Karl Gebhardt was a German physician who, as the consulting surgeon of the Waffen-SS, ran the Hohenlychen Sanatorium and directed a series of cruel and unethical surgical experiments on concentration camp prisoners at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.
Karl Franz Gebhardt was born on November 23, 1897, in Haag, Upper Bavaria. He served in the Bavarian infantry in World War I, was wounded in action, and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class; he was also a prisoner of war of the British for a brief period. Gebhardt received his medical degree in 1922 from the University of Munich. In 1923, he joined the Freikorps Oberland and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch. In 1924, he interned at the University of Munich’s surgical clinic, and upon completing his internship, residency, and postresidency work by 1932, he joined the Nazi Party in 1933.
In 1935, Gebhardt became an associate professor of medicine in Berlin and a member of the SS. He was named superintendent of the Hohenlychen Sanatorium in 1935, transforming it from a tuberculosis clinic to an orthopedic medicine facility. There he established the first sports-medicine clinic in Germany. It also treated amputees and patients with disabilities.
Gebhardt became director of the Medical Department at the Academy for Exercise and Physical Training in 1936 and was the chief physician for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. By this stage, he had built a distinguished career and had published widely in the field of sports medicine. Not coincidentally, he was also interested in aspects of physical therapy.
In 1937, Gebhardt became chair of orthopedic surgery at the University of Berlin. Highly regarded in Germany and beyond, in 1938, he was named personal physician to Heinrich Himmler (a friend from his youth), which further cemented his reputation in Germany. He was also appointed president of the German Red Cross.
In 1940, after the onset of war, Gebhardt advertised for an assistant doctor who would take medical care of women prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp, and as a result, he appointed Dr. Herta Oberheuser.
Also in 1940, Gebhardt served a tour of duty with SS Second Division. On May 27, 1942, Himmler sent Gebhardt to Prague to attend upon Reinhard Heydrich, who had been gravely wounded in an assassination attempt. Despite a fever, Heydrich’s recovery appeared to progress well. Theodor Morell, Hitler’s personal physician, was also sent to Prague and suggested the use of sulfonamide, a new antibacterial drug. Gebhardt disdained the use of sulfonamide, which he considered worthless, thinking Heydrich would make a full recovery without antibiotic use. Heydrich died of sepsis, however, on June 4, 1942.
Gebhardt was accused of failing to treat Heydrich appropriately. To demonstrate his innocence, he commenced a series of bizarre and cruel medical experiments on concentration camp prisoners, chiefly at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. On July 27, 1942, working with Oberheuser, he brought 75 women prisoners, mostly Polish intelligentsia, for experimentation. There he supervised experiments that saw prisoners’ legs or arms broken, usually without anesthetic, to gauge the body’s ability to heal itself. Amputations were also carried out, and infections were either introduced into the wounds or allowed to fester to test various drugs to ward off sepsis and gangrene. Nearly all these internees died. Those who survived became lame and hopped because of the experiments; as a result, they were known as the “rabbits.”
The Ravensbrück experiments were slanted in Gebhardt’s favor; women in the sulfonamide-treated experimental group received little or no nursing care, while those in the untreated control group received better care. Not surprisingly, those in the control group were more likely to survive the experiments. One particularly bizarre experiment involved amputating camp prisoners’ limbs and attempting to transplant them onto German soldiers wounded on the Russian front.
Gebhardt treated Albert Speer in early 1944 for fatigue and a swollen knee, nearly killing him until he was replaced by another doctor. Gebhardt had permission from Himmler for his vivisection of women at both Ravensbrück and Auschwitz.
After the war, Gebhardt was arrested by Allied authorities and stood in the dock during the Doctors’ Trial at Nuremberg along with 22 other doctors, from December 9, 1946, to August 20, 1947. Accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes, he was found guilty and sentenced to death on August 20, 1947. He was hanged on June 2, 1948, in Landsberg Prison.
Gebhardt’s assistant, Fritz Fischer, who worked in the hospital at Ravensbrück as a surgical assistant to Gebhardt, was also tried and convicted at Nuremberg. Initially condemned to life imprisonment, Fisher’s sentence was reduced to 15 years in 1951. Released in March 1954, he regained his medical license and was employed by the chemical company Boehringer Ingelheim, until his retirement. He died in 2003 at the age of 90.
Herta Oberheuser, another of Gebhardt’s assistants at Ravensbrück, was sentenced to 20 years in prison but was released in April 1952 and became a family doctor in Stocksee, Germany. In 1956, a Ravensbrück survivor recognized her, and her medical license was revoked in 1958. She died on January 24, 1978, at the age of 66.
Hans Globke was a Nazi lawyer who helped draft antisemitic laws stripping Jews of their rights. He worked with Adolf Eichmann in the SS Department of Jewish Affairs. After the war, he rose to become one of the most powerful figures in the West German government. Serving as national security adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, he was the main liaison with the CIA and NATO.
Hans Globke was born on September 10, 1898, in Düsseldorf, into a Roman Catholic family. His father, Josef Globke, was a draper; his mother was named Sophie. When he finished his secondary education at the elite Catholic Kaiser-Karl-Gymnasium Aachen in 1916, he was drafted into the army. After World War I, he studied law and political science at the universities of Bonn and Cologne, graduating from the University of Giessen in 1922. Globke finished his assessment examination in 1924, briefly serving as a judge in the police court at Aachen. He became deputy police chief of Aachen in 1925 and a government assessor in 1926. In December 1929, he entered the Prussian civil service and quickly rose through the ranks. During this period, he was a member of the conservative Catholic Center (Zentrum) Party.
In November 1932, two months before Adolf Hitler became chancellor, Globke wrote a set of rules to make it tougher in Prussia for Germans of Jewish ancestry to change their last names to anything less recognizably Jewish, and he followed this up with guidelines for its implementation the following month. Globke stayed in the civil service after Adolf Hitler came to power.
In 1933, he helped draw up the Enabling Act, the emergency law that gave Hitler total power. Two years later, Globke helped to draft the first two Nuremberg Laws, designed to isolate Jews from the rest of society in the Third Reich by stripping them of their political and civil rights. In 1936, he coauthored with Wilhelm Stuckart the highly influential commentary on the 1935 Nuremberg Laws.
Although he thus participated at a high level in the administration of Nazi Germany, his request to join the Nazi Party was turned down because of his former Zentrum links. He remained a favored person within the regime, however. Later, Globke created the laws that forced all Jews to take on the names Israel or Sarah and that gave all property belonging to concentration camp victims to the German government. During the war, he helped Heinrich Himmler enforce these laws all over occupied Europe.
When the war ended in 1945, American authorities arrested Globke. He was not tried; it was felt he had only enabled the Nazis but was never a Nazi himself. Later, he was a witness during the Nuremberg Trials.
Globke held several administrative posts in West Germany beginning in 1946, and none of the Western Allies protested his nominations. In September 1949, he joined the newly created Chancellery of the Federal Republic, becoming state secretary there in 1953. He acted as the highest adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and influenced staff recruitment. He was also a key player in establishing the West German security services.
Globke’s activities during the Nazi period were criticized by the Social Democratic opposition in Parliament in 1951, 1953, and again in 1955 to 1956, and for that reason, he tried to keep a low profile. Adenauer, on the other hand, had him promoted and even decorated with a high West German order.
Globke’s actions during the Nazi period became a major issue in the debate over his guilt. His supporters claimed that Globke had strong links to the anti-Hitler bomb plot of July 20, 1944, and that his legal explanations of the race laws could be viewed as a softened approach to Nazi racial legislation. His opponents accused him of being a leading figure in the persecution of Jews.
In 1960, the East German government, which had access to most of the relevant Nazi files, began a campaign to discredit Globke, even comparing him to Adolf Eichmann. This resulted in his trial in absentia in July 1963, in which the court sentenced him to life imprisonment for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and murder. The final judgment was not accepted by the West German authorities, who at the same time conducted a separate investigation into the case, although without it ever coming to trial.
The debate about Globke’s culpability was as much about personal guilt as it was about the reintegration of former Nazi officials into the West German government. Globke resigned his position in October 1963, when Adenauer also resigned, and died on February 2, 1973.
Odilo Globocnik was a prominent Austrian Nazi official and the primary architect of the Holocaust in German-occupied Poland.
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik was born on April 21, 1904, in Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to an Austrian Slovene family. His father Franz, a Habsburg cavalry lieutenant, did not have enough funds to buy an officer’s marriage permit, so he left the service and was given a job in the postal service. His mother was Hungarian, and both grandmothers had German heritage. In 1914, the family left Trieste for Cseklész (modern-day Bernolákovo, Slovakia), and his father was recalled to active duty.
As a teenager, Globocnik joined the pro-Austrian militia fighting the Slovene volunteers and later the Yugoslav army during the Carinthian War, from 1918 to 1919. In 1920, he worked as an underground propagandist for the Austrian cause during the Carinthian plebiscite, later enrolling in a school for mechanical engineering, from which he graduated with honors. During this time, he took on odd jobs, such as carrying suitcases at the train station, to financially support his family.
In 1922, Globocnik became involved in a Nazi-style paramilitary group. Being a building tradesman in Klagenfurt, he joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS on September 1, 1934. As the Nazi Party was illegal in Austria, he was arrested four times between 1933 and 1935, spending some 11 months in jail. In 1936, he was appointed provincial party leader in Kärnten (Carinthia), and prior to Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, he formed Nazi cells in various Austrian provinces. He played a pivotal role in the annexation, receiving personal instructions from Adolf Hitler at the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.
Hitler rewarded Globocnik by appointing him as gauleiter of Vienna on May 24, 1938. From this base, Globocnik and those in his circle, who distrusted the Catholic Church, launched a crusade against it; they confiscated property, closed Catholic organizations, and sent many priests to the concentration camp at Dachau. Anger at the treatment of the Church in Austria grew quickly, and October 1938 saw the first act of overt mass resistance to the new regime when a rally numbering thousands left Mass in Vienna chanting, “Christ is our Führer,” prior to being dispersed by police.
Hermann Göring relieved Globocnik of his post at the end of January 1939, owing to financial irregularities, including foreign-currency speculation, theft of Jewish valuables purloined by the state, and mismanagement of party funds. With his removal as gauleiter of Vienna, Globocnik’s career seemed over.
He then enlisted in the Waffen-SS and saw action in the invasion of Poland in September 1939, where he distinguished himself in combat. On November 9, 1939, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who had always admired Globocnik’s loyalty, appointed him SS chief of the Lublin District in the General Government of Poland. Further to Globocnik’s responsibilities for Lublin’s SS and police matters, in July 1941, Himmler appointed him as his “Plenipotentiary for the Construction of SS and Police bases in the former Soviet areas.” His base commanders were Georg Michalsen, Kurt Classen, Hermann Höfle, and Richard Thomalla. Hermann Dolp was also prominent in the construction of these bases at Minsk and Mogilev. Globocnik and these five SS officers would play a leading part in Aktion Reinhard one year later.
With the start of the Final Solution during the summer of 1941, Globocnik stated that after the “resettlement” of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement, the Polish population from Lublin should be resettled to the East as part of the larger program to move the Slavic nations behind the Ural Mountains and prepare this region for German colonization. This was an important element of what became known as Generalplan Ost. This action would be organized first in the Lublin district; German colonists, mainly from Bessarabia and Bukovina, would replace Poles. The Zamość region was chosen by Himmler and Globocnik as a laboratory for the whole of Generalplan Ost.
Some 110 villages in the Zamość region were resettled between 1942 and 1943, often accompanied by mass executions. Many villages were destroyed in the course of this action. Approximately 50,000 Poles were deported to the transit camps in Zwierzyniec and Zamość. From these, they were sent to Auschwitz, Majdanek, and labor camps in Germany. Thousands escaped to the forests, and the economy of the Lublin district totally collapsed.
Globocnik’s role in Lublin and his key role in supervising the Aktion Reinhard death camps in addition to Generalplan Ost created conflict between him and Ernst Zörner, the civil governor of the Lublin district. The Polish underground started to resist Globocnik’s resettlement plan; Zörner pressured the SS authorities to stop the resettlement of Poles, arguing that because of large-scale resistance, industrial sabotage, and mass escapes of Polish peasants from the villages, the plan was not working. Governor Hans Frank reported his concerns to Berlin, and Himmler issued an order to stop the resettlement action. As Aktion Reinhard had to be completed, Globocnik was left alone.
At a meeting with Himmler on October 13, 1941, Globocnik proposed exterminating the Jews in assembly-line fashion in a concentration camp utilizing gas chambers. The next day, Himmler held a five-hour meeting with Reinhard Heydrich to discuss “executions,” following which several extermination-camp gassing sites were developed or proposed. Days later, Himmler forbade all further Jewish emigration from Reich territory in view of the forthcoming Final Solution of the Jewish Question.
Globocnik implemented the Final Solution between 1941 and 1945. He supervised the final liquidation of the ghettos and, carrying out Himmler’s orders, oversaw the construction and management of three Aktion Reinhard death camps—Bełżec (1941), Sobibór (1942), and Treblinka (1942)—where Jews from all over Europe were murdered. Not only did Aktion Reinhard kill at least 1.7 million Jews, but it also provided stolen assets, valuables, and removable property amounting to 178 million Reichsmarks.
Appointed by Himmler as head of the SS firm OSTI (Ostindustrie GmbH), Globocnik created a small army of Jewish slave laborers. Of these, 45,000 were forced into labor camps like Trawniki and Poniatowa to perform all sorts of manual labor under the most horrific conditions. Globocnik was also responsible for a network of work camps in the Lublin district, including another extermination site, Majdanek.
Following the completion of Aktion Reinhard and the cessation of the Generalplan Ost, in September 1943, Globocnik was ordered to Trieste to serve as the local SS leader and police commissioner in the portion of Italy still controlled by German forces. There he led the persecution of partisans and Jews in Istria (northern Italy and the northern Adriatic coast).
In October 1944, Globocnik married Lore Peterschinegg, head of the Carinthian Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls).
At the end of the war, Globocnik fled into the Alpine highlands but was apprehended by British forces on May 31, 1945, near Paternion, Austria. After a brief interrogation, he committed suicide by poison at 11.30 a.m. the same day, by biting into a hidden cyanide capsule. Overall, it is estimated that Globocnik was directly responsible for the deaths of as many as 1.5 million Jews.
Richard Glücks was a high-ranking Nazi official in the SS. From November 1939 until the end of World War II, he oversaw the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps (Amt D: Konzentrationslagerwesen) under the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office (SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt, or WVHA).
The son of a fire-insurance agent, Glücks was born on April 22, 1889, in Odenkirchen, in the Rhineland. After completing his secondary education in Düsseldorf, he worked in his father’s business, leaving to become a volunteer in the German army artillery in 1909. In 1913, he visited the United Kingdom before moving to Argentina as a trader, but when World War I broke out, he returned to Germany on a Norwegian ship to rejoin the army in January 1915. He was given command of an artillery unit. Glücks was awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class, and after the war, he served in the Westphalian Freikorps, from 1919 to 1920. In March 1920, Glücks became a liaison officer between the German forces and the Military Inter-Allied Commission of Control, the organization that regulated the restrictions regarding military rearmament laid down by the Treaty of Versailles. Glücks stayed in that role until 1924, when he joined the staff of the Sixth Prussian Division.
On March 1, 1930, Glücks joined the NSDAP, and on November 16, 1932, he moved into the SS. He rose through the ranks to command his own SS unit, and on April 1, 1936, he became chief of staff to Theodor Eicke, who was then inspector of concentration camps. Eicke moved on to become field commander of the Death’s Head SS division in 1939, and on November 15, 1939, Heinrich Himmler promoted him to be the new inspector of concentration camps. Glücks reported to Himmler, but as Glücks had never served inside a concentration camp, he gave his camp commanders more autonomy in operating their respective commands. Glücks looked at the use of forced labor in the concentration camps, urged commandants to lower the death rate as it went counter to his department’s economic objectives, and ordered that inmates be made to work continuously.
On February 21, 1940, Glücks recommended to Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich that Auschwitz, a former Austrian cavalry barracks in Poland, was a suitable site for a new concentration camp. On March 1, 1941, he accompanied Himmler and senior directors of the I. G. Farben industrial conglomerate on a visit to Auschwitz, where they decided to expand the camp to accommodate up to 30,000 prisoners, establish an additional camp at Birkenau capable of housing 100,000 POWs, and construct a factory; this facility and its camp prisoners would then be placed together with the camp prisoners for the use of I. G. Farben. By May 1940, under Glücks’s orders, Rudolf Hoess, the first commandant of Auschwitz, commenced construction of the Auschwitz complex.
Days after the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Glücks started to implement the Final Solution. Himmler ordered Glücks to prepare his camps to take 100,000 Jewish men and 50,000 women being deported from the Reich to augment the Soviet prisoners as forced laborers. In July 1942, he met with Himmler to plan medical experiments on camp inmates. From his visits to Auschwitz, Glücks knew of the mass murders and atrocities happening there, and Hoess routinely reported to Glücks on the status of the extermination activities.
In 1942, the entire concentration camp system moved under the authority of Oswald Pohl to the WVHA, with the inspectorate now reporting to that department. Glücks continued to manage the camp administration until the end of the war. In January 1945, he was decorated for his contributions to the Reich in managing the 15 largest camps and the 500 satellite camps, which employed upward of 40,000 members of the SS. Glücks, together with Pohl, managed the entire Nazi camp system. All written and oral extermination orders were transmitted by Heinrich Himmler through Pohl and Glücks, to be passed on to the various concentration camp commanders. Not only did Glücks exercise full control over the medical services at Auschwitz and other camps, as he was responsible for the SS doctors who made the selections for extermination, but also he decided, together with Himmler and Pohl, how many Jewish deportees should be liquidated and how many spared for hard labor.
The WVHA offices in Berlin were destroyed by Allied bombing on April 16, 1945. With the advance of the Red Army forces, Glücks and his wife, Alice, fled to Flensburg, where they were captured by the British. There has been ongoing discussion regarding his fate, but the consensus is that he committed suicide on May 10, 1945, by swallowing a cyanide capsule.
Joseph Goebbels was a leading Nazi politician who became the Nazi Party’s minister for propaganda and public enlightenment. Serving from 1933 until 1945, Goebbels ran Adolf Hitler’s propaganda efforts. His ministry used modern media—including film, radio, and the press—to create a cult around Hitler and spread the Nazi message abroad. Goebbels organized the notorious Nuremberg Party Rallies that began in 1929 and was also the impetus behind the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 to 10, 1938, during which Jewish businesses and synagogues were destroyed and thousands of Jews were sent to concentration camps. One of Hitler’s closest and most devoted followers, Goebbels was known for his deep, virulent antisemitism. Goebbels remained dedicated to Hitler even after the war turned against Germany. Following Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels served as chancellor of Germany for a single day before he and his wife, Magda, poisoned their six children and took their own lives.
Joseph Goebbels was a master propagandist and orator who served as Nazi Germany’s first and only minister for Propaganda and Public Enlightenment across the duration of the regime between 1933 and 1945. One of Adolf Hitler’s closest and most devoted followers, he was known for his deep, virulent antisemitism. Following Hitler’s suicide, Goebbels served as chancellor of Germany for a single day; then he and his wife, Magda, poisoned their six children and took their own lives. (Library of Congress)
Paul Joseph Goebbels was born on October 29, 1897, in Rheydt, in the German Rhineland, into a strict middle-class Catholic family. He was the son of Fritz Goebbels, a bookkeeper in a factory, and his wife Maria. As he was a bright student, his parents hoped that he would study for the priesthood. In 1914, Goebbels was unable to join the German army because he was less than five feet tall and had a bad limp from a congenital foot deformity and a bone operation as a child. Instead, he served with a Patriotic Help Unit in his hometown. Goebbels completed his education at a Christian gymnasium, completing his university entrance examination in 1916. Goebbels would say later that his limp resulted from a wound suffered while fighting in the war.
After the war, instead of joining the clergy, Goebbels studied German literature and attended several universities, including Bonn, Freiburg, Würzburg, and Munich. During his college years, he fell away from his Catholic faith. In 1921, he earned his doctorate from Heidelberg University. His doctoral supervisor, Max Freiherr von Waldberg, was Jewish; in April 1933, he would be forced to resign from Heidelberg University owing to his non-Aryan status under the Third Reich’s Civil Service Law.
After completing his doctorate, Goebbels embarked on a 10-year literary career writing novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, Michael: Ein Deutsches Schiksal (Michael: A German Destiny), based on his experiences at university, was not published until 1929, when the Nazi Party’s publisher accepted it. Goebbels developed the theory that his works remained unpublished because the publishing companies were owned by Jews. By this stage a rabid antisemite, in 1922, he joined the emerging National Socialist German Workers’ Party and was given the initial task of organizing the party’s youth. When he tried to find steady work after university, he was rejected as a reporter by the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt. In 1924, he gave up trying to work in journalism and entered politics.
Goebbels’s sharp intelligence, his gift of oratory, his flair for theatrical effects, his reckless pragmatism, and his revolutionary dogma flourished in service to the party. Over the following few years, Goebbels was an active Nazi and met Hitler upon his release from jail in 1925. In prison, Hitler made plans to restructure the party and appointed Goebbels in 1929 to manage the NSDAP in the Rhineland, where he was also to act as secretary to prominent Nazi Gregor Strasser.
In October 1926, Goebbels was promoted to district commissioner (Gaulieter) for Berlin. He reorganized the Berlin branch of the party and built its weekly newspaper, Der Angriff, into a strong political weapon promoting German nationalism and opposing the ruling Weimar government. Goebbels attacked Berlin’s Jewish police chief, Bernhard Weiss, launching a heavy propaganda campaign against him. When he was informed by a friend that Weiss was a loyal German with an exemplary military record, Goebbels commented that he had nothing against Weiss and that the attacks were run to put the Nazis constantly in the national spotlight.
In 1928, Goebbels, Hermann Göring, and 10 other Nazis were elected to the Reichstag. Goebbels became the party’s head of propaganda. Over the next years, he ran the NSDAP electoral strategy. When Adolf Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, he appointed Goebbels as minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, which was the vehicle for Goebbels to show his true propaganda skills.
On May 1, 1933, Goebbels organized a massive parade on what was designated the Day of National Labor, an event that marked the end of the German trade-union movement. On May 10, 1933, he then supervised the burning of 20,000 books written by Jewish or anti-Nazi authors. As minister for public enlightenment and propaganda, Goebbels began to control all cultural aspects of German life—including art, music, literature, and mass media—which resulted in a mass flight of Jewish artists and authors. Before long, the contents of all of Germany’s newspapers, books, novels, plays, and films were subjected to the ministry’s control. His large budget enabled Goebbels to bribe artists to cooperate with Nazi Party policies and threaten with violence those who did not. It was Goebbels’s strategy that by controlling art, literature, and other forms of German culture, he could bring about a spiritual mobilization of the German people.
Goebbels used publicity and marketing ideas in the political realm, bringing out eye-catching slogans and psychology into political advertising. His propaganda posters were designed to include bright-red ink and a large typeface for attention-grabbing headlines, and his innumerable rallies generated immense support for the regime—as well as instilled fear among the Jewish population.
Goebbels controlled what was seen in the cinemas. Hitlerjunge Quex, made in 1933, told the story of a German boy brought up in a communist family who broke away from his background, joined the Hitler Youth, and was murdered by communists for doing so. The Eternal Jew was a film denigrating the Jews, comparing them to rats spreading disease. Goebbels ordered that many comedies should be made to give Germany a “lighter” look so that the cinemas were not just full of serious films with a political message.
Goebbels adapted modern media for propaganda purposes with masterly skill. To make sure that every German could hear Hitler speak, he organized the sale of cheap radios called the People’s Receivers, which cost only 76 Reichsmarks. There was also a smaller version costing just 35 Reichsmarks. If Hitler was to give speeches, Goebbels reasoned, every German should be able to hear him. Loudspeakers were put up in streets so that people could not avoid the Führer’s words, and cafés and bars were ordered to broadcast Hitler’s public speeches.
Goebbels himself detailed his own role in the Nazi rise to power in two books: Der Kampf um Berlin (The Struggle for Berlin), published in 1932, and Vom Kaiserhof zur Reichskanzlei (From Kaiserhof to the Reich Chancellery), in 1934. His unpublished diary covering the years 1942 to 1943 was discovered among his papers after his death and published in 1948.
On February 18, 1943, Goebbels delivered a “total war” speech at the Sports Palace in Berlin, urging Germans to devote themselves entirely to the German war effort and warning that a German defeat would mean the destruction of Western civilization at the hands of Jews and communists. Goebbels was a supporter of sending Jews to concentration camps and ghettos to the East, and he pushed for Jews in his jurisdiction, Berlin, to be sent first. On July 25, 1944, Hitler designated Goebbels as the Reich plenipotentiary for total war.
A womanizer, Goebbels’s reprehensible private life endangered his status in the party. In 1931, in a Protestant ceremony, Goebbels married Magda Quandt, with whom he would later have six children. Notwithstanding the marriage, he had several affairs, the behavior that angered Hitler and undermined Goebbels’s standing.
After World War II started in 1939, Goebbels attempted to influence Hitler’s war strategy, but while Hitler acknowledged Goebbels’s work as propaganda minister, he disregarded his military advice and excluded him from assisting in the war effort. Despite this slight, Goebbels continued to strongly support the party, even after war turned against Germany. Goebbels remained the party’s main propaganda voice until the war’s end.
By 1945, the Nazi war machine had been destroyed on the Eastern Front, and the Reich was doomed. In the final days of the war, Goebbels moved his wife, Magda, and their six children into Hitler’s bunker in Berlin. Hitler’s final act as German leader, before he killed himself, was to appoint Goebbels to the office of Reich chancellor. On May 1, 1945, with the soldiers of the Red Army surrounding Berlin, Goebbels helped his wife to poison their children and then shot her before committing suicide.
Amon Goeth was an Austrian Nazi officer who was commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in German-occupied Poland for most of the camp’s existence during World War II. Decades after his execution in 1946 for war crimes, Goeth became infamous as an icon of Nazi evil after his depiction in Stephen Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List (1993), the story of Oskar Schindler, the industrialist who shielded over 1,000 Jews during the Holocaust.
Amon Leopold Goeth was born on December 11, 1908, in Vienna, Austria, to a wealthy book-publishing family. In 1926, he joined an Austrian Nazi youth group while studying agriculture in Vienna. He was a member of the antisemitic paramilitary Heimwehr (Home Guard) from 1927 to 1930, abandoning them to join the Austrian branch of the Nazi Party and the SS in September 1930. From 1928 until 1939, he was employed by a military and technical book publisher in Vienna.
On June 19, 1933, the Austrian Nazi Party was declared illegal. Operating in exile from Munich, Goeth couriered radios and weapons on behalf of the party into Austria. Arrested by the authorities, he was released in December 1933 for lack of evidence. He was arrested again after Austrian chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss was assassinated in July 1934 in a failed Nazi coup.
While living in Munich, Goeth suspended his SS and Nazi Party activities until 1937, instead helping his parents to develop their publishing business. In 1938, he married Anny Geiger; their child Paul was born in 1939 but died within a few months. They had another son, Werner, in 1940 and a daughter, Ingeborg, in 1941. Even though the family maintained a permanent home in Vienna throughout World War II, Goeth later separated from his wife and started a relationship with a beautician, Ruth Irene Kalder, with whom he had a daughter, Monika.
On March 5, 1940, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht, with the rank of Unterfeldwebel. Later the same year, he transferred into the SS and was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer.
After serving at Teschen (Cieszyn) and Kattowitz (Katowice), Goeth was transferred to Odilo Globocnick’s staff in Lublin in June 1942 to participate in Jewish deportations. Little is known of the six-month period he served during Aktion Reinhard, although transcripts of his later trial indicate that he was responsible for rounding up and transporting Jews to be murdered. Goeth also played a leading role in the destruction of a number of Jewish ghettos, including Rzeszów in 1942, from where the Jews were deported to the death camp at Bełżec.
After conflict with SS-Sturmbannführer Hermann Höfle, Globocnik’s chief of staff for Aktion Reinhard, Goeth was instructed in early 1943 to build a new camp at Płaszów employing forced labor, which he would command after it had been built. Goeth served at Kraków-Płaszów from February 11, 1943, until September 13, 1944.
The site chosen for this Arbeitslager (labor camp) was the Jewish cemetery on the outskirts of Lublin. Huts were constructed in desecration of the freshly dug graves, gravestones were crushed to form an access road, and, within one month, the new camp was ready. On March 13, 1943, the Kraków ghetto was liquidated, and several thousands of people not deemed fit for work were sent to extermination camps to be murdered. During the liquidation of the ghetto, Goeth personally shot some 50 children, while hundreds of people were murdered on the streets. Survivors were sent to the camp at Płaszów.
Goeth created a regime of terror in which torture and murder were the order of the day. His behavior was, to some extent, conditioned by excessive alcohol consumption and lack of sleep, but there was more to it than that. His two dogs were trained to attack Jews, and almost daily, he killed prisoners as his cruelty took on an increasingly ominous character. Over time, it seemed, he became more ruthless and unpredictable.
Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory, staffed with Jewish slave labor, was moved adjacent to Płaszów after the liquidation of the ghetto. He skillfully worked on Goeth to ensure that his workers survived the brutal regime the commandant had created. In time, Goeth permitted Schindler to move his workers to quarters outside the camp, where their odds for survival improved.
On September 3, 1943, in addition to his duties at Płaszów, Goeth took charge of the liquidation of the ghetto at Tarnów, which had been home to 25,000 Jews at the start of World War II. During the liquidation, Goeth confiscated for himself Jewish property, furniture, furs, clothing, jewelry, tobacco, and alcohol, which were later found by the Gestapo in storage at Brunnlitz (Brnĕnec). Ten thousand Tarnów Jews were deported to Płaszów, and 4,000 were killed. The 8,000 Jews who remained were loaded onto a train for Auschwitz, but less than half survived the journey; most of them were deemed unsuitable for forced labor and were murdered immediately on their arrival at Auschwitz.
Goeth also supervised the closure of the forced-labor camp in Szebnie near Jaslo. The liquidation began on September 21, 1943, with the killing of 700 Jewish prisoners, who were driven in trucks to a forest in Tarnowiec, where they were shot at Goeth’s command. Under the leadership of SS-Sturmbahnführer Wilhelm Haase, Goeth also prepared plans for the liquidation of ghettos in Bochnia and Przemyśl.
By April 1944, Goeth had been promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer and was appointed a reserve officer of the Waffen-SS. In early 1944, the status of the Kraków-Płaszów labor camp changed to a permanent concentration camp under the direct authority of the SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, or WVHA). Concentration camps were more closely monitored by the SS than labor camps, so conditions improved slightly when the designation was changed.
On September 13, 1944, Goeth was arrested in Kraków by the SS and charged with theft of Jewish property (which belonged to the state, according to Nazi legislation); failure to provide adequate food for the prisoners under his charge; violation of concentration camp regulations regarding the treatment and punishment of prisoners; and allowing unauthorized access to camp personnel records by prisoners and noncommissioned officers for the purpose of large-scale fraud. He was also interrogated by the Sicherheitspolizei (Security Police, or SiPo) for passing on unauthorized information to a civilian named Grunberg about the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. Grunberg, a German sympathetic to the Jews, passed the information on to Oskar Schindler, who in turn warned the ghetto leaders.
Moreover, Goeth could not explain where the 80,000 Reichsmarks that were found in his villa came from. He was dismissed from his position, but due to the war situation and Germany’s looming defeat, the charges against him were dropped in early 1945. SS doctors then diagnosed him as suffering from mental illness, and he was committed to a sanitorium in Bad Tölz, where he was arrested by the U.S. military in May 1945.
The Americans agreed to a request by Polish authorities to extradite Goeth to Poland, where he was tried before the Supreme National Tribunal on charges of committing mass murder during the liquidations of the ghettos in Kraków and Tarnów and of the camps at Płaszów and Szebnie. He was found guilty of personally ordering the imprisonment, torture, and extermination of individuals and groups of people. He was also convicted of homicide, the first such conviction at a war crimes trial, for “personally killing, maiming and torturing a substantial, albeit unidentified number of people.”
Amon Goeth was sentenced to death in Kraków on September 5, 1946. He was hanged in the former camp at Płaszów on September 13, 1946.
Hermann Göring was a German political and military leader as well as one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party. A World War I fighter-pilot ace, he received the Pour le Mérite. In World War II, he became an air force marshal and head of the Luftwaffe. Adolf Hitler appointed Göring as his second in charge and successor. Göring played a pivotal role in German foreign policy regarding Austria and Czechoslovakia, in implementing the Holocaust against Europe’s Jews, and in plundering the art and valuables of occupied Europe.
Hermann Wilhelm Göring was born on January 12, 1893, in Rosenheim, Bavaria, to a former cavalry officer and judge, Heinrich Ernst Göring. His father, who had been the first governor-general of German South West Africa, had five children from a prior marriage; Hermann was the fourth of five other children by Heinrich’s second wife, Franziska Tiefenbrunn. When Göring was born, his father was German consul general in Haiti; his mother returned to Bavaria only to give birth and then left her six-week-old baby for three years. She only saw her son again when the family returned to Germany in 1896.
As commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring was one of the most powerful figures in the Nazi Party. He played a pivotal role in crafting German foreign policy regarding Austria and Czechoslovakia, in implementing the Holocaust against Europe’s Jews, and in plundering the art and valuables of occupied Europe. Tried and sentenced to death at Nuremberg, he committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide pill just two hours prior to his planned execution. (Library of Congress)
Hermann Göring’s godfather, Dr. Hermann Epenstein, was a wealthy half-Jewish physician, army doctor, and businessman. Franziska Göring was Epenstein’s mistress, and in 1894, Epenstein restored a ruined castle, Mauterndorf, in Salzburg, Austria. Hermann Göring considered this as the castle of his youth. In 1897, Epenstein bought the large Burg Veldenstein castle north of Nuremberg, and the Göring family moved there.
Göring was interested in a career as a soldier from a very early age. He became a mountaineer and scaled Mont Blanc as well as German and Austrian mountains. At 16, he entered officers’ training school at Gross Lichterfelde, Berlin, graduating with distinction. In 1912, he was commissioned in the Prince Wilhelm Regiment (112th Infantry) of the Prussian army.
When World War I broke out in August 1914, Göring served around Mülhausen, a garrison town close to the French frontier. In 1915, he was hospitalized with rheumatism, a result of damp trench warfare. While recovering, his friend Bruno Loerzer urged him to transfer to the air corps of the German army. Göring’s initial request was rejected, but by 1916, he was accepted and sent for pilot training. Seriously wounded in aerial combat, he took nearly a year to recover and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class. On July 7, 1918, he was named commander of the famed Flying Circus, the squadron of Baron Manfred von Richthofen. Credited with 22 aerial victories in World War I, Göring was awarded the coveted Pour le Mérite medal.
In the last days of the World War I, Göring was ordered to retreat with his squadron but refused. Like many others, he believed the stab-in-the-back legend, which held that the German army had not lost the war but was betrayed by German Marxists, Jews, and Republicans in the civilian leadership.
After the war, Göring remained in aviation and briefly worked at Fokker. Most of 1919 was spent in Denmark and Sweden flying in civil aviation. Göring left Stockholm in 1921 to study political science at Munich University, becoming a close associate of Adolf Hitler. On February 3, 1922, he married a baroness, Carin von Kantzow.
Göring joined the Nazi Party in 1922. His aristocratic background and his prestige as a war hero made him a prize recruit. In December 1922, Hitler gave Göring charge of the SA, which Göring built dramatically in strength. Nazism offered him the promise of action, adventure, comradeship, and an outlet for his lust for power. He participated in Hitler’s failed Beer Hall Putsch on November 8 to 9, 1923, was seriously wounded, and became addicted to morphine for pain relief. He fled Germany after the putsch but returned after a pardon in 1927, when he rejoined the NSDAP. In 1928, he was elected to the Reichstag and was its president from 1932. He knew many key players in industry, banking, and the military, and he played a key role in the Nazi ascent to power.
Carin Göring’s health had been weakened by tuberculosis, and the day after she attended her mother’s funeral in Stockholm, she suffered a heart attack. She died of heart failure on October 17, 1931. Göring later built his Karinhall estate to honor his late wife.
After Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, Göring gained further power and influence. His many roles included minister without portfolio, minister of the interior for the state of Prussia, and minister of the air force (Luftwaffe). In rebuilding the Luftwaffe, he became a key player in all major policy decisions affecting its composition and training.
On February 27, 1933, just one month after Hitler had been sworn in as chancellor, an arson attack on the Reichstag building in Berlin occurred. One of the first to arrive on the scene, Göring exploited the fire (which many suspected that he had engineered) in order to implement a series of emergency decrees that destroyed the last remnants of civil rights in Germany, imprisoned communists and Social Democrats, and banned the left-wing press.
On April 26, 1933, Göring established the Gestapo (Geheime Staatspolizei), which was intended to crush all resistance to Nazism. On April 20, 1934, Göring handed over control of the Gestapo to Heinrich Himmler.
On June 30, 1934, Himmler and Göring affected the SS purge of leaders of the paramilitary SA, including Ernst Röhm, who had become a threat to Hitler’s power. Göring personally went over the lists of detainees and determined who should be shot. At least 85 people were killed between June 30 and July 2, in a period that became known as the Night of the Long Knives.
On April 10, 1935, Göring married actress Emmy Sonneman, and at the ceremony, no fewer than 200 Luftwaffe fighter planes flew over the couple as an honor guard.
In 1936, Göring was appointed to oversee the Four-Year Plan, giving him power over the German economy. On December 17, 1936, in a secret meeting, Göring told leading German industrialists that the war for which Germany was preparing was on the horizon.
The creation of the state-owned Hermann Göring Works in 1937, a gigantic industrial complex employing 700,000 workers and a capital of 400 million Reichsmarks, enabled Göring to make a fortune. So also did the confiscation of Jewish properties. Some he acquired for himself for a nominal price, while he collected bribes for allowing others to steal Jewish property. He took kickbacks from industrialists for favorable decisions as Four-Year Plan director and money for supplying arms to Spanish Republicans in the Spanish Civil War—even though Germany was supporting Franco and the Nationalists.
Göring used his position to indulge in ostentatious luxury and bought grand estates, hunting lodges, and a large art collection. He also owned a personal train complete with separate sleeping coaches for him and his wife and a car that was set up as a cinema. He remained genuinely popular with the German masses, who regarded him as manly, honest, and more accessible than the Führer.
As head of the Four-Year Plan, Göring pressured for Austria to be incorporated into the Reich. On February 12, 1938, he met with Austrian chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, threatening Austria with invasion if it would not concur to peaceful unification. Schuschnigg’s subsequent resignation on March 11, 1938, and the German invasion of Austria the next day were arguably down to Göring’s machinations more than Hitler’s and should be seen as his victory.
In July 1938, Göring once more involved himself in foreign affairs, suggesting to the British government that he make an official visit to discuss Germany’s intentions for Czechoslovakia. At the Nuremberg Party Rally in September 1938, Göring and other speakers denounced the Czechs as an inferior race that must be conquered. Again, Göring’s intrigues paid off. British prime minister Neville Chamberlain undertook three summit meetings with Hitler, leading to the Munich Agreement on September 29, 1938. This not only gave the Czech Sudetenland to Germany but opened the way to the German occupation of the remainder of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939—once more owing to Göring’s diplomatic maneuverings.
Following the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9 to 10, 1938, Göring fined the German Jewish community 1 billion Reichsmarks and ordered the elimination of Jews from the German economy, the Aryanization of their property and businesses, and their exclusion from schools, resorts, parks, forests, and the like. On November 12, 1938, he warned of a “final reckoning with the Jews” should Germany come into conflict with a foreign power.
At the start of World War II, Göring had built the Luftwaffe into a formidable force. His planes performed superbly in the Blitzkrieg campaigns against Poland, the Low Countries, Norway, and France.
Then from July 10, 1940 to October 31, 1940, the Luftwaffe waged large-scale attacks against the United Kingdom in the Battle of Britain, as Göring was convinced that by Operation Eagle he could secure the surrender of the British through air power alone. Göring made a fatal tactical error when he switched to massive night bombings against London on September 7, 1940, which saved the Royal Air Force sector-control stations from destruction and gave the British fighter defenses time to recover. The Luftwaffe lost planes and experienced bomber crews that it was unable to replace, and Hitler was forced to abandon Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of England.
On November 5, 1940, Göring issued an order to loot the art treasures at the Louvre museum in Paris, many of which were to be distributed to German museums and private Nazi collections, with a large portion of the art reserved for himself. On May 23, 1941, Göring ordered the plunder and destruction of Soviet industrial centers, justifying this on the basis that the conquered Soviet population would be no more than laborers for Germany.
On June 29, 1941, Hitler named Göring as his successor and heir, with a promotion to the rank of Reichsmarschall (a rank above field marshal created just for him), placing him above all other military leaders in Germany.
On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa, a massive invasion of the Soviet Union, an offensive initially opposed by Göring, who favored a Mediterranean strategy instead. In training, doctrine, and fighting ability, the German forces invading Russia represented arguably the 20th century’s finest combat army, but the ultimate failure of Barbarossa to achieve its objectives was the crucial turning point in World War II. Nazi Germany was henceforth forced to fight a two-front war against a coalition possessing vastly superior resources.
Systematic killing of men, women, and children began in June 1941 after the onset of Operation Barbarossa. On July 31, 1941, Göring commissioned Reinhard Heydrich to prepare and submit a plan for a “final solution to the Jewish question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage) in territories under German control and to coordinate the participation of all government organizations involved. Accordingly, the Wannsee Conference was held on January 20, 1942, in Berlin, with Heydrich emphasizing that once mass deportation was complete, the SS would take charge of the exterminations. The minutes of the conference estimated the Jewish population of the Soviet Union to be 5 million, with another 3 million in Ukraine.
Göring’s opposition to Operation Barbarossa had political ramifications, with blame cast in his direction for suggesting that the Luftwaffe, with only a limited transport capacity, could supply the Sixth Army at Stalingrad. By mid-1943, enemy fighters were accompanying bomber squadrons deeper and deeper into German territory. Public opinion turned against Göring, as Allied air raids on Germany became increasingly effective and the Luftwaffe seemed unable to defend Germany itself. Progressively marginalized, Göring spent more time at his estate of Karinhall, where he indulged his interests in hunting and stealing art collections.
As the Soviets approached Berlin, Hitler’s efforts to defend Germany became futile. His birthday, celebrated at the Führerbunker in Berlin on April 20, 1945, was a leave-taking for many top Nazis, Göring included. Göring had already evacuated Karinhall, loading all his plundered treasures onto 24 heavy trucks and several train cars. He arrived at his estate at Obersalzberg on April 22, 1945, to learn that Hitler, in a diatribe against his generals, had that day admitted publicly that the war was lost and that he intended to remain in Berlin to the end and commit suicide.
On April 23, 1945, Göring learned that Hitler considered him to be in a better position than the Führer to negotiate a peace settlement. After consulting a number of senior government officials, Göring sent a telegram to Hitler stating that in accordance with Hitler's decree of June 29, 1941, Göring would take power over Germany if Hitler could not respond by midnight. The head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, portrayed this as a treasonous attempt by Göring to wrest power from Hitler, who demanded Göring’s immediate resignation; without it, he would be executed for high treason. Hitler removed Göring from all offices and ordered that he and his staff be placed under house arrest at Obersalzberg. Bormann made an announcement over the radio that Göring had resigned for health reasons. On April 30, 1945, Hitler committed suicide.
On May 9, 1945, accompanied by his wife and daughter, Göring surrendered to elements of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division. On May 21, 1945, he was transferred to the secret American camp Ashcan, where other senior Nazis were imprisoned. Tried at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, Göring was unrepentant. Found guilty and sentenced to death, on October 15, 1946, only two hours before his planned execution, Hermann Göring, aged 53, committed suicide by swallowing cyanide.
Arthur Greiser was a Nazi politician, SS-Obergruppenführer, and Reichsstatthalter of the German-occupied territory of Wartheland.
Arthur Karl Greiser was born January 22, 1897, in Schroda (Środa Wielkopolska), Prussia, to a local bailiff. In 1903, he began to study at the Könglich-Humanistische Gymnasium (Royal Humanities College) in Hohensalza, Posen (Poznań). Owing to Posen’s geographical location close to Prussian Poland, Greiser learned to speak Polish fluently as a child.
In 1914, Greiser quit school without earning a diploma. He joined the navy in August 1914, and in 1917, he became a naval aviator. He earned the Iron Cross First and Second Class as well as other military decorations. Shot down and wounded later in the war, on September 30, 1919, he was classified as 50 percent war disabled and discharged from naval service.
After the war, he returned home to Posen, now Poznań and part of Poland. From 1919 to May 1921, he served in the Freikorps Grenzschutz Ost and fought in the Baltic States. He joined the Nazi Party and SA on December 1, 1929, and then the SS on September 29, 1931. In 1935, Greiser became the Senate president of the Free City of Danzig (Gdańsk).
On September 8, 1939, after Germany invaded Poland, Greiser was named as head of the military government in Poland. On October 21 and 26, 1939, he was appointed district leader (gauleiter) and administrator of Reichsgau Posen (renamed Wartheland on January 29, 1940). Greiser would hold these positions until the end of the war.
Reichsgau Posen was potentially very rich. It had been a major agricultural area providing food to Germany before 1914 and possessed an excellent rail and road network as well as a comparatively healthy and well-educated workforce. The capital, Litzmanstadt (Łódź), had developed a sophisticated industrial base during the 19th century.
A fervent racist who eagerly practiced an “ethnic cleansing” program to rid the Warthegau of Poles, Greiser removed Polish civilians from various regions and resettled them with ethnic Germans, 350,000 of whom were refugees from Eastern European states occupied by the Soviet Union. Some of the people removed were murdered systematically, while others were deported further east. Greiser approved the creation of SS detachments that operated as mobile killing squads murdering Jews, mental patients, and other groups deemed “subhuman” in accordance with Nazi philosophy. Wilhelm Koppe, a subordinate to Greiser, was put in charge of the Final Solution in the Wartheland, and between late 1941 and April 1942, Koppe was responsible for killing 150,000 Jews using gas vans.
Greiser was fully aware of the Holocaust. Early in 1940, he was on record challenging Hermann Göring over efforts to delay the expulsion of Łódź Jews to the Generalgouvernement. On September 18, 1941, Heinrich Himmler informed Greiser that he intended to transfer 60,000 Czech and German Jews to the Łódź ghetto up to the spring of 1942, when they would be “resettled.” The first transport arrived a few weeks later, and Greiser sought and received permission from Himmler to kill 100,000 Jews in his area.
Greiser then instructed Koppe to manage the overcrowding. Koppe and Herbert Lange managed the problem by experimenting with gas vans at a country estate at Chełmno, creating the first killing unit, which murdered around 150,000 Jews between late 1941 and April 1942. On October 6, 1943, Greiser held a national assembly of senior SS officers in Posen, at which Himmler bluntly spoke of the mass executions of civilians. Greiser’s mass murder actions were coordinated by Herbert Mehlhorn.
On January 20, 1945, Greiser ordered a general evacuation of Posen (having received a telegram from Martin Bormann relaying Adolf Hitler’s order to leave the city). Greiser left Posen the same evening and reported to Himmler’s personal train in Frankfurt am Oder. There, Greiser found that Bormann had tricked him. Hitler had announced that Posen must be held at all costs, and Greiser was now viewed as a deserter and coward, particularly by Joseph Goebbels, who, in his diary on March 2, 1945, labeled Greiser “a real disgrace to the Party.” Posen fell under Russian control on January 28, 1945, and Greiser surrendered to the Americans in Austria near the end of the war.
Greiser was later tried by the Polish Supreme National Tribunal. His defense against war crimes charges was that he was following orders, but he was nonetheless found guilty of several charges including mass murder, torture, and the systematic destruction of Polish culture and identity. On July 21, 1946, aged 49, Arthur Greiser was executed by hanging at Fort Winiary in Poznań in what would become the last public execution in Polish history.
Irma Grese, sometimes called the “Beautiful Beast,” was an SS officer during World War II who served as a guard in the concentration camps at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen.
Irma Ida Ilse Grese was born in Wrechen, Germany, on October 7, 1923. She was the third of five children of Berta and Alfred Grese, a farming family. In 1936, Grese’s mother committed suicide after learning that Alfred Grese had engaged in an extramarital affair.
Grese, a poor student, was bullied by her classmates, dropped out of the school in 1938 aged 14, and joined the Bund deutscher Mädel (League of German Girls, or BdM). She was then employed in several casual jobs, including two years at an SS sanatorium.
By the time Grese was 18 years old, she was accepted to work at the women’s concentration camp Ravensbrück, where she served as an Aufseherin (female guard), bringing to the position both her passion for the Nazi cause and her brutality.
In March 1943, Grese moved to the harsher camp environment at Auschwitz-Birkenau. By the middle of 1944, she was a senior guard. She was an active participant in prisoner selections for the gas chambers and was especially feared by inmates; survivors later gave evidence about her tortures and the “pure unabashed evil” ways in which she terrified prisoners.
Irma Grese was a guard at Ravensbrück, Auschwitz, and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps and was infamous among prisoners for her many acts of sadistic cruelty and bloodshed. Arrested at the end of the war and placed on trial for crimes against humanity, she was one of three female guards (along with Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath) found guilty and sentenced to death. She was hanged on December 13, 1945, at just 22 years of age. (Corbis via Getty Images)
Grese gained infamy as a nymphomaniac and a sadist, who had sexual relationships with chosen prisoners and many of the male SS guards. The prisoners described acts of cruelty and bloodshed, such as beating the prisoners bare-handed and making them hold heavy stones over their head for long stretches. The prisoners also were cowed by indiscriminate shootings. When Grese was especially angry, she was known to use trained and allegedly half-starved dogs to attack prisoners, who were also fearful of her because she was responsible for selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. Survivors reported that Grese wore heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol, testifying that she enjoyed using both physical and psychological methods to torture inmates. Other accounts claimed that she beat some women inmates to death and flogged others using a plaited whip. Grese became a symbol of terror and the most feared guard in the camp.
One surviving prisoner, Olga Lengyel, wrote that Grese had a fondness for selecting not just the sick and the weak but any woman who had retained her beauty. She later recalled that Grese had numerous lovers among the SS in the camp, including Josef Mengele, and that her scrupulous personal grooming, tailored clothing, and overuse of perfume were all part of a deliberate act of hostility against the ragged women who were her prisoners.
On April 17, 1945, Grese transported prisoners from Ravensbrück to Bergen-Belsen. When British troops arrived there soon thereafter, Grese was standing at the camp entrance, along with the commandant, Josef Kramer, offering help. They were immediately arrested, along with other SS personnel who had not already fled. A few months later, Grese was put on trial as a war criminal.
Irma Grese was one of the 45 defendants accused of war crimes at the Belsen Trials, conducted by the British military in Lüneburg, Germany, which ran from September 17 to November 17, 1945. The charges of war crimes were derived from the Geneva Convention of 1929 concerning the management of prisoners, and the accusations against Grese addressed her abuse and murder of those imprisoned at the camps.
During the Belsen trials, the press branded Grese as the “Beautiful Beast” alongside Kramer, who was nicknamed the “Beast of Belsen.” Even though a total of 16 women guards were charged with similar ghastly accusations, Grese was one of only 3 female guards sentenced to death, along with Juana Bormann and Elisabeth Volkenrath. Found guilty, she was hanged on December 13, 1945, aged just 22.
Franz Gürtner was a German jurist and leading member of the conservative German National People’s Party (DNVP). An old-school bureaucrat, Gürtner was sympathetic to right-wing radicals, such as Adolf Hitler. On June 2, 1932, he was appointed German minister of justice and continued in that role in Hitler’s cabinet after January 1933 until his death on January 29, 1941. Gürtner provided official sanction and legal grounds for a series of criminal actions under the Hitler administration.
He was born in Regensburg, southeast Germany, on August 26, 1881. The son of a locomotive engineer, he studied law at the University of Munich and then served as an officer in France and Palestine during World War I. He was awarded an Iron Cross for bravery.
After the war, Gürtner resumed a successful legal career and was appointed Bavarian minister of justice on November 8, 1922, a position he held until 1932. A member of the conservative German Nationalist Party, Gürtner also developed strong nationalist beliefs and, like many in Weimar Germany, was infuriated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and the 1923 Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr. As he was sympathetic toward right-wing radicals such as Hitler, it was understood that Gürtner used his influence to help Hitler when he was put on trial after the failed Beer Hall Putsch in 1923. Tried for treason, Hitler received a five-year jail term, which was spent in some comfort at Landsberg Prison. He had only served nine months before Gürtner used his judicial authority to obtain his early release. Gürtner also persuaded the Bavarian government to legalize the banned Nazi Party and allow Hitler to speak again in public.
In June 1932, Gürtner was appointed minister of justice in the cabinet of Franz von Papen. He was retained by Hitler as minister of justice and was given responsibility for coordinating jurisprudence in the Third Reich.
Though a non-Nazi conservative, Gürtner was authoritarian by inclination. He fully supported the Reichstag Fire Decree, which effectively wiped out civil liberties in Germany. Indeed, on the day before the Reichstag fire, he proposed a bill that was almost as heavy handed and would have instituted severe restrictions on civil liberties under the pretense of keeping the communists from launching a general strike. In office, Gürtner merged the association of the German judges with the new National Socialist Lawyers’ Association and provided a veil of constitutional legality for the Nazi state.
In 1933, Gürtner came into conflict with one of his subordinates, Roland Freisler, over issues relating to Rassenschande (racial shame)—sexual relationships between Aryans and non-Aryans—which Freisler wanted immediately criminalized. Gürtner, in a meeting, pointed out many practical difficulties with Freisler’s proposal. This did not, however, stop the passing of the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, criminalizing such relations.
In the weeks following the Nazi Party purge known as the Night of the Long Knives from June 30 to July 2, 1934, Gürtner demonstrated his loyalty to the Nazi regime by writing a law that added a legal veneer to the purge. Signed into law by both Hitler and Minister of the Interior Wilhelm Frick, the Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defense retrospectively legalized the murders committed during the purge. Gürtner even quashed some initial efforts by local prosecutors to take legal action against those who carried out the murders.
As Reich minister of justice with extensive powers, Gürtner opened the first session of the People’s Court on July 14, 1934. After nominating all the judges and public prosecutors, Hitler invariably rubber-stamped Gürtner’s nominations and swore the judges in personally. In return, Gürtner signed Nazi laws and mediated between the Nazi regime and conservative jurists to gain their cooperation.
Yet Gürtner also tried to protect the independence of the judiciary and at least a facade of legal norms. The ill-treatment of prisoners in concentration camps under the jurisdiction of local SA leaders provoked a sharp protest from the Ministry of Justice. Gürtner observed that prisoners were being beaten to the point of unconsciousness with whips and blunt instruments, commenting that such treatment revealed a level of brutality and cruelty that was totally alien to German sentiment and feeling. Gürtner also complained about confessions obtained by the Gestapo under torture. In both protests, he found himself at odds with Hitler. By the end of 1935, it was already apparent that neither Gürtner nor Frick would be able to impose limitations on the power of the Gestapo or control the SS camps, where thousands of detainees were being held without judicial review.
In 1936, Gürtner, acting upon Hitler’s direction, ordered that the Fallbeil, a variation on the guillotine, replace the hand ax as the official method for all civil executions throughout Germany. He then joined the Nazi Party in 1937 and found himself providing official sanction and legal grounds for a series of criminal actions, beginning with the institution of Ständegerichte (drumhead courts-martial). During the war, this court tried Poles and Jews in the occupied eastern territories and issued decrees that opened the way for implementing the Final Solution.
Upon the outbreak of war, the Ministry of Justice found that its power was swiftly eroded by internal security forces, which did not adhere to formal judicial processes. The Gestapo and SD became judge, jury, and executioner in many issues, and few in the ministry were brave enough to query their work. In 1939 the SS won the right to order the summary execution of any person deemed subversive or disloyal; all compromise with the state judicial system was abandoned.
A district judge and member of the Confessing Church, Lothar Kreyssig, wrote in 1940 to Gürtner protesting that the T-4 euthanasia program was illegal, since no law or formal decree from Hitler had authorized it. Gürtner promptly dismissed Kreyssig from his post, telling him, “If you cannot recognise the will of the Führer as a source of law, then you cannot remain a judge.”
Gürtner then provided legal backing and support to any act carried out on behalf of Hitler—normally explaining that such action was required to defend the Fatherland. On this basis, Hitler expected Gürtner to legally justify any actions taken by Nazi organizations as well. The usual legal explanation invariably oriented around a “defense of the Fatherland” argument.
Franz Gürtner was still minister of justice when he died in Berlin on January 29, 1941. His death completed Heinrich Himmler’s supremacy of the legal and justice system, as Gürtner’s replacement at the justice ministry, State Secretary Franz Schlegelberger, never had Gürtner’s authority; nor was he in any position to challenge the might of the SS.