel was an SS commander who led Sonderkommando 4a (a part of Einstazgruppe C), which became notorious for the mass murder in 1941 of 33,771 Jews in Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine.
He was born on August 13, 1894, in Potsdam, near Berlin, the son of a craftsman. He qualified as a stonemason and carpenter. In World War I, he served in an engineering unit, was awarded the Iron Cross First Class, and in 1918 rose to the rank of staff sergeant.
After demobilization, Blobel studied construction between 1919 and 1920, and from 1921 to 1924, he was employed by various firms as an architect. He opened his own architectural practice in 1924, but because of the Weimar Republic’s economic crisis, he received no new work and lived on a social security allowance between 1930 and 1933. By December 1, 1931, Blobel had joined the Nazi Party, the SA, and the SS. In 1933, he joined the Düsseldorf police force, and in June 1934, he was recruited into Reinhard Heydrich’s SD. On January 30, 1941, he was promoted as chief of the SD in Salzburg, with the rank of SS-Standartenführer.
During the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Blobel took command of Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C, then active in Ukraine. Einsatzgruppe C was under the control of Otto Rasch. The role of the Einsatzgruppen (mobile killing units) was to follow troops of the Wehrmacht as they advanced into Ukraine; they were tasked with eliminating political and racial “enemies” of the Third Reich.
Blobel was primarily responsible for carrying out the notorious massacre of 33,771 Kiev Jews at the Babi Yar ravine in Kiev. In August 1941, in Belaya Tserkov, some 50 miles south of Kiev, all adult Jews were murdered by Blobel’s unit. Execution of the children was suspended by a junior officer, Helmuth Groscurth, who drafted a report in which he wrote that the execution of women and children “did not differ in any way from the atrocities perpetrated by the enemy.”
Paul Blobel was an SS commander who led Sonderkommando 4a, which became notorious for the mass murder in 1941 of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine near Kiev, Ukraine. Here, Blobel pleads not guilty during the Einsatzgruppen trial at Nuremberg in 1947. At the left of the photo is another indicted SS commander, Franz Six. (Chronos Dokumentarfilm GmbH/ullstein bild via Getty Images)
His superior officer was Walther von Reichenau, whose position on such matters would be encapsulated on October 10, 1941, in what became known as the Severity Order. Reichenau’s order asserted that German soldiers “must learn fully to appreciate the necessity for the severe but just retribution that must be meted out to the subhuman species of Jewry.” The order paved the way for mass murder of Jews in areas coming under his command, and the expectation was that all Jews would from this point onward be either summarily shot or handed over to the Einsatzgruppen. He thus rejected Groscurth’s concerns and stated that the argument should never have been written down in the first place. Blobel and his assistant, August Häfner, had already told Groscurth that execution of the children had to continue. An argument then arose between Blobel and Häfner about who should carry out their murder; Häfner said his troops had their own children and should not be forced to carry out this cruel act. He suggested that von Reichenau’s Ukrainian field militia should execute the children, which they did.
Shortly after the children of Belya Tserkov had been executed, Blobel and his Sonderkommando arrived in Kiev. The Soviet security service (NKVD) had bombed the city center during the battle for control of the city, and as a result, many German soldiers had died. In reprisal, Blobel determined that the Kiev Jews would be exterminated, even though they—mainly the elderly, women, and children—could in no way be blamed for the bombing. On September 29, 1941, all Jews were ordered to congregate and told that they would be deported to labor camps. Instead, they were shot into in a ravine at Babi Yar, northwest of the city. In his progress report dated October 7, 1941, Blobel reported the execution of 33,771 Jews there.
Following the mass murder at Babi Yar, a gas van was made available to Blobel’s Sonderkommando. Einsatzgruppe C was issued at least five gas vans and gave two to Sonderkommando 4a, two to Einsatzkommando 6, and one to Einsatzkommando 5. From June 1941 to the end of 1943, 59,018 people were murdered by Sonderkommando 4a, although after January 13, 1942, this was no longer done under Blobel’s command. He was removed by his successor, SS-Oberführer Erwin Weinmann, who had him transferred to Berlin for disciplinary reasons (probably related to Blobel’s excessive drinking). Once there, he was not given an immediate assignment and was placed under the supervision of the Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller.
During 1942, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler decided that the buried remains of Jews and other victims of the Einsatzgruppen had to be cleared away. The same had to be done with victims of the extermination camps who had not been cremated but buried in mass graves. Reinhard Heydrich was charged with this operation, and in 1942, he met with Blobel to discuss the nature of the operation that now had to take place. Blobel’s commission was suspended by Heydrich’s death on June 4, 1942, but later that month, he was officially ordered by Heinrich Müller to take charge of the operation, which was top secret and codenamed Aktion 1005.
Before the exhumations could be started, a suitable method had to be found for destroying the corpses. The place chosen for trials was Chełmno, the first death camp, which had been operating since the end of 1941. Aktion 1005 would take place by disinterring and cremating the bodies in wood fires in open pits. The bones were crushed in a special machine, and the ashes and any remaining bone fragments were buried in the graves from where the corpses had originally been exhumed. With a suitable method now found for erasing the traces of mass extermination easily and efficiently, the operation could begin in earnest and was carried out by Sonderkommando 1005—a special unit of about 20 men, members of the SS, SiPo, and other police forces under Blobel’s command.
Blobel’s last role in the Third Reich was commanding Einsatzgruppe Iltis, a unit consisting of two Einsatzkommandos tasked with fighting partisans on the Austro-Yugoslav border. Several of his men had already served under him in Sonderkommando 1005; after the war, he alleged that he himself had not been active as leader of Einsatzgruppe Iltis, as he had fallen ill in 1944 (his drinking had developed into alcoholism) and been confined to a sanatorium from February to April.
At the beginning of May 1945, Blobel was apprehended by the Americans. Placed on trial at Nuremberg, he protested his innocence, but he was nonetheless found guilty of crimes against humanity, war crimes, and membership of illegal organizations. He was sentenced to death. During the trial, he showed no remorse and only allowed expressions of compassion for the perpetrators who had been tasked with this dirty work. He was executed by hanging in Landsberg Prison on June 7, 1951.
A high-ranking Nazi doctor and research scientist, Kurt Blome controlled unethical medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Captured by U.S. forces, he was acquitted at the Doctors’ Trial in 1947 and worked with U.S. scientists to impart his knowledge of bacteriological warfare and biological weapons from these experiments.
He was born in Bielefeld, Germany, on January 31, 1894, and graduated from high school in Dortmund. He moved to Rostock in early 1914 to study medicine at the University of Göttingen. On April 1, 1914, he began his compulsory military service with the Mecklenburg Fusilier Regiment “Kaiser Wilhelm” No. 90. During World War I, he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. Wounded in March 1918, Blome ended the war as a patient in a Bremen hospital.
From 1918 to 1919, he continued his medical studies in Münster and Giessen and became a member of the Freikorps in Rostock. In 1920, he was actively involved in the so-called Kapp Putsch, in which he was wounded. He passed his medical examination in 1920 in Rostock, and in 1921, he was awarded a doctor of medicine degree at Rostock for his work on the behavior of bacteria.
Blome joined the NSDAP in 1922. In November 1923, after the party had been banned following Adolf Hitler’s abortive putsch, he was dismissed by the University of Rostock owing to his Nazi activities. From 1924 to 1934, he then led a medical practice as a specialist for skin and sex diseases.
In 1934, Blome became director of the Office of Public Health in Mecklenburg-Lübeck. The same year he was appointed to the main office for public health in Berlin as commissioner for the exemption provisions of the Nuremberg Laws. He was later appointed as head of medical training for the Third Reich in January 1935. On February 8, 1936, Blome became a member of the Reich Committee for the Protection of German Blood, and from April 20, 1939, he was deputy head of the Office for National Health.
His appointment on April 30, 1943, as head of the Central Institute for Cancer Research in Nesselstedt near Posen was a camouflage for his work on biological weapons. Blome was also appointed as a member of the Blitzforschung (“lightning research”) working group, which was preparing for biological warfare. An expert on the development of biological weapons, Blome had a long-standing interest in the military use of carcinogenic substances and cancer-causing viruses. He worked on methods for the storage and dispersal of biological agents, like plague, cholera, anthrax, and typhoid, and later he confessed to have infected concentration camp prisoners at Dachau with bubonic plague to test vaccines. Blome was an expert in aerosol dispersants and the transmission of malaria to humans. At Auschwitz, he sprayed nerve agents like Tabun and Sarin from aircraft on prisoners.
In March 1945, Blome fled from Posen (Poznań) just ahead of the Red Army. He was unable to destroy the evidence of his experiments, however, which is why so much is known about them. On May 17, 1945, with the defeat of Germany, Blome was arrested in Munich by American military personnel. He was subsequently tried at the Doctors’ Trial in 1947 on charges of practicing euthanasia and conducting experiments on humans. Inexplicably, he was acquitted; it was rumored that he was saved by American intervention. Two months after his Nuremberg acquittal, Blome was transferred to the United States, where he was interviewed at Camp David, Maryland, about biological warfare.
In 1951, Blome was hired by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps under Project 63 to work on chemical warfare. Although his file did not mention his trial at Nuremberg, Blome was denied a visa to work in the United States. He was, however, employed at the European Command Intelligence Center at Oberursel, West Germany, where he worked on chemical warfare projects. Blome also conducted research on cancer.
Blome’s fate is unclear, with two different possible endings. Most biographies state that he was eventually arrested by French authorities, convicted of war crimes, and sentenced to 20 years in prison. Other reports state that he was not arrested or charged with war crimes again after his acquittal at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial in 1947 and that he continued to practice medicine in West Germany, as a free man who never paid for his crimes. It has also been suggested that he was active in politics as a member of the right-wing Germany Party. All accounts agree, however, that Blome died in Dortmund on October 10, 1969, aged 75.
Walter Blume was a midranking SS commander and leader of Sonderkommando 7a, part of Einsatzgruppe B. The unit perpetrated the killing of thousands of Jews in Belarus and Russia. Blume was also responsible for the deportation of over 46,000 Greek Jews to Auschwitz.
He was born on July 23, 1906, in Dortmund, into a Protestant family. His father was a schoolteacher with a doctorate in law. The younger Blume studied law in Bonn, Jena, and Münster; passed the bar examination; and received his doctorate in law from Erlangen University in April 1933. On March 1, 1933, he became head of the political section of the Dortmund court, where he worked as a state judicial state examiner and assistant judge.
In 1933, Blume joined the SA on March 1 and the NSDAP on May 1. On April 11, 1935, he became a member of the SS and joined the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), working in the Prussian Secret Police.
Four years later, in December 1939, Blume was appointed as director of staff in the Berlin Gestapo, serving in Halle, Hanover, and Berlin until 1941. In March 1941, he was summoned to Düben, Saxony, where he was tasked with reorganizing the Einsatzgruppen ready for action in the forthcoming campaigns in the Soviet Union.
In May 1941, he took command of Sonderkommando 7a of Einsatzgruppe B (under overall command of Arthur Nebe). The head of the SD, Reinhard Heydrich, instructed Blume that he and his unit were tasked with wiping out Jews in the areas to be occupied. Einsatzkommando 7a was sent to Vitebsk (Belarus) and part of western Russia (Klintsy, Nevel, and Smolensk). In completing the Aktions that followed, Blume later reported that he had exterminated 24,000 Jews. On August 17, 1941, Blume left Sonderkommando 7a and was succeeded by Eugen Steimle. For the next two years, he took charge of the Gestapo office in Düsseldorf.
In 1942, Blume was promoted to SS-Standartenführer and sent to Greece as commander in charge of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei, or SiPo) in Athens. He increased the office staff and requisitioned city buildings in the center of Athens as locations in which to undertake interrogation (often by torture), and he directed the exclusion, concentration, and ultimately the expulsion of the Greek Jews. He also set up the Haidari concentration camp, which operated from September 1943 until it was shut down in September 1944. It was the largest and most notorious of some 20 camps set up by the Nazis in Greece.
In August 1943, Blume, under the direction of Adolf Eichmann and together with Dieter Wisliceny and Anton Burger (an SS-Obersturmführer and soon-to-be commandant at the Terezín concentration camp), organized the deportation of 46,000 Jews from the cities of Athens, Ioannina, Corfu, Rhodes, and Kos to Auschwitz-Birkenau. By October 18, 1943, Blume headed the SiPo and SD in Athens. At the end of 1944, he returned to Berlin.
With the German surrender in 1945, he was taken prisoner in Salzburg, Austria.
In April 1948, Walter Blume was a defendant at the Nuremberg Einsatzgruppen trial. The indictment claimed that he was directly responsible for the murder of 996 people between June and August 1941. He was not indicted for the crimes committed in Greece, including his involvement in the deportation of the Greek Jews. He was sentenced to death by U.S. Military Court II. In 1951, the Advisory Board on Clemency for War Criminals, run by U.S. high commissioner to Germany John J. McCloy, reduced Blume’s death sentence to 25 years. In 1955, Blume was released from Bavaria’s Landsberg prison.
After 1957, Blume ran a business in the Ruhr Valley. He remarried in 1958 and had six children.
Ten years later after the first trial, the Bremen public prosecutor’s office investigated Blume, Anton Burger, and Friedrich Linnemann (Blume’s assistant in Athens during the deportations). Despite the serious nature of the charges against them, a decision was made on January 29, 1971, not to proceed with any charges.
Walter Blume died on November 13, 1974, in Dortmund, aged 68.
Wilhelm Boger, known to some as the “Tiger of Auschwitz,” was a German police commissioner and concentration camp supervisor. He was notorious for the nature of the crimes he committed at Auschwitz.
Wilhelm Friedrich Boger was born on December 19, 1906, in Zuffenhausen near Stuttgart. In 1922, he completed his formal schooling and joined the National Socialist youth movement (later named Hitler Youth) the same year. From 1922 to 1925, he worked as an apprentice, and in 1925, he took a clerical job at the Stuttgart office of the National German Commercial Employees’ Association. Until the end of 1929, Boger was in the Artaman League, an organization that aimed to replace universal military service with voluntary agricultural service. He joined the NSDAP in 1929 and the SS in 1930. He married for the first time in 1931.
Boger lost his job in the spring of 1932. On March 5, 1933, as a member of the SS, he was called up to serve in the auxiliary police at Friedrichshafen, and on July 1, 1933, he was transferred to the Stuttgart political police. In October 1933, Boger moved into Friedrichshafen’s political police force, and from 1936 to 1937, he attended police training school. After passing his examination, he was appointed as a police commissioner, despite a 1936 conviction for mistreating a prisoner during an interrogation.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Boger was transferred to the state police office at Zichenau. Three weeks later, he was commissioned to set up and supervise the border police station in Ostrolenka, Poland.
In 1940, Boger transferred to the Second SS Police Engineer unit, and after a brief training period, he was sent to the front, where he served until he was wounded in action in March 1942.
After his recovery, Boger was sent to Auschwitz and assigned to the Political Department, which represented the RSHA in the camp. Its chief duties were to receive and keep records on prisoners, maintain camp security, combat internal resistance, and conduct interrogations.
From December 23, 1943, until the evacuation of the camp in January 1945, he led the section dealing with investigations and interrogations. He was known for his cruelty and carried the reputation with pride. To assist with interrogations, he invented what became known as the Boger swing, a particularly vicious instrument of torture that resulted in ever-increasing levels of suffering as a prisoner’s flesh would be flayed with each successive incorrect or unacceptable response during questioning. Employing this method, Boger was able to obtain a high confession rate from his victims.
In the last days of January 1945, with the help of SS-Untersturmführer Hans Schurz and other colleagues including Pery Broad, he took a truck loaded with incriminating files to Buchenwald. He then worked at Nordhausen, where he resumed his activity in the political service, supervising 5,000 prisoners on an evacuation march to Ravensbrück.
With the end of the war, he fled to Ludwigsburg, where his parents lived. He was arrested there in June 1945 by the American military police. In November 1946, he was due to be extradited to Poland for trial but escaped from custody. From 1948 until mid-1949, he worked as a farmhand near Stuttgart. In July 1949, he was rearrested and imprisoned in Lüneburg until August but was soon released. From late 1949, he was employed under his own name at the Heinkel aircraft factory in his hometown of Zuffenhausen. He was arrested again in October 1958 by the Stuttgart denazification court, which found him to be a rational, well-schooled police commissioner and civil servant, and not brutal at all. Passing his denazification tribunal, he was once more released.
In 1959, he was arrested one further time, and on this occasion, Boger was charged for war crimes committed while he was at Auschwitz. On August 20, 1965, he was indicted at the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial for aiding and abetting in the murder of Jews. After testimony was heard from a series of eyewitnesses, he was finally sentenced to life imprisonment for murder in at least 5 cases, collective murder in at least 109 others, and shared assistance for collective murder.
Boger died at the age of 70 in Bietigheim-Bissingen prison, Baden-Württemberg, on April 3, 1977.
Juana Bormann was a Nazi concentration camp guard noted for her brutality shown toward the prisoners over whom she exercised authority.
She was born on September 10, 1893, in Birkenfelde, East Prussia. While not much has been recorded about her early life, it is known that she was a deeply religious Catholic woman who had at one time considered the life of a missionary. During the 1930s, however, she gave up this possibility to join the SS. To make more money, she enlisted as a civilian employee at Lichtenburg, the first women’s concentration camp, on March 1, 1938. At first, she worked in the kitchens. When the new women’s camp at Ravensbrück was opened in May 1939, she, together with the rest of the staff and prisoners from Lichtenberg, was transferred there.
At Ravensbrück, she was appointed as an Aufseherin, or overseer—in reality, a camp guard. In March 1942, she was transferred to Auschwitz (main camp), before being sent on to the extermination complex at Birkenau in October that year. Here, she worked alongside, and sometimes under the direction of, her supervisors, who included Maria Mandl and Irma Grese.
Known for her cruelty, Bormann was notorious for beating prisoners and turning loose her dogs on them; indeed, she was nicknamed the “woman with the dogs.” At least two deaths were recorded due to mauling, and it was said that one of her favorite diversions was unleashing her German shepherd dog (by some accounts, an Irish wolfhound) on the prisoners. All, it was noted, were afraid of Bormann and did their best to avoid her.
One of the many subcamps of Auschwitz was established at Hindenburg (Zabrze), where a private enterprise belonging to the Vereinigte Oberschlesische Hüttenwerke AG (United Upper Silesian Steelworks AG) received permission to operate. At the beginning of August 1944, a transport of about 350 women prisoners, most of them Polish Jews, arrived from Birkenau at the subcamp that had been built there. Bormann was sent as a guard, under commandant SS-Unterscharführer Adolf Taube. In January 1945, the camp was evacuated, and the prisoners were marched on foot to Gleiwitz (Gliwice). Bormann was sent back to Ravensbrück, before moving on to Bergen-Belsen in March. Her new commandant was Josef Kramer, and she was reunited with Irma Grese and another guard with whom she had previously served, Elisabeth Volkenrath.
On April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British troops, and most of the camp personnel, including Bormann, were arrested. After being interrogated, she was remanded to a prison in the nearby town of Celle to await trial. The Belsen Trial, which took place between September 17 and November 17, 1945, was conducted by the British army in Lüneburg. Bormann was charged on various counts dating back to her time at Auschwitz, with witnesses testifying that she assisted in selecting prisoners to be sent to the gas chambers as well as for experiments with Josef Mengele and another Auschwitz doctor, Fritz Klein. She denied all charges, admitting only to slapping prisoners with her hand for disciplinary reasons.
In evidence, she told the court that she was a single woman and related her history of work in the concentration camps. Upon being asked about her involvement in the selection process for gassing, she replied that she had never attended selections and was only present at morning and evening roll calls. She admitted that she had a dog at Belsen, but she said that this was a pet rather than a camp guard dog and that she never set it against prisoners. Asked whether she had ever tried to leave the SS, she replied that she had applied in writing to do so in 1943 but that her application had been turned down.
Juana Bormann was found guilty of violating the laws and customs of war for her actions at Auschwitz and Belsen and was sentenced to death by hanging, along with Grese and Volkenrath. She was transferred to Hameln jail on December 9, 1945, to await execution. The hangings were set for Thursday, December 13, 1945. Volkenrath’s was first, followed by Grese and then Bormann. Albert Pierrepoint, the British executioner, chronicled that at 52 years of age, she looked “old and haggard” as she “limped down the corridor” toward the gallows. Her last recorded words were “I have my feelings.” She was buried in the jail’s courtyard until 1954, when her body and those of the others were moved to the Am Wehl cemetery in Hameln. All the graves were (and remain) unmarked.
Martin Bormann was a close friend and the private secretary of Adolf Hitler, and by the end of World War II, he had become the second most powerful man in Germany.
Martin Ludwig Bormann was born on June 17, 1900, in Wegelben near Halberstadt, one of five children of a former Prussian regimental sergeant major who later became a postal worker. Bormann had a poor relationship with his strict father. Educated at a Lutheran school, Bormann dropped out to work on a farming estate in Mecklenburg. He volunteered to serve in the German army during the last few months of World War I, joining the 55th Field Artillery Regiment, although he never saw action.
In 1922, while working as manager of a large estate, Bormann joined the Freikorps Rossbach in Mecklenburg. Here he befriended and fought alongside Rudolf Hoess, who, many years later, became commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp.
The so-called Feme murders were politically motivated murders committed in 1919 to 1923 by the German far right against political opponents. German nationalist Albert Leo Schlageter was executed by the French occupation forces in the Ruhr, and Walther Kadow (Bormann’s former elementary school teacher) was suspected of having betrayed Schlageter to the French. In May 1923, Hoess, with Bormann as his accomplice, brutally murdered Kadow. In 1924, Hoess was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and Martin Bormann to 1 year for their part in the murder.
Martin Bormann was a close friend and the private secretary of Adolf Hitler. By the end of World War II he had become the second most powerful man in Germany after the Führer. He followed Nazi ideology with the utmost brutality and remained at Hitler’s side right through to the end of the war. Afterward he disappeared, never to face justice. It was later concluded that he took his own life a week after Hitler committed suicide in 1945. (Library of Congress)
In July 1926, after his early release, Bormann saw Hitler for the first time and was immediately impressed by him. Bormann joined the National Socialists, becoming head of the Nazi regional press in Thuringia in 1926. From 1928 to 1930, Bormann held posts in the SA Supreme Command.
On September 2, 1929, Bormann married 19-year-old Gerda Buch, whose father, Walter Buch, served as a chairman of the Nazi Party Court; Hitler served as a witness at their wedding. Martin and Gerda Bormann had 10 children, of whom a daughter died shortly after childbirth. Bormann also had a lover, the actress Manja Behrens, with whom he spent more time than with his own family.
In October 1933, Bormann became a Reichsleiter (“Reich Leader”) of the NSDAP. A month later, he was elected as a Nazi delegate to the Reichstag. The Adolf Hitler Contribution to the German Economy, organized by Bormann in 1933, brought money from employers into the party coffers, and Bormann demonstrated his financial skills. In 1933, Hitler entrusted him with the administration of his own finances, which brought him access to Hitler himself and to the close circle around him.
From July 1933 until 1941, Bormann was the chief of cabinet in the Office of the Deputy führer, Rudolf Hess, acting as his personal secretary and right-hand man. The powers of Hess’s staff were constantly extended. Its principal task was to assert the will of the party over the state apparatus. This meant control of legislative activity, influence over appointments, and regular interference at state and party political levels. After Hess’s flight to Britain in May 1941, Bormann was appointed to succeed him, and he became head of the Party Chancellery at age 40. He had the authority of a Reich minister, but his actual power exceeded his formal positions in the party and state apparatus. Bormann’s rise to power was based on his administrative and financial abilities, his unscrupulousness and intrigues, and his unconditional loyalty to Hitler.
In 1942, Bormann became Hitler’s secretary and was given the post of deputy führer. He controlled all the papers and people Hitler saw, and he wielded a growing influence on government policy. He took charge of all of Hitler’s paper work, appointments, and personal finances. Hitler came to have complete trust in Bormann and the view of reality he presented. During one meeting, Hitler was said to have screamed, “To win this war, I need Bormann!”
People whose access to Hitler Bormann controlled included Josef Goebbels, Hermann Göring, Heinrich Himmler, Albert Speer, and Joachim von Ribbentrop. As Hitler rarely left the headquarters, his judgments were invariably wrong during the final stages of the war.
Bormann pursued the aims and the ideology of Nazism with the utmost brutality. He pushed through the exclusion of the Christian churches from public life, and he favored extremely harsh treatment of the Slav population in the territories occupied by German troops and an intensification of the antisemitic measures of the Nazi state. He advocated extremely harsh, radical measures when it came to the treatment of Jews, of the conquered eastern peoples, and of prisoners of war. He signed a decree on October 9, 1942, which prescribed that “the permanent elimination of the Jews from the territories of Greater Germany can no longer be carried out by emigration but by the use of ruthless force in the special camps of the East.” Bormann’s further decree, signed by him on July 1, 1943, gave Adolf Eichmann absolute power over Jews, confirming the exclusive jurisdiction of the SS in this area.
Bormann remained at Hitler’s side right up to the latter’s suicide and pursued to the end—although with decreasing success—the implementation of Hitler’s orders, including the destruction of Germany’s remaining infrastructure. When it became clear that Germany was losing the war, Bormann attempted on May 2, 1945, to break through the lines of the Red Army with Hitler’s driver and four others. They moved underground in small groups to Friedrichstrasse station, emerging to find Berlin in flames and Soviet shells exploding around them.
Bormann’s fate remained unclear for a long time. In October 1946, the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg condemned him to death in absentia. Despite frequent reports that Bormann had survived, the search for him proved fruitless. It was rumored for many years that Bormann had flown to Argentina.
On December 8, 1972, near the site of the Führerbunker in Berlin, construction workers uncovered human remains. Albert Krummnow, a postal official, came forward and informed the authorities that he had buried two bodies, one of which was Bormann’s, on May 8, 1945. Fragments of glass found in one of the men’s jawbones indicated that they committed suicide via cyanide capsules. DNA testing in 1988 later found the remains to be compatible with that of Bormann’s son. It was confirmed that Bormann had committed suicide on May 2, 1945, aged 44, in Berlin. His remains were cremated, and in 1999, Martin Bormann Jr. was permitted to scatter his father’s ashes in the Baltic Sea outside German territorial limits. The cremation and burial cost the German government $4,700.
Hugo Boss was a German clothing manufacturer whose enterprise embraced the Nazi period and, in more recent times, has become a global fashion house.
Born in the small Württemberg town of Metzingen on July 8, 1885, Boss was the youngest of five children in the family of Heinrich and Luise (née Münzenmayer) Boss, owners of a lingerie and linen shop. After a routine upbringing for a young middle-class German of the time, he assumed control of the store in 1908, the same year he was married. After serving in World War I, Boss established his own clothing company in Metzingen in 1923, followed by a clothes factory the following year. This produced shirts, jackets, work wear, sportswear, and raincoats.
One of Boss’s earliest clients was Rudolf Born, a textiles distributor. He contracted Boss to produce some brown shirts for a small but growing political group known as the National Socialist Party; this was, of course, the nascent Nazi Party, which would assume office in January 1933. Boss himself at this time was relatively apolitical; he produced clothes for a variety of clients, including other political parties, the police, and the postal service.
With the onset of the Depression, Germany’s economic climate deteriorated and then collapsed, and Boss was forced into bankruptcy. In 1931, he reached an agreement with his creditors that enabled him to start his business and found that he had an ally in the Nazis. On April 1, 1931, he joined the Nazi Party as member number 508,889 and became a sponsor of the SS. Over time, his economic situation improved.
Boss’s reasons for becoming a Nazi, it appears, were twofold: as a businessman, it made good commercial sense to align himself with a growing political party that seemed likely to take power at some time in the future; and, given the economic and social turmoil in which Germany found itself, Boss saw Hitler as the only man able to regenerate the country.
The design of Nazi uniforms eventually saw the involvement of the Hugo Boss company, and the all-black outfit of the SS, introduced in the fall of 1932, was designed by artist and SS-Oberführer Professor Karl Diebitsch and a graphic designer, Walter Heck. It has often been asserted that the black SS uniform was designed by Boss himself, but this was not the case. However, the Hugo Boss company did produce the uniforms, together with the brown shirts of the SA and the uniforms of the Hitler Youth. In 1934, Boss claimed that he had been supplying the Nazis with uniforms since 1924, but it is more likely that he became entrenched in this role in 1928, when he received the status of official supplier to the Nazi movement.
In 1938, Boss had his best year to date and became a supplier of uniforms to the German army. Yet in 1940, Boss was employing only 250 workers; he was successful but not yet a major provider to the Nazi state. The outbreak of war in September 1939 changed this.
By 1941, his sales and profits had skyrocketed, but this came at a price. Like most private manufacturers in Germany, Boss found it hard to find employees during the war, and unable to fill his factories with workers, he was obliged to use prisoners of war and forced laborers from countries occupied by the Nazis. During the war, Boss used 140 such workers, swelled by 40 French prisoners of war from 1940 onward. Conditions in Boss’s factory were considered by all to be appalling; the barracks were pestilential, food was inadequate and of poor quality, and medical facilities for the workers were practically nonexistent. Evidence exists to the effect that managers and foremen were enthusiastic Nazis.
With the end of the war in 1945, Boss was subjected to the process of denazification, whereby he was tried for his complicity in the Nazi state. His early Nazi Party membership now counted against him, as did his financial support of the SS and his supplying of uniforms for both the various Nazi Party organizations and the German army. He was denounced as a war profiteer and classified as an activist member of the party and “beneficiary of National Socialism.” In 1946, he was fined and forbidden to vote as a German citizen or to run a business. Upon appeal, Boss was retried and reclassified; he now became a “follower of National Socialism” (Mitläufer) rather than an activist, and his penalties were reduced.
Hugo Boss died on the night of August 8 to 9, 1948. While his company survived to become one of the leading fashion houses in the world today, there remains a stigma attached to the company owing to its association with the Third Reich.
Herta Bothe was a concentration camp guard infamous for her brutality toward her prisoners at Ravensbrück, Stutthof, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen.
Born in Teterow, Mecklenburg-Schwerin, on January 8, 1921, she was the daughter of a woodworker. Before the outbreak of war in September 1939, she worked briefly as a nurse while a member of the Nazi Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls) youth organization. In September 1942, Bothe joined the Nazi concentration camp corps as an SS-Aufseherin (overseer) in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück. After a period of training, she was sent to the camp at Stutthof, where she was soon nicknamed the “Sadist of Stutthof,” having quickly acquired a reputation as one who beat prisoners without mercy.
Bothe’s career as a guard saw her transferred through several different deployments, notably Stutthof’s female subcamp, Bromberg-Ost, where she was sent in July 1944. Here, she would often beat sick or weak prisoners without mercy or would otherwise engage in sadistic tortures (including shooting) of those carrying heavy food containers from the camp kitchen.
On January 21, 1945, Bothe received orders to move to Auschwitz to assist with the camp’s evacuation of prisoners away from the advancing Red Army. She was to accompany what became a death march of female prisoners and to head toward the camp at Bergen-Belsen in northwestern Germany. She arrived in late February 1945, and in March, she was put in charge of 60 prisoners undertaking woodcutting duties.
Bergen-Belsen was liberated and then occupied by British troops on April 15, 1945, but the enormous carnage accompanying the end of the war saw chaos, overcrowding, and general horror pervading the camp. On the day of the liberation, the British found approximately 60,985 survivors; there were some 10,000 unburied dead who lay where they had fallen in the compound and another 15,000 who succumbed to disease and starvation after the British arrived.
In an attempt to help clean up the camp, thus trying to save the lives of those remaining, the British camp administration forced the captured Nazi guard detachments to carry the corpses of Jewish dead and deposit them into mass graves. Bothe expressed a defiant show of anger at this order, as she feared contamination and exposure to disease—especially typhus, which had been running rampant through the camp and taking thousands of lives. The anger of the British in setting the captured Nazi guards to work in gathering the dead as a matter of punishment was apparent to all, and most of the dead were simply piled up in what became mountains of putrescent flesh, prior to being shoved unceremoniously into giant pits dug by British army bulldozers.
After completion of this grisly task, Bothe was placed under formal arrest and taken to a jail at Celle to await trial for war crimes. The subsequent Belsen Trial took place in nearby Lüneburg, with SS men and women who had been apprehended at the time of the liberation and afterward as defendants. At her trial, Bothe was charged on two separate counts: mistreatment of prisoners at Bergen-Belsen and mistreatment of prisoners at Auschwitz. She admitted to striking inmates for camp violations but maintained that she never killed anyone or used anything other than her hands to strike the prisoners. She failed to convince the military tribunal, was convicted, and was sentenced to 10 years in prison for using a pistol on prisoners.
However, on December 22, 1951, after serving six years of her sentence, she was granted an early release on the ground of clemency from the British government. She then retreated into anonymity and lived for the next half century in Germany under the name Lange, dying at the age of 79 on March 16, 2000.
SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Bothmann was commandant of the Chełmno extermination camp from 1942 until its liquidation and leader of the SS-Sonderkommando Bothmann, which conducted the extermination of Jews from the Łódź ghetto and other places.
Hans Johann Bothmann was born in Dittmarschen, Holstein on November 11, 1911, to farmer Hermann Bothmann and his wife Dora. He attended primary school in Lohe, middle school in Bad Segeberg, and high school in Neibüll. In 1932, Bothmann joined the Hitler Youth, and by 1933, he was a member of the SS. Soon afterward, Bothmann worked full-time with the Gestapo office in Berlin and was promoted in 1937 to Kriminalkommissar (detective inspector) in the detective unit there. Bothmann, 28 years old at the time of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939 and recently promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer, was transferred to the state police headquarters in Posen (Poznań), an area of Poland annexed to Germany.
Bothmann replaced SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange as commandant of the Chełmno death camp in March 1942 and served there until mid-April 1943. Prompted by two incidents in March and April 1942, Bothmann made substantial changes to the camp’s killing methods. First, one of the gas vans being used to murder Jews broke down on the highway while conveying victims to their death; soon after that, another van exploded while the driver was revving its engine at the loading ramp. Bothmann worked to ensure that such incidents would not recur and introduced “efficiencies” into the killing procedure.
Ultimately, until transports of Jews to Chełmno were discontinued in late March 1943, the camp was credited with the murder of at least 180,000 Jews under Bothmann’s administration.
After Chełmno was dissolved in mid-April 1943, all members of Bothmann’s unit took special leave in April 1943. The 85 members of SS Sonderkommando X then chose to serve in Yugoslavia under Bothmann in a reconstituted Sonderkommando Bothmann. They were used in antipartisan campaigns as an auxiliary military-police force (Feldgendarmerie) and incurred significant losses.
In mid-February 1944, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Governor Arthur Greiser decided to reduce the number of Jews in the Łódź ghetto and to keep only the minimum number of Jews needed for the defense industry.
In April 1944, Bothmann was recalled from Croatia to become commandant of Chełmno death camp a second time. The purpose was to oversee the final reduction of the Łódź ghetto; thus, 7,176 Jewish men, women, and children were transported from Łódź to the reactivated Chełmno in 10 rail transports between June 23 and July 14, 1944. They were murdered in gas vans. Once the murder process was completed, transports to Chełmno ceased from the end of August 1944.
In early 1944, with the tide of war turning against Germany, many senior Nazis, especially Higher SS and Police Leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF) for the Wartheland Wilhelm Koppe, expressed concern to Himmler that there remained at Chełmno many buried corpses needing to be exhumed and cremated and that all evidence of the murders carried out there had to be expunged. Himmler sent Bothmann back to Chełmno one more time with orders to dig up the bodies and leave no evidence of the killings. The resultant Aktion 1005 was carried out in July and August 1944, with any Jews remaining in the vicinity used to clear up all traces of the camp. When Soviet troops captured Łódź, Bothmann and his men shot dead the last surviving Jewish workers during the night of January 17 to 18, 1945.
Bothmann and his unit fled west just before the arrival of the Soviets. The unit was dissolved, and its members were allocated to various police departments. In February 1945, Bothmann headed the border police commissariat in Flensburg, in Schleswig. With the end of the war, he was taken into British custody, but on April 4, 1946, he committed suicide by hanging himself in prison not far from Flensburg, in Heide.
Philipp Bouhler was a high-ranking Nazi official who implemented Aktion T-4, the so-called euthanasia program for those who were mentally ill, the disabled, and the inmates of hospitals and nursing homes deemed “unworthy” of Nazi society. With Heinrich Himmler, Bouhler also developed Aktion 14f13, which killed between 15,000 and 20,000 concentration camp prisoners.
Philipp Bouhler was born on September 11, 1899, in Munich, the son of Emil Bouhler, a retired colonel. Between 1912 and 1916, he was a cadet, and from July 6, 1916, he served in the Bavarian Fusiliers Regiment, fought in World War I, and was badly wounded.
From 1919 to 1920, he studied philosophy for four semesters at the University of Munich before joining the staff of the Völkischer Beobachter (“People’s Observer”) in 1921. In July 1922, he joined the National Socialist Party, and by 1925, Bouhler was the party’s business manager, a post he held until 1936.
On March 5, 1933, after the Nazi seizure of power, Bouhler joined the Reichstag, representing Westphalia. On April 20, 1933, he joined the SS; he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer on January 30, 1936.
On August 29, 1934, Bouhler was appointed president of the Munich police. However, he never took up the position, because that September he was chosen to head Adolf Hitler’s new chancellery, a post specially created for party business. Bouhler stayed in that position until April 23, 1945. The office was responsible for all correspondence for Hitler, which included private and internal communications as well as responding to public inquiries.
Bouhler was also chairman of the Official Party Inspection Commission for the Protection of National Socialist Literature. This commission determined which writings were suitable for release into Nazi society and which were not approved and should be censored or removed.
On October 18, 1935, the Nazi government, with the assistance of Karl Brandt, passed the Law for the Protection of the Hereditary Health of the German People. The Nazis had declared that Germany was in severe danger of Volkstod (death of a people, nation, or race), and this law set up the model under which Nazi doctors could take the life of those deemed to be “life unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben).
In August 1939, the Reich Committee for the Scientific Registration of Serious Hereditary and Congenitally Based Diseases was established. Brandt and Bouhler were put in charge of the program of euthanasia employed to deal with the incurably insane or the physically handicapped, a program that Hitler said would result in the “racial integrity of the German people.”
From 1939 onward, Bouhler was responsible for Aktion T-4, the program named after its headquarters on Tiergassestrasse 4, Berlin, which began in the fall of 1939. At first, mandatory sterilization formed an important part of the Nazi plan of racial purification, and those who were deemed to have hereditary “weaknesses” became its victims. No one knows how many people were sterilized, with estimates ranging anywhere from 200,000 to 350,000 people.
The first person to die via the T-4 program was one Gerhard Kretschmar, a child born on February 29, 1939. His parents, who lived in Saxony, petitioned Hitler for Gerhard to be “put to sleep,” as he was born blind, mentally retarded, and without one leg and part of one arm. Carbon monoxide gas was selected as the means of death, and after this, several asylums were equipped with gas chambers. The first killing center was Schloss Hartheim in Upper Austria, and once the program got underway, between October 1939 and August 1941, Aktion T-4 killed over 70,000 people.
The program was carried out secretly, but over time, the public became aware of the killings. This led to legal action. In the summer of 1940, Lothar Kreyssig, a judge in Brandenburg, lodged a complaint against Bouhler for murder. Bouhler met the minister of justice, Franz Gürtner, several times, and on August 27, 1940, he sent Gürtner a copy of Hitler’s note of September 5, 1940, directing Bouhler to instigate T-4. Yet religious communities opposed the murder of people with physical, emotional, or mental disabilities, and public disapproval was very strong. In response and on Hitler’s orders, Aktion T-4 was suspended on August 24, 1941. In practice, murders in health care institutions continued, by systematic malnutrition and overdose of drugs.
As World War II progressed, the euthanasia program, now called Aktion 14f13, was used to murder people believed to be biologically inferior, such as Jews, Poles, Russians, and Roma. The scheme operated under the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps and the office of the SS-Reichsführer, under the codename Sonderbehandlung 14f13. The combination of numbers and letters was derived from the SS record-keeping system. Sonderbehandlung (special handling) was the euphemism for murder. The final step was the mass killing, mostly of Jews, in the extermination camps themselves.
Beginning in 1942, Bouhler’s influence in the NSDAP started to wane, and by 1944, many of the functions of his office were absorbed by the Party Chancellery under Martin Bormann.
On April 23, 1945, on orders of Adolf Hitler, Bouhler was arrested in Berchtesgaden by the SS and stripped of all his functions. He was released on May 1, 1945, after Hitler had committed suicide. Captured by American troops on May 9, 1945, Bouhler committed suicide with cyanide on May 19, 1945, in an American prison camp in Zell am See, Austria.
René Bousquet, a French collaborator, was secretary-general of the Vichy French police in the government of Pierre Laval from April 18, 1942, to December 31, 1943. In this capacity, he organized the notorious roundup at the Velodrome d’Hiver (Winter Velodrome, or Vel’ d’Hiv) on July 16 to 17, 1942. Here, more than 13,000 Jews were arrested by French police, handed over to the Germans, and then deported to the East.
He was born in Montauban into the family of a French notary on May 11, 1909, and earned a bachelor’s degree in law from Toulouse. In March 1930, he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur for saving dozens of people from drowning in a flood. Because of this heroism, Bousquet was put in charge of the reconstruction of the disaster departments of the south.
René Bousquet was secretary general of the Vichy French police in the government of Pierre Laval between April 1942 and December 1943. On July 16–17, 1942, Bousquet oversaw the mass arrest of all foreign Jews in Paris, in what became known as the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup. In this image Bousquet (center) is shown inspecting a guard of honor alongside the prefect of police, Amédée Bussière. (Keystone-France\Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
In 1931, at the age of 22, he was deputy chief of staff to the undersecretary of state for the interior in the first Laval government, where he became a close associate. He served as chief of staff for several ministers, and in May 1936, Bousquet was named assistant bureau chief of the Interior Ministry with responsibility over the national security files, which classified 5 million French and 2 million foreigners as “suspects” or “undesirables.” These files were important later in the identification of foreign Jews during the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup.
In 1939, prior to the outbreak of World War II, Bosquet became secretary-general of the Marne department. In May 1940, following the Armistice in which France surrendered to Germany and agreed to occupation, Marshal Philippe Pétain, head of the collaborationist Vichy regime, appointed Bousquet prefect of the Marne. In this capacity, he managed to spare the Marne from economic colonization by Nazi Germany, and while certain prisoners of war escaped, in November 1941, he collaborated with the Rheims police in the denunciation, arrest, and handover to the Germans of communist militants.
In early 1942, Bosquet was twice offered the Ministry of Agriculture but refused on both occasions. On April 18, 1942, as the SS was taking over security duties in the Occupied Zone from the Wehrmacht, Laval appointed Bousquet secretary-general of police in the Ministry of the Interior, giving Bousquet permanent credentials to sign on behalf of the head of state. As such, he took a leading role in the police collaboration between Vichy and the German occupation. Bousquet concentrated all police services under his personal authority.
Bosquet met with Reinhard Heydrich of the SD on May 6, 1942, and obtained consent from the SS to transfer another 5,000 Jews from the transit camp at Drancy to the extermination camps in the East.
Laval, Bosquet, and Louis Darquier, commissioner for Jewish affairs, entered into discussions with their Nazi counterparts—Heydrich; Carl Oberg, head of the SS in France; and SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler—about the status of Jews in France. After consultation with Laval, Bousquet agreed to have his personnel serve the occupation forces in arresting the foreign Jews in Vichy and to have his personnel participate in the roundup of Jews throughout the rest of France. The forces the Germans had in France were limited; without this cooperation, they could not have carried out these actions.
On July 16 to 17, 1942, Bousquet ordered the mass arrest of all foreign Jews in Paris, in what became known as the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (La Rafle). Approximately 13,000 Jews were arrested, sent to Drancy, and then deported to Auschwitz, where most were murdered. During Bousquet’s term as secretary-general, the majority of the approximately 76,000 Jews to be deported from France were arrested.
Senior SS and Police Leader Carl Oberg oversaw the German police in France, and Bousquet negotiated with him the Oberg-Bousquet accords, presented to all regional prefects on August 8, 1942. The agreement formally recognized the autonomy of the French police and gendarmerie and said that the French police would not be compelled to provide hostages or to hand their prisoners over to German services. The final text of the agreement laid down as a principle that the French police would not be called upon by the services of the SS commander to designate hostages and that those arrested would in no case be subject to reprisals by the German authorities. Thus, French nationals guilty of political offenses or ordinary offenses (though not those directed against occupation forces) would be punished by the authorities in accordance with French law. The agreement mentioned “communists” and “saboteurs,” but it did not refer to Jews. In breach of this agreement, three days later, the Germans demanded that the French hand over 93 hostages, who were shot in retaliation for the murder of 8 Germans.
The fall and winter of 1942 to 1943, coinciding with the beginning of Allied victories over the Axis forces, marked a turning point in Vichy’s attitude toward the deportation of Jews. Laval now refused to participate in the Franco-German collective raids, and in March 1943, Bousquet requested that the French no longer take part in the deportations of French Jews. In April, the Germans requested that the French police participate in two transports of 2,000 Jews (including 1,500 native French Jews) to Leguay. In response, Bousquet said that the French security forces wished to be exempted from participating. Between April and June, the deportations were halted.
Oberg and Bousquet signed a new agreement on April 2, 1942, under which the French police “promised to defend the order against the attacks of the Jews, Communists, and other enemies,” while the Germans promised not to force the French to take hostages and to no longer to intervene in “strictly French” police affairs. From this period, the Vichy police, although still very active against the communist resistance, moderated their actions in the hunt for the French Jews.
In 1943, Bousquet protected some members of the resistance who were threatened with arrest, including future French president François Mitterrand, who had run a network of escaped prisoners, and had sabotaged certain operations mounted against the maquis, and released detained persons.
At the end of 1943, Bousquet, who had agreed to collaborate in the arrest of communist “terrorists” and foreign Jews claimed by no country, rebelled as soon as he was asked to “strike without discrimination.” In November 1943, the German authorities wanted to consult the lists of Israelites established by the prefecture. Bousquet, who was losing the confidence of Carl Oberg and knew that he was leaving, wrote in response,
For the police and the French administration the fact of being an Israelite does not constitute a presumption of responsibility, neither in political matters nor in matters of common law. It cannot even entail an aggravation of this responsibility, insofar as a Jew is prosecuted for a crime or an offense punishable by our criminal law. On the other hand, the German ordinances concern only the occupied zone. The attitude of the French administration cannot therefore be different from what it is.
In December 1943, under pressure from the Germans, Bousquet resigned his position. On December 20, he burned his archives to complicate the work of his successor, Joseph Darnand, who replaced him on December 31. During the 20 months of Bousquet’s presence at the head of the police (April 1942 to December 1943), 60,000 Jews were deported, while under Darnand’s 8 months (January to August 1944), another 15,000 to 16,000 were deported.
On June 9, 1944, just before the liberation, Bousquet was arrested by the Germans and sent under house arrest to a villa in Bavaria. He was released in April 1945 by the American forces. In May 1945, he returned to France, where he was jailed at the Fresnes prison from May 17, 1945, to July 1, 1948. Laval, with whom he was always close, was also imprisoned at Fresnes. Bousquet helped Laval prepare for his trial, and on the eve of Laval’s execution, Bousquet spent part of the night with him.
In 1949, René Bousquet was the last Frenchman to be tried by the High Court of Justice. The Cold War loomed large, as did the problems of reconstruction. French conscience lacked morality about the Holocaust; the Jewish community was much more concerned with its painful memories rather than with demanding justice for the crimes perpetrated against it. The postwar media focus on the roundups of the summer of 1942 was, therefore, limited. At the end of a three-day trial, René Bousquet was acquitted of the charge “against the interests of national defense” but was “convicted of the crime of national unworthiness,” which was automatically found for all those people who participated in the Vichy government. He was sentenced to the minimum sentence of “five years of national degradation.” This was lifted immediately, however, on the ground that he had “actively and sustainably participated in the Resistance against the occupier.”
After his conviction, like other Vichy officials, Bousquet could not join the French civil service. Instead, he enjoyed a successful career at the Banque de l’Indochine and in newspapers. He met with François Mitterrand through Jean-Paul Martin, Bousquet’s former collaborator in Vichy. On January 17, 1958, the Conseil d’État amnestied him.
In 1974, Bousquet supported and helped finance Mitterrand for the presidential election against Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. Bousquet was also acquainted with numerous other political and cultural figures. On October 28, 1978, Louis Darquier, the former Vichy commissioner for Jewish affairs and now an old man living in Spain, gave an interview in L’Express revealing the extent of Bousquet’s involvement in the mass deportation of Jews.
From 1986 onward, when the accusations against Bousquet became consistent, encounters between Bousquet and Mitterand became less frequent. A judicial investigation was conducted, and Mitterrand was accused of intervening in the proceedings to restrain it. The Paris public prosecutor’s office decided to dismiss Bousquet before a Court of Justice had been closed, which aroused public ire. Mitterrand was specifically targeted when the lawyers of the mission of the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues made the claim that “there is a political decision at the highest level not to advance the Bousquet case.”
These words gave a decisive boost to the efforts of French lawyer and Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld to bring some responsible Vichy French officials to justice, in formal recognition of Vichy’s complicity in the deportation of Jews from France. In 1989, Serge Klarsfeld filed a complaint against Bousquet for crimes against humanity, for the deportation of 194 children from six departments of the south of France. After eight years of investigation and numerous delay tactics, Bousquet was indicted in 1991.
On June 8, 1993, a few weeks before his trial was to begin, Bousquet was shot dead at his home by 51-year-old Christian Didier. Consequently, Bousquet never stood trial for his wartime actions. Didier pleaded not guilty to murder, as he claimed that the killing was justified by Bousquet’s wartime crimes. Ruled sane, Didier was tried and convicted of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison. If the trial against Bousquet had proceeded, it would have been the first against a French citizen for crimes against humanity committed during the war years and probably also the first trial of the crimes of the Vichy government.
Viktor Brack was the organizer of the euthanasia program known as Aktion T-4, under which over 70,000 Germans and Austrians with disabilities were murdered. He later became one of the men responsible for gassing Jews in Nazi concentration camps.
Viktor Hermann Brack, the son of a German medical practitioner, was born on November 9, 1904, in Haaren (modern-day Aachen), Germany. After studying economics at a Munich university, he befriended Heinrich Himmler, for whom he worked for a time as chauffeur. Brack enlisted in an SA regiment in 1923, and in 1929, he became a member of the NSDAP and joined the SS. In 1932, he took a staff position at Nazi Party headquarters in Munich. He was promoted to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer in the SS in 1935, and in 1936, notwithstanding his lack of prior medical or scientific experience, he became chief of Office 2 in the führer’s chancellery and chief liaison officer with the health ministry in Berlin. Office 2 handled matters concerning the Reich ministries, armed forces, the Nazi Party, clemency petitions, and complaints received by the führer from all parts of Germany.
In late 1939, Brack was tasked by his superior officer, Philip Bouhler, with implementing the Nazi euthanasia program, known as Aktion T-4. This implemented early-20th-century ideas of eugenics and of improving the race by not allowing disabled or mentally ill people to reproduce. In December 1939, Brack delegated to August Becker the task of arranging gas-killing operations of mentally ill patients and other people whom the Nazis deemed “life unworthy of life”; this program resulted in the murder of tens of thousands of Germans and Austrians with disabilities. Brack himself personally interviewed and selected personnel for the euthanasia establishments, from those involved in cremating the corpses all the way through to cleaners. On November 9, 1940, Brack was promoted to SS-Oberführer.
Persecution of the Jews had become a fixed Nazi policy very soon after the outbreak of World War II, and by 1941, that had become the Final Solution. The agencies organized to implement Aktion T-4 were used for this operation. Because of the urgent need for laborers in Germany, it was decided not to kill Jews who were able to work but to sterilize them. Accordingly, Himmler instructed Brack to research from physicians involved in Aktion T-4 how to sterilize persons without the victim’s knowledge.
In March 1941, Brack forwarded to Himmler his signed report on the results of experiments concerning the sterilization of human beings by means of X-rays. Brack advocated a two-part system. The first part simply referred to the mass gassing of internees unable to work; the second, aimed at “useful” laborers, would introduce forced sterilization to prisoners so that they would not be able to reproduce. Forced sterilization was carried out mainly through the use of massive doses of radiation aimed at prisoners’ reproductive organs. In some cases, male prisoners were physically castrated. As many as 4,000 prisoners per day were sterilized between late 1943 and early 1945.
In 1942, Brack joined the Waffen-SS, and during the late summer of that year, he was ordered to active duty, where he remained until the end of the war.
After the defeat of Germany, on May 20, 1945, Brack was taken into custody by U.S. counterintelligence officers. He was charged with various crimes against humanity and defended himself in the Doctors’ Trial, which began in late 1946 in Nuremberg. Found guilty in 1947, he was sentenced to death. Brack was hanged on June 2, 1948, in Landsberg Prison.
Otto Bradfisch was an economist and a political scientist, jurist, SS-Obersturmbannführer, leader of Einsatzkommando 8 of Einsatzgruppe B of the SiPo and the SD, and commander of the Security Police in the Łódź ghetto and Potsdam.
Bradfisch, the son of food trader Karl Bradfisch, was born on May 10, 1903, in Zweibrücken, in the Rhineland. He attended primary school in Kaiserslautern and then completed his schooling at the local school in 1922. Studying economics at the universities of Freiburg, Leipzig, and Heidelberg, he graduated in 1926 from Austria’s University of Innsbruck with a doctorate in politics. On January 1, 1931, he joined the NSDAP.
Due to the unreliable economy, Bradfisch then studied law to increase his job opportunities. After studying at the universities of Erlangen and Munich, he passed his first (February 17, 1932) and second (October 9, 1935) state legal examinations. While studying at Munich University, he worked as the acting local NSDAP group leader. He then worked as an assessor in Upper Bavaria’s government until he became a government assistant in the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior.
In 1936, Bradfisch left the Evangelical Church. He applied to serve in the Gestapo, and on March 3, 1937, he became its deputy head in Saarbrücken. In 1938, he entered the SS and was appointed as an SS-Sturmbannführer. From November 4, 1938, to the spring of 1941, he served on the local council in Neustadt an der Weinstrasse, until he was selected to serve in Russia and given command of an Einztaszkommando.
Just prior to Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, a briefing occurred in Pretzsch, in which senior SS leaders from the Reich Security Main Office, including Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Müller, were present. The leaders of the Einsatzgruppen, staff officers, and commanders of the Einsatzkommandos attended. Heydrich announced the imminent invasion of the Soviet Union and reported that the Einsatzgruppen had been tasked to carry out “special treatment” (i.e., killing) of potential adversaries, which included Jews, communist functionaries, saboteurs, assassins, agitators, and the like, who would advance in the wake of the army in order to pacify the occupied population. According to Heydrich, Adolf Hitler had himself issued this extermination order. There was an agreement between the Wehrmacht and the SS on the division of responsibilities between the Einsatzgruppen and army units.
From 1941 until the end of March 1942, Bradfisch was head of Einsatzkommando 8 (EK 8) of Einsatzgruppe B, headed by SS-Brigadeführer Arthur Nebe, and the SD, directing the shooting of more than 60,000 people. From Warsaw, EK 8 marched first to Białystok, where it arrived in late June or early July 1941, and remained for about a week. In carrying out the extermination order, EK 8 shot and killed Jews in areas across the demarcation line established in 1939 between the German Reich and the Soviet Union. To find Jews, some members of EK 8 surrounded villages or streets, while others rounded up victims from their homes. All were either transported immediately to previously prepared shooting sites, or held in schools or factory buildings until the next day, or shot a few days later. Old and sick people unable to walk were shot in or around their homes.
The mass shooting took place outside the villages. Natural crevasses, abandoned army positions, and mass graves dug by the victims themselves functioned as execution sites. The victims were unloaded from the trucks and thrust toward the pits. First, they handed over their valuables and clothing, and then they had to lie facedown in the pit. They were then shot in the back of the head. Occasionally, victims had to stand at the edge of the pit in order to be shot into the pits.
During the first weeks of the Russian campaign, men between the ages of 18 and 65 years were killed, while women and children were initially spared. In Białystok, EK 8 arrived at the end of June or the beginning of July 1941, where it carried out two shootings in which Jewish men were killed; at one such site, at least 800 men were shot in a forest. EK 8 reported that on July 13, 1941, in Białystok, 215 Jewish and communist functionaries were shot and that executions continued after then at about the same rate.
After this, EK 8 moved further eastward to Baranowicze (Baranavichy) to continue its “elimination work” over the next fortnight. The unit ran at least two Aktionen against the resident Jewish population, initially shooting around 100 Jewish men; by July 24, 1941, at least 381 Jewish male deaths had been reported. Bradfisch supervised and directed at least one of these actions, and the preparation and execution of both executions were at his order.
EK 8 arrived in Minsk in the second half of July, where it remained until the end of August. At the shooting in Minsk, EK 8 began to kill men and women of all ages as well as children. During July and August 1941, the unit carried out at least seven further shootings in which women and children were among the victims. SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler was present at one of these mass executions, in which at least 300 Jews were killed, following which he stated to the members of EK 8 and police reservists that the order to exterminate the Jews in Eastern Europe came directly from the führer and must be carried out. He saw the annihilation of the Jewish population as his historic task. The massacre at which Himmler was present saw Bradfisch himself give the order to shoot.
On September 9, 1941, EK 8 reached the suburbs of Borisov and Orsha, Mogilev, where Bradfisch led EK 8 in at least eight mass shootings, killing at least 4,100 Jewish men, women, and children, as well as Russian prisoners of war. Bradfisch then engaged a White Ruthenian militia unit to support a major action in Mogilev. After this, EK 8 reported that the ghetto site in Mogilev was now available to the city administration, since Mogilev was virtually free of Jews.
In November 1941, Bradfisch ordered and led EK 8 in a major Aktion against the Bobruisk Jewish population, in which a total of at least 5,000 men, women, and children were shot. He reported subsequently that Bobruisk and its surrounds were free of Jews.
By December 1941, the German offensive against Moscow had halted. While EK 8 was originally intended for security-police duties in what would have been an occupied Moscow, the unit now settled in Mogilev.
In April 1942, Bradfisch was transferred to Łódź as head of the state police station, a position he held until 1945. In August 1943, he was appointed acting mayor of Łódź. From here, he was responsible for the deportation of around 100,000 Jews to the extermination camps at Chełmno and Auschwitz.
During the last months of the war, Bradfisch was the higher SS and police leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF) in Potsdam. In mid-January 1945, he fled westward, as the German authorities abandoned Łódź before the advancing Red Army. He abandoned his unit and acquired an army identity document (Wehrmachtssoldbuch) that had been issued to a corporal, Karl Evers. As Karl Evers, he was captured by the Americans, handed over to the British, and released in August 1945.
After his release, Bradfisch, still operating as Karl Evers, at first worked in agriculture and then in mining. After 1953, he resumed working under his own name and was employed selling insurance until he was arrested on April 21, 1958, based on a warrant issued by the district court of Heilbronn. On July 22, 1961, he was convicted in the Munich District Court of the murder of 15,000 people and was subsequently jailed.
In October 1967, Bradfisch’s sentence was reduced for health reasons, and on July 21, 1969, he was discharged from prison. He then lived in Munich and died at the age of 91, on June 22, 1994.
Karl Brandt was a German physician and SS officer who served as Adolf Hitler’s personal physician and participated in the Aktion T-4 program, which systematically murdered handicapped and mentally challenged individuals and others deemed “unworthy of life.”
He was born into the family of a Prussian army officer in Mühlhausen, in the then-German Alsace-Lorraine, on January 8, 1904. Receiving his degree in medicine from the University of Freiburg in 1928, as a doctor, he specialized in head and spinal injuries. In 1932, Brandt joined the Nazi Party, and in 1933, he became a member of the SA.
In August 1933, Adolf Hitler’s niece, Geli Raubal, and his adjutant, Wilhelm Brückner, were hurt in a car crash. Brandt, working as a doctor in Upper Bavaria, was summoned to help them; he made such a good impression that he was asked to be one of Hitler’s personal physicians. By 1934, Brandt was a member of Hitler’s inner circle at Berchtesgaden. Brandt was made a major general in the Waffen-SS and was appointed Reich commissioner for health and sanitation; his free access to Hitler, more than any administrative role, was the source of Brandt’s power. Brandt became an adherent of “racial hygiene” policies, which were based on the premise that medical professionals could remove hereditary and other defects from a nation or racial group. Brandt was both a believer in eugenics and a career-minded opportunist.
In 1939, a request from a German family for the mercy killing of their severely handicapped child became the pretext for the initiation of the Nazi euthanasia program. Brandt and Philipp Bouhler, head of Hitler’s chancellery, were placed in charge of its planning and execution. They received a rare explicit authorization from Hitler allowing them to “grant mercy deaths” to “incurable” patients as of September 1, 1939. Brandt and Bouhler then implemented Aktion T-4, which saw the mass murder of mentally ill and handicapped German adults and children. There were two separate euthanasia programs: one, dating back to the spring of 1939, dealt with infants and toddlers up to three who had physical deformities; a second program included mentally disabled children and adults. Brandt had a hand in both.
On October 6, 1939, Hitler ordered Brandt to “relieve through death” those mentally ill individuals who could not “take any conscious part in life.” Hitler backdated his signature to September 1, 1939, in order to highlight the order’s connection to the war; his logic was that the life of every dead soldier should be balanced by taking the life of a person “unworthy of life.” While the child euthanasia program murdered its victims through lethal overdoses of medication, adult patients were removed from their home institutions and transferred to six designated euthanasia, or killing, centers throughout Germany, where they were murdered in specially designed gas chambers. By the end of January 1941, about 70,000 mentally ill adult patients had been gassed. Public concern about the program persisted until Hitler “suspended” it in August 1941, but Brandt soon expanded it in 1941 to include other nationalities. In the summer of 1942, the effort resumed in a more decentralized format and saw the murder both of children and of adult patients through means of lethal overdose and starvation.
As euthanasia slowed, its specialists brought their expertise in killing to the extermination of the Jews. Some of Brandt’s workers in the T-4 program were sent to Riga and Lublin to help in the construction of gas vans, as well as to other parts of occupied Poland in 1942 to assist Odilo Globocnik establish the Aktion Reinhard death camps of Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka. In 1941, T-4 physicians transferred 15,000 to 20,000 concentration camp prisoners from several camps to killing centers, where they were gassed in Aktion 14f13.
Brandt was also behind a program of enforced abortions for women classed as “genetically defective.” This included those who were physically or mentally disabled. Additionally, Brandt pushed forward a program of enforced sterilization, and he conducted medical experiments to see which method of sterilization was most effective in terms of the number of people who could be sterilized at one go.
By 1942, Brandt became chief of medicine and health for the Third Reich and was the most powerful medical practitioner in Germany. He administered not just the euthanasia program but also other Nazi medical undertakings, including a range of human experimentation projects on concentration camp inmates. Correspondence between Brandt, Himmler, and Oswald Pohl, head of the SS Economic and Administrative Office (WVHA), clearly demonstrates that Brandt knew of, initiated, and supported these unethical medical experiments in concentration camps.
Brandt sought further control over the medical profession and health-related services before falling out of favor with Hitler in 1944. Hitler was furious when he learned that Brandt had moved his wife and son out of Berlin and toward Allied lines in the West, something Brandt had done in the expectation that they would be in a “better” zone of occupation rather than in one occupied by the Soviet Union. Hitler accused him of defeatism and ordered that he should face a court-martial on the charge of treason. Brandt was then arrested for allegedly planning to surrender to the Allies. Although Brandt escaped his Nazi death sentence, he was arrested by the British on May 23, 1945.
As the leading Nazi doctor and because of his involvement in so many unethical medical enterprises, Brandt was the focus of prosecutors at the Nuremberg Doctors’ Trial, which began in December 1946. He was found guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and membership in a criminal organization (the SS). He and six other colleagues were executed by hanging on June 2, 1948, at Landsberg Prison.
Pery (sometimes Perry) Broad was a guard active at Auschwitz between April 1942 and 1945, working as a translator and stenographer in the Political Department (Politische Abteilung). His report on the conditions he observed at Auschwitz served as evidence in subsequent trials of former Auschwitz officials.
Pery Broad was born on April 25, 1921, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to a German mother and a Brazilian businessman. When Broad was five years old, his mother took him to Berlin, where he attended school. In 1931, he was an early member of the Hitler Youth. As he grew to maturity, the educated and well-read Broad learned music and spoke several languages fluently. He studied at the Technical College of Berlin until December 1941.
In 1941, Broad entered the SS and then volunteered for the Waffen-SS as a foreigner. He had offered to serve in the army, but because of a medical disability (extreme myopia), he was demobilized in 1942 and sent to Auschwitz, initially to work on security details. Broad later was transferred to the Politische Abteilung, in the investigation and interrogation service.
He served at Auschwitz until the dissolution of the camp in January 1945. After the camp’s evacuation, he undertook service for two months at Dora-Mittelbau, near Nordhausen, until he was assigned to guard duties during death marches of prisoners in advance of liberation by Allied armies.
He was captured by British troops on May 6, 1945. As a prisoner of war interned in the Gorleben detention center in Lower Saxony, Broad voluntarily wrote a long and detailed memoir on what he witnessed at Auschwitz, which became known as the Broad Report. In the report, which he gave to the Secret Intelligence Service, Broad related very precisely the functioning of the gas chambers. In December 1945, much of the report was included in a courtroom affidavit.
As an informant, Broad was separated from other German prisoners, and much use was made of his testimony; when former Auschwitz camp staff were on trial at Bergen-Belsen, his detailed statements were also used in the tribunal held there. In addition, Broad testified for the prosecution at the Tesch trial in March 1 to 8, 1946, when Bruno Tesch, a German chemist and coinventor of Zyklon B, together with company director Karl Weinbacher, were convicted and sentenced to death for the supply of Zyklon B used for the purpose of mass murder.
Broad was released from British captivity in 1947 and then worked as a clerical employee at a sawmill on the River Örtze in Munster, as well as with other private companies.
On April 30, 1959, he was arrested in connection with the investigation for the first Auschwitz Trial, but at the end of 1960, Broad was released on bail. He was then arrested a second time, in November 1964, as a defendant in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials. He was charged with complicity in joint murder on at least 22 separate occasions, 2 involving the murder of at least 1,000 inmates. He now made a radical turnaround; unlike in his report, he acted like all the other defendants. He denied the crimes, did not choose to remember anything, and spoke no words of remorse. Yet when presented with his own records in the courtroom, Broad was unable to deny his presence at the selection ramp or in the infamous Block 11. Witnesses gave damning evidence against him. Broad was found guilty of supervising selections at Birkenau and of participating in interrogations, torture, and executions. On August 19, 1965, he was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment at hard labor.
In 1965, the Auschwitz State Museum published the Broad Report. It is interesting that his involvement in the liquidation of the so-called Gypsy camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been secondary to the main proceedings at Frankfurt and had not been relevant to the verdict. While a separate review of Broad’s role in liquidation of the Gypsy camp was promised by the Hessian minister of justice, Lauritz Lauritzen, this never happened.
In February 1966, Broad was released from custody, as his pretrial detention was credited to the sentence. He was thus released based on time served. After release from prison, Broad lived quietly and died on November 28, 1993, in Düsseldorf.
Alois Brunner, an Austrian SS officer and assistant to Adolf Eichmann, was responsible for deporting over 100,000 European Jews to ghettos and concentration camps in Eastern Europe. He ran the Drancy transit camp outside Paris from June 1943 to August 1944, during which time over 25,500 people were deported.
Alois Brunner was born on April 8, 1912, in Nádkút Vas, Austria-Hungary (modern-day Rohrbrunn, Austria) to Joseph Brunner and Ann Kruise. He joined the Austrian Nazi Party in May 1931 at the age of 16 and the SA in 1932. In 1933, he relocated to Germany and served five years in the Austrian Legion. With the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, Brunner served in a number of minor posts prior to volunteering for the SS in 1938. After joining the SS in 1938, he was reassigned to the staff of the Zentralstelle (the Central Office for Jewish Emigration) in Vienna; there, he helped Eichmann develop the Vienna Model, a plan to rob and force the emigration of Jews from Austria. He also worked closely with Eichmann on the Nisko Plan, a proposed Jewish reservation in Nisko, Poland.
Brunner rose to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) and served Eichmann as his personal secretary, later describing Brunner as his “right-hand man.” Then, Brunner became the director of the Zentralstelle.
In April 1939, Brunner was sent to the new Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia to speed up the emigration of Czech Jews. After war broke out in September 1939, he organized the deportation of over 1,500 Viennese Jews to Nisko in October 1939. Over time, he directed the removal of 56,000 Austrian Jews, and his success in Vienna earned him a further promotion. In October 1942, he was transferred to Berlin to implement the Vienna Model there.
Brunner became Eichmann’s favorite troubleshooter. He sent the entire Jewish population of Salonika, Greece—some 43,000 strong—to death camps in the East in the space of less than two months. In July 1943, as commandant of Drancy, he oversaw the transport of 25,500 Jews to Auschwitz. Brunner took special delight in the arrest and deportation of children.
In September 1944, Brunner participated in the arrest and transport of 14,000 Slovakian Jews.
There are different stories as to Brunner’s fate immediately after World War II. He was sought after and had some narrow escapes from the Allies. It is rumored that shortly after the war, he was employed by Reinhard Gehlen and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Gehlen, Adolf Hitler’s top anti-Soviet spy, surrendered to the Americans and offered them his services, which the CIA accepted, enabling Gehlen to reestablish his spy organization. Here, he enlisted thousands of Gestapo, Wehrmacht, and SS veterans.
Brunner was sentenced to death in absentia in France in 1953 for crimes against humanity, and in 1954, a new lawsuit was filed there based on his sending children to Auschwitz.
He fled West Germany in 1954. First, he went to Egypt, where he was allegedly recruited by former Nazi Otto Skorzeny into another CIA program designed to train the Egyptian secret service. He subsequently relocated to Syria, where he became a government adviser and remained under the protection of the Syrian government until his death. Brunner was believed to have lived in Damascus under the alias of Dr. Georg Fischer. He was reportedly given asylum, a generous salary, and protection by the ruling Ba’ath Party in exchange for his advice on effective torture and interrogation techniques used by the Germans in World War II.
Brunner was the object of many manhunts and investigations over the years by different groups, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, and others. He lost an eye and then the fingers of his left hand as a result of letter bombs sent to him in 1961, possibly by the Israeli Mossad.
When the Austrian news magazine Bunte interviewed him in 1985, Brunner was unrepentant and said his one regret was that he had not murdered more Jews. In a separate 1987 telephone interview, he told the Chicago Sun-Times, “The Jews deserved to die. I have no regrets. If I had the chance I would do it again.”
The government of Syria under Hafez el-Assad came close to extraditing him to East Germany, before this plan was halted by the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Starting in the 1990s and continuing for two decades, there was periodic media speculation about Brunner’s exact whereabouts and his possible demise. Germany applied for his extradition from Syria in 1987, and in 1991, the European Parliament voted to condemn Syria for continuing to harbor him. However, German journalists visiting Syria in the 1990s reported Brunner to be living at the Meridian Hotel in Damascus.
In December 1999, unconfirmed reports surfaced that he had died in 1996 and was buried in a Damascus cemetery. In 2000, rumors circulated that Poland was preparing to seek his extradition. Brunner was last seen alive in 2001 in Syria. In July 2013, sketchy rumors emerged that he might still be alive in Syria. Finally, in November 2014, the Simon Wiesenthal Center reported that Brunner had died in Syria in 2010 and that he was buried somewhere in Damascus. The news of his death was received from a credible former German secret service agent who confirmed rumors about Brunner’s death.
Walter Buch was a jurist holding the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer during the Nazi era. He was also Martin Bormann’s father-in-law. During denazification proceedings in 1949, Buch was classified as a major offender (Hauptschuldiger).
Walter Hans Buch was born on October 24, 1883, in Bruchsal, Baden. His father, Hermann Buch, an eminent jurist, was senate president of the Supreme Court of Baden. From 1890 to 1902, Buch attended school at Bruchsal and Konstanz, and in 1902, he enrolled as a career soldier in the Sixth Infantry Regiment in Konstanz. In 1908, he married and had two daughters and two sons.
Buch fought in World War I as an officer, attaining promotions as the war lengthened. From September 1918, he worked in the Prussian War Ministry in Berlin until on November 20, 1918, he was discharged with the rank of major.
From 1919 to 1922, Buch was a member of the Deutschnationale Volkspartei, Weimar Germany’s major conservative and nationalist party. He was the leader of the Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund in Baden, an organization founded in Bamberg in February 1919 to fight Judaism. He remained leader until it was banned by the state government.
In March 1920, Buch met Adolf Hitler for the first time and was inspired by the meeting. After this, he occasionally exchanged letters with Hitler, monitoring his works through word of mouth and newspapers. On December 9, 1922, Buch became a member of the NSDAP, and on January 1, 1923, he joined the SA. Between August 1923 and 1924, he organized the Franconian SA in Nuremberg.
In mid-1923, after Hermann Ehrhardt quarreled with Ernst Röhm and Adolf Hitler, 8 SA members formed the Hitler Shock Troop (Stosstrupp-Hitler) to protect Hitler. This small unit, forerunner to the SS, never comprised more than 20 members and included Buch. From this foundation, he became a high-ranking honorary leader of the SS.
Buch participated in the failed Beer Hall Putsch in Munich on November 8 to 9, 1923, and returned to Munich within four days of the coup. Sent by Hermann Göring (who had fled to Innsbruck) to bolster the cohesion of the party troops, Buch established ties with the now-outlawed SA groups.
With the banning of the party, Buch became a wine merchant in Munich. He maintained regular contact between the imprisoned Hitler and the exiled leadership until Hitler’s release and the reestablishment of the party on February 20, 1925. Until January 1, 1928, Buch led and organized the SA in Upper Bavaria.
On November 27, 1927, Buch became chairman of the Untersuchungs- und Schlichtungs-Ausschuss (Inquiry and Mediation Board, or USCHLA), an internal party disciplinary body that became to the party what the Gestapo was for Germany as a whole. Acting as the party’s secret police force, the board was feared among the party’s followers. Buch ruled on internal party disputes, spied on party members, and put them under pressure if they strayed from the party line. There was no appeal against board judgments, other than directly to Hitler. Buch built up a powerful, independent secret-police organization within the party and engaged in surveillance of other political organizations in and outside of Germany.
On May 20, 1928, Buch was one of the 12 elected NSDAP members in the Reichstag, where he remained until 1945. Between June 1930 and October 1931, he led the party’s youth leadership, and until 1933, he was editor in chief of the Völkischer Beobachter.
On September 2, 1929, Buch’s eldest daughter, Gerda, married Martin Bormann, with Adolf Hitler and Rudolf Hess as witnesses.
During the Röhm Putsch of June 30, 1934, Buch played a leading part and was present at the arrest of Ernst Röhm by Hitler. It was Buch who directed the SS unit that shot the leading SA men in the Stadelheim Prison courtyard. As a reward for having given Röhm’s murder the outward appearance of legality, Buch was appointed supreme party judge and SS-Gruppenführer on November 9, 1934.
Buch was responsible for legalizing party members’ excesses during the Kristallnacht of November 9 to 10, 1938; he declared that those responsible for the more than 100 Jewish deaths had only been following orders. His own entrenched antisemitism saw no need to question those who had given these orders, considering that Jews were literally “not humans.” In an article in Deutsche Justiz dated October 21, 1938, Buch wrote, “The Jew is not a human being. He is an appearance of putrescence. Just as the fission-fungus cannot permeate wood until it is rotting, so the Jew was able to creep into the German people, to bring on disaster, only after the German nation . . . had begun to rot from within.”
On November 9, 1941, Hitler dismissed Gauleiter Josef Wagner from all his offices after his wife opposed the marriage of their daughter to an SS man. A party court chaired by Walter Buch ruled on February 6, 1942, that Wagner had not caused any damage to the party and could remain in the party. Hitler annulled that decision, however, and threw Wagner out of the NSDAP. For his defiance, Hitler ruled that Buch would henceforth be required to have all his decisions signed by his son-in-law Martin Bormann.
On April 30, 1945, American troops captured Buch and imprisoned him from May to August 1945. American interrogators questioned him about the whereabouts of Martin Bormann, but to no avail. Buch then gave evidence as a witness at the Nuremberg trials. Buch’s daughter Gerda died of cancer in March 1946.
In August 1948, Buch was sentenced to five years of forced labor and confiscation of all his property. Upon appeal, the Munich denazification court confirmed the finding that Buch was a major offender (Hauptschuldiger) but reduced his sentence from five years to three and a half years. He was released based on time served.
Six weeks later, on November 12, 1949, Buch committed suicide by slitting his wrists and throwing himself into Bavaria’s Ammersee.
Josef Bühler was a Nazi officer who served as state secretary and deputy governor to the German-controlled General Government in Kraków, Poland, during World War II. He actively participated in the imposition of Nazi Germany’s Final Solution of the Jewish Question.
Bühler was born on February 16, 1904, in Bad Waldsee, Germany, into a Catholic family of 12 children. His father was a baker. After completing high school, in 1922, Bühler commenced the study of law at the University of Munich. He joined the NSDAP in 1922 and participated in the attempted Nazi putsch in Munich on November 8 to 9, 1923.
From 1930 to 1932, he worked in the Munich law firm of Hans Frank, a legal adviser to Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Bühler graduated from university in Berlin in 1932 with a doctorate in law, and from 1932, he worked as a district judge in the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. From October 1934, he was an administrator to the Munich Court. In 1935, he became the chief of the Prosecutors Division of the Reich Justice Ministry. In 1938, Hans Frank, now Reich minister without portfolio, placed Bühler in charge of Frank’s cabinet office.
After the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Hans Frank was appointed governor-general of occupied Poland, and Bühler accompanied him to Kraków. From November 1939, Bühler managed the governor-general’s office; after March 1940, he served as Frank’s secretary of state, and he was appointed to the honorary rank of SS-Brigadeführer by SS chief Heinrich Himmler.
Already on November 24, 1939, Bühler gave the so-called special commissioner for the capture and protection of art and cultural treasures, Kajetan Mühlmann, the necessary funds for art theft. Bühler then took part in two conferences, on May 16, 1940, and May 20, 1940, in preparation for the Extraordinary Pacification Action, which aimed to wipe out any resistance from the Polish intelligentsia. In a special circular dated January 12, 1942, Bühler instructed the district governors that they were not to exercise their right of pardon against those Jews who had been sentenced to death for escaping from the ghetto.
On January 20, 1942, Bühler represented the governor-general’s office at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin, during which leading Nazi bureaucrats and others discussed the imposition of the Final Solution. Bühler stated to the other conference attendees that he wanted “a speedy solution of the Jewish question” in the General Government and that action was to be carried out as quickly as possible. He urged Reinhard Heydrich, who ran the conference, to begin the Final Solution in the General Government, where “no transport problems” existed. In 1942, Bühler participated in the ethnic cleansing of Poles in what became known as Aktion Zamość, in which German police and the military expelled 116,000 Polish men and women in just a few months from the Zamość region to make way for projected German settlements. This involved, among other things, the abduction and deportation of Poles to Germany for forced labor.
On January 18, 1945, Bühler fled from Kraków. He was arrested on May 30, 1945, by the Americans and was interned in the Nuremberg witness jail. On April 23, 1946, he testified on Hans Frank’s behalf before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. Bühler and Frank had attempted to hold the SS leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, who had committed suicide in American captivity on May 10, 1945, responsible for the crimes in Poland and to blame everything else on Himmler.
After his witness hearing, Bühler was extradited to Poland in May 1946 in accordance with the Moscow Declaration, which required that “the National Socialist criminals were to be transferred to the place of their crimes.” Between June 17, 1948, and July 5, 1948, Bühler was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in Kraków for crimes against humanity. He was found guilty on July 10, 1948, and was sentenced to death and the forfeiture of all property. Bühler was executed by hanging in Kraków on August 22, 1948.