1933, Germany. From its rise to power, the Nazi  regime builds a series of incarceration sites which are formally called “concentration  camps” and their major purpose during the 1930s is to imprison and intimidate  the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceive  to be a threat to the survival of the regime.

The Second World War begins on 1 September  1939 and the SS, which is responsible for the management of concentration camps, expands  their functions turning them into sites where Nazi authorities kill targeted groups of people. One  such camp is Auschwitz, established in May 1940, around 60 km west of Polish Krakow.

 Between  1940 and 1945, a minimum of 1,3 million people will be deported to Auschwitz and of these, at  least 1,1 million will be murdered. The chief of the camp’s crematories who supervises the  unit which burns the corpses of innocent men, women, and children in pits, on pyres, or  in the crematorium furnaces, is Otto Moll. Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll was born on 4 March 1915 in the town of Hohen Schönberg,  then part of the German Empire.

When on 30 January 1933 President von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of  Germany, Otto Moll was 17 years old. He trained as a gardener and on 30 May 1935, he  joined the SS, which in the Nazi state controlled the German police forces and the concentration  camp system.

 From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish  Question and after 1941, its leadership planned, coordinated and directed the so-called  Final Solution of the Jewish Question. This “solution” was the annihilation of the European  Jews, which we now refer to as the Holocaust. Otto Moll was musically active and became a member  of the SS marching battalion orchestra which performed in SS barracks or in public places.

  When during a journey with this marching band from Bernau to Oranienburg in January 1937, the SS  truck collided with a car, one SS man was killed, and Moll was critically injured. He was  treated in Bernau Hospital for several months, suffering from a fractured skull and losing  an eye. It has been suggested that because of the accident he suffered from frontal lobe  syndrome – an organic damage that can manifest itself in psychotic or psychopathic behavior.

 As a result, Moll became a physically and mentally ill person who was deliberately exploited  as a murderer by the criminal Nazi regime. From 1938, Otto Moll was employed  at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he worked as the head  of a gardeners’ work detail and was protected by Rudolf Höss who  belonged to the camp’s leadership The Second World War started on the 1st of  September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

The last operational Polish unit surrendered on  the 6th of October the same year and in May 1940, around 60 km west of Krakow, the Germans  established Auschwitz concentration camp. The direct reason for the establishment of the  camp was the fact that mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing “local”  prisons.

 The camp’s commandant became Otto Moll’s former superior Rudolf Höss and the first 30  prisoners, the German criminals with green badges, arrived in Auschwitz on the 20th of May 1940  from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The greens, as these 30 German prisoners were  called, did much to establish the sadism of early camp life, which was directed particularly  at Polish inmates.

 The first transport of Polish male prisoners arrived in Auschwitz on 4 June  1940, when the Germans deported a group of 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnów to the Auschwitz  concentration camp. Among them were soldiers of the September campaign, members of the underground  independence organizations, secondary school pupils and students, as well as a small group of  Polish Jews. They received numbers from 31 to 758.

On the 2nd of May 1941, the camp’s  commandant Rudolf Höss brought Otto Moll to Auschwitz who lived in  the camp with his wife and two daughters. His first wife Elli had also  worked in the concentration camp but died of blood poisoning in 1940. Moll  remarried only a few weeks after her death. Many former Auschwitz prisoners described  Otto Moll as the worst SS-man in the entire camp.

 He distinguished himself with the particular  sadism towards the prisoners and because he had a glass eye, he had a nickname “Cyclops “. A former  Auschwitz prisoner Benjamin Jacobs later recalled: “”His straight blond hair was cut short.  In his chiselled face were set a pair of cold blue eyes. Only one of them was real.  When he spoke, only the live eye shifted. There seemed to be no real feeling in the  heart beating beneath his bulging chest.

” At Auschwitz, Moll first supervised agricultural  commando. Józef Głuszak, who worked in the Moll’s commando and survived the Holocaust, later  recalled: “Moll was particularly happy to persecute us and drive us to labor. I remember  once a prisoner came to a hothouse and picked some onion leaves.

 Moll noticed that, summoned  the prisoner, took him to a barrel with fermenting human fertilizer, put him there head down, then  took him out and told the other prisoners to move him to a water pool located nearby. The prisoner  didn’t report for work the next day. It was clear that he had died. Together with this unit,  we planted cabbage and cauliflower. Moll was eager to tire us down and cracked the whip all  the time.

 I witnessed the following situation: Moll was asking, “Are you cold?” Of course  everyone said “yes”. It was very cold at that time. We wore pants and shirts, without  jackets. Cold days gave us a really hard time. Moll ordered a prisoner to run circles around our  unit and the SS man guarding us, who stood nearby, fired single shots at the runner. Some ten  prisoners were shot dead that way on the spot.

” Thanks to his drive and toughness, in June 1942  Otto Moll became the leader of the notorious penal company to which the prisoners were assigned  for various reasons, including escape attempts, contact with civilians or the illegal possession  of food, money and additional clothing. Assignment to the penal company, situated in infamous Block  11, lasted from one month to one year and the prisoners were not only completely isolated  from other prisoners but had to perform the hardest labor and were continually beaten  by the SS men and prisoner functionaries.

The Auschwitz subcamp Birkenau, which was also  a killing centre and played a central role in the German effort to kill the Jews of Europe,  started functioning on 1 March 1942. At Birkenau, Moll then devoted himself primarily to  the killing of people. Jewish deportees arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau  immediately underwent selection.

The selection procedure was carried out on  the ramps as follows: families were divided after leaving the train cars and all the people  were lined up in two columns. The men and older boys were in one column, and the women and  children of both sexes in the other. Next, the people were led to the camp doctors and  other camp functionaries conducting selection.

They judged the people standing before them  on sight and, sometimes eliciting a brief declaration as to their age and occupation,  decided whether they would live or die. Henryk Mandelbaum, who survived Auschwitz, later  recalled: “People believed that it was indeed a bath, especially if it was presented as  such during the journey or after one’s arrival at Auschwitz; the latter was the  specialty of Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, who would give speeches and tell people that they  had come to perform well-paid work. And although

they had left valuable property behind, they would  be able settle down here and earn new fortunes. Thereafter he instructed them to undress,  saying that they would receive fresh clothes because – since they were going to a place where  cleanliness must be maintained – it was necessary to prevent the spread of disease.

 The people –  easily fooled – believed all that he said and proceeded to take off their clothes, thereafter  entering the fake “bath”. They were not allowed to take any valuables, only towels and soap.  The Germans told them that they would be given back all the valuables that they had left in the  changing- room. And when the gas chamber was full and the doors closed tightly shut, they would pour  in the Zyklon B, which caused people to suffocate.

At the same time – since the transports  included people who were elderly, sick and handicapped – a fake Red Cross ambulance  would drive around, with a crew of two SS men, in order to deceive the prisoners. The  sick would be put in the ambulance, and thereafter taken to be gassed.” The victims  were dead within 20 minutes.

 Johann Kremer, the SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified  that the shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and it  was clear that they fought for their lives. On one occasion the truck full of  prisoners was being driven to a gas chamber but turned so suddenly that a woman’s  child about 3 years old fell out.

 Otto Moll, who was driving behind the truck, took  the child by the neck and then by the leg, and smashed his head against a guardhouse  wall killing him on the spot. Moll then drove up to the truck and threw the  child’s lifeless corpse to his mother. For his merits in killing innocent men,  women and children, Hitler decorated Moll with the War Merit Cross, First Class  with Swords on the 20th of April 1943.

This even casts a significant light on his  importance in the extermination of Jews. In addition to him, only Commandant Höss and Josef  Klehr, the head of the SS disinfection commando, were decorated with this medal  among the Auschwitz personnel. From September 1943 to May 1944, Moll was the  first commandant of the Fürstengrube and Gleiwitz I which were Auschwitz sub-camps.

 The prisoners  worked repairing damaged sides of cars, in the machine shop and smithy, and building roads and  a nearby airstrip. From the late summer of 1944, they were taken out to work on two 12-hour  shifts. Samuel Stoeger, who during the German occupation of Poland lost his whole family  of 13 people, including his wife and child, recalled the following after the war: “German  foremen who supervised our work in the repair shops would report us to the camp authorities for  the most trivial offences committed during work, such as trying to get warm by the radiator or  eating some scraps found somewhere. Based on

these reports, Moll organized the “payment”, that  is the punishment of flogging, every Sunday at noon. It was administered on two sawbuck tables  built specially for this purpose. The floggings were carried out by the designated prisoner  functionaries or SS men. The usual punishment was 50 lashes. Moll personally passed the sentences.

”  Stoeger continued: “Moll would personally shoot prisoners for most trivial offences. He once  caught me boiling potatoes which I had been given at the repair shop. He assumed that I had stolen  them from the camp warehouse and didn’t believe my explanations. He beat me up and knocked me  around, set the dog on me, and then told me to run “for freedom” ,as he called it, pointing to the  wired fence around the camp.

 When I refused, he threatened me with a revolver. Having no choice,  I ran up to the wires and started climbing. Four shots were immediately fired from the guard  tower. None of them hit me. At the almost exact same moment Moll’s deputy drove by. He supervised  our work in the repair shops and knew that I was a hardworking man. He pleaded with Moll on my behalf  and saved me from death.

 Such incidents were very frequent. The day before my incident Moll shot  two of my friends from Kraków in that manner.” Prisoners who for some reason had no  other assignment were consigned by Otto Moll to the pointless carrying of stones from  a nearby slag heap to the camp and back again. Almost a hundred Gleiwitz I prisoners  died as a result of mistreatment, hunger, and backbreaking labor.

In May 1944 Otto Moll returned  to the Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was appointed the director of all  crematoria by the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss. During this period, the extermination of  Hungarian Jews was to take place. Moll was aware of the fact that the planned  ten to fifteen thousand corpses per day would overwhelm the crematoria’s ovens.

 So just  before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, Moll ordered fire pits to be dug alongside  crematoria which he provided with a gutter system of his own design. People from the  incoming transports were to be shot and then burned in these fire pits. In this way, fat  from the burning corpses would be drained off, collected, picked up by the inmates with  buckets and tipped into the flames to burn.

Moll often strolled around the crowd  of arrivals scheduled for gassing, observed them undressing and lured small children  away from their mothers with sweets in order to throw them outside into the boiling fat of  the fire pits. On a few occasions he was seen picking children up by their hair and then  holding them suspended while he shot them.

When there were so many incoming transports that  the gas chambers and crematoria were incapable of containing all the new arrivals, Moll’s fire  pits to burn corpses were used. The excess people were generally shot, one at a time,  often by Moll himself or by the other SS men, especially Erich Muhsfeldt.

 When some  people asked Moll to spare their life, he replied “An order is an order” and then killed  them without any remorse. The Jews were shot in the back of their head and dropped into fire. It  sometimes happened that some prisoners put up a fight or children cried. As a punishment, Moll  would throw them into the burning pits alive. Moll often led attractive Jewish women to the edge of the fire pits to enjoy their fear.

 He  would whisper lewd words into their ears, then shoot them in the back of the  head and drop them into the fire. Another of Moll’s specialties was setting his dog on naked women. The dog would  bound towards them in a rage, chasing them toward the fire pits while biting and  snapping at their legs and buttocks. Moll would then shoot the women in their stomach so that  they would fall over and watch them burn alive.

The fire pits were also used for  smaller groups of victims consisting of up to 200 people. The reason was  that using Zyklon B gas for such a small number of people was considered  uneconomical and therefore wasteful. As a result, the Germans drove the  Hungarian children as well as the sick, old and disabled people by truck to the fire  pits where Moll and his colleagues, who had been instructed to shoot them by hand or throw them  alive into the flames, were waiting for them.

During 8 weeks from May 15 to July 9, 1944,  Hungarian gendarmerie officials, under the guidance of German SS officials, deported around  424,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection, SS  functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.

 After the war, Holocaust survivor  Henryk Tauber recalled that Moll would take gold items out of the box where the valuables stolen  from people from transports were stored and took them for himself in his briefcase. From  the things that were left by gassed people, he took furs and lots of food, especially fats.  With a smile on his face, he would then say to the SS men around him: “One should store up on food  supplies because lean times would come someday.

” As the head of all crematoria, Moll also directed  the work of the Jewish Sonderkommando which was a unit of camp’s prisoners forced to help with the  disposal of gas chamber victims. Those who refused to do the terrible work of the Sonderkommando,  Moll would personally throw alive into burning furnaces.

 The prisoners did not consider him  a human and would call him “ Schweinemetzger” which meant “pig butcher”. One Holocaust survivor  later testified: “Moll was called a pig butcher because he was not a human being, but a butcher  who threw children alive into the fire.” On one occasion when he found a gold ring and  watch in the possession of one of the members of the Jewish Sonderkommando, he poured petrol over  him and put him into cold furnace.

 The prisoner’s name was Lejb and he was 20 years old. The  aforementioned Auschwitz survivor Henryk Tauber later recalled what followed: “Underneath, there  was an ashpit, where petrol was poured and flames went up to the retort in which Lejb was locked.  After a few minutes, the furnace was opened and Lejb, covered in burns, came out running.

 He  was then ordered to run around the crematorium yard and shout that he was a thief. Then, he was  told to climb the crematorium barbed wire fence, which was not electrified by day. When he got  to the top of the fence, Moll shot him dead.” Moll was also known for being an excellent  marksman and when he felt that the prisoners from the Sonderkommando were not working properly,  he would shoot them from considerable distances.

One of very few survivors of the Sonderkommando,  a Slovak prisoner Filip Müller, described Moll’s atrocities in the greatest detail. Among other  things, Müller reported on the sadistic death torture of “frog swimming” practiced by Otto Moll:  Moll chased selected prisoners into one of the extinguishing ponds next to the crematoria and  forced them at gunpoint to swim there, croaking constantly, until they died of exhaustion.

  Müller also recalled how Otto Moll had invented camp games such as “brick-bashing” in which two  groups of prisoners had to smash as many bricks as possible for a certain amount of time and the  losing team was then shot on the spot by Moll. Among Moll’s many sadistic  specialties also belonged beating people with clubs and iron bars  or throwing them against electric fences.

After the end of the extermination of  Hungarian Jews, Moll returned to the position of the head of the Gleiwitz I sub-camp. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached  the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.

  SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. These  forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as death marches. The prisoners  had to march over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions. Inmates  suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure on these marches.

 Otto Moll let one  such death march and in February 1945 he arrived in Kaufering which was the common name of a system  of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp system. The prisoners deported to each of  11 subcamps had to construct the accommodation themselves. The resulting huts, partially buried  for camouflage from aerial reconnaissance, were completely inadequate for the weather conditions.

 Rain and snow leaked through the earthen roofs, and vermin infested the huts. Prisoners had to  sleep on straw that had been spread on the floor. What little food the prisoners did have, was  taken by the SS guards and those who were sick, were fed even less. There were even incidents of  cannibalism, and some prisoners were so desperate to escape from their horrible reality that  they would try to commit suicide, by throwing themselves into the electrical fencing.

 At Kaufering number 2, Moll was a camp leader responsible for billeting, feeding, and  the clothing of prisoners, as well as sanitary conditions, labor commitments and transfer of  sick prisoners. However, he abused and killed prisoners as well as willfully neglecting their  care. When 3 of the prisoners who were performing labor one day in March 1945 were preparing to cook  some potatoes, Moll took a stick and beat two of them. He said to the third: “ You, you young pig.  You were cooking potatoes, too. I’ll show you.

 ”He then beat the third prisoner so severely that he  broke the stick and the beaten prisoner spent two weeks in the hospital. When 2 passers-by stopped  and saw how Moll had been beating the prisoner, he ran out and said: “ You should be glad that  the Jews are punished!” On another occasion, in April 1945 Moll pushed a Russian with a board  and then beat him over the head with a rock until he fell to the ground.

 The dead Russian was  then carried away on a stretcher out into the woods. At another time in February 1945,  Moll struck a woman with a stick many times. The subcamps of Kaufering were liberated  between the 24th and 27th of April 1945 by the Seventh United States Army. To prevent  the liberation of the surviving inmates, Otto Moll had forced prisoners on a death  march to the Dachau concentration camp.

A transport which Moll accompanied left  Kaufering camp number 2 on 25 or 26 April 1945. There were about 150 prisoners  in the transport and Moll shot 26 of them who had collapsed due to exhaustion.  Several of these were Russians and Poles. On the 29th of April 1945, Otto Moll arrived  at Dachau and left the following day with the formation of SS personnel, marching in the  direction of Tyrol.

 The formation soon dissolved, and he surrendered to the Americans  on 3 or 4 May 1945, near Bad Tolz. Finally Otto Moll had to face justice and  pay for his crimes. From 15 November 1945 he was tried at the first Dachau trial which  was held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp.

 During the trial  Moll lied claiming that there was no shooting or mistreatments during the death march he led  from Kaufering to Dachau. He also claimed that the prisoners left Kaufering 2 with sufficient  provision for 2 days and he personally obtained additional food for half a day from Dachau.  In reality, the prisoners got no food at all. Molls’ crimes at Auschwitz were  not part of the indictment and he was never prosecuted for them.

 When  asked about his stay at Auschwitz, Moll claimed that he had served there only as a  gardener and never had contact with prisoners. On the 13th of December 1945, The  US Military Tribunal found Otto Moll guilty of fatally shooting 26 prisoners  who had collapsed from exhaustion during the death march from Kaufering and  sentenced him to death by hanging.

On the 28th of May 1946, Otto Moll, then 31 years old, was executed in  the courtyard of Landsberg prison. There were no tears shed for Otto Moll. Thanks for watching the World History  Channel be sure to like And subscribe and click the Bell notification  icon so you don’t miss our next episodes we thank you and we’ll  see you next time on the channel.