The 2nd of February 1943, Stalingrad, the
Soviet Union. The German 6th army, after 5 months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties,
having exhausted their ammunition and food, finally capitulates, making it the first
of Hitler's field armies to surrender during World War II. The battle for the city
proves a decisive psychological turning point, ending a string of German victories in the summer
of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward. The Soviet Red army remains on the offensive and
on the 27th of January 1945 enters Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination centers, and
liberates more than 7,000 remaining prisoners, who are mostly ill and dying. It is estimated
that a minimum of 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and
1945 and of these, at least 1.1 million were murdered. One of the main perpetrators
responsible for these atrocities is Otto Moll. Otto Moll was born on the 4th of March 1915 in
Hohen Schönberg, then part of the German Empire. Following World War I, which
ended on 11 November 1918, a number of right-wing extremist political
groups emerged in Germany. One of them was the Nazi Party which claimed that the Jews
had done much to spread defeatism and thus destroy the German army. They interpreted the
terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty and the steep compensation payments that it entailed as
revenge by the victors and a glaring injustice. Beginning with the onset of the Great Depression,
the Nazi Party rose rapidly from obscurity to political prominence, becoming the largest
party in the German parliament in 1932, winning 33.1 percent of the vote. The
Communists, however gained votes as well, winning 16.9 percent. As a result, the small
circle around President Paul Von Hindenburg came to believe that the Nazi party was Germany's
only hope to forestall political chaos ending in a Communist takeover. Nazi negotiators and
propagandists did much to enhance this impression. When on January 30, 1933, President von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of
Germany, Otto Moll was 17 years old. Three years later in 1936, Moll joined the SS after having graduated
from the professional gardening school. The SS – Schutzstaffel or Protection Squads - was
originally established in April 1925 to protect Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders and speakers
and provide security for political meetings. SS members were subject to strict military
discipline and swore an oath of complete loyalty to Hitler and those appointed by him. In
January 1929 Heinrich Himmler became the head of the SS and the organization greatly expanded
in size and strength. By the time Hitler came into power in 1933, Himmler had made the SS the
dominant organization within the Reich. From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler entrusted
the SS first and foremost with the removal and eventual murder of political and so-called
racial enemies of the regime. The SS became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany
and was staffed by men who perceived themselves as the “racial elite” of the Nazi future.
From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question which then
culminated in 1941, when the leadership planned, coordinated and directed the so-called
Final Solution. This “solution”, in which Otto Moll would play a crucial role, was the
genocide of European Jews during World War II.; also known as the Holocaust. SS officers were
directly responsible for the management of concentration camps, where millions
of Jews were murdered by poison gas. Otto Moll was musically active and became a
member of the SS marching band. When during a journey with this marching band from Bernau to
Oranienburg, 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 his brain was damaged, too, and as a
result he became a physically and mentally ill person who was deliberately exploited
as a murderer by the criminal Nazi regime. From 1938, Moll was employed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was located
north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and
Sinti people and, later, Soviet civilians. At Sachsenhausen Otto Moll 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 began on the 1st of
September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The last operational Polish
unit surrendered on the 6th of October. The German occupation of Poland was exceptionally
brutal. The Nazis considered Poles to be racially inferior and they launched a campaign
of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and to reduce the
Poles to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.
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 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 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, including Catholic
priests and Jews, arrived in Auschwitz on the 14th of June 1940 from Tarnów in Poland.
They were given serial numbers 31 to 758. On the 2nd of May 1941, Höss broght to
Auschwitz Otto Moll 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 “. At Auschwitz, Moll first supervised agricultural
commando. Thanks to his drive and toughness, in June 1942 he 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. After the expansion of Auschwitz into an
extermination camp ordered by the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, Moll devoted himself
primarily to the killing of people. Before the large crematoria and gas chambers were set up
in Birkenau, which was the largest of the more than 40 camps and sub-camps that made up
the Auschwitz complex, Moll and his Nazi comrade Franz Hössler had directed the
mass killings in Crematorium I and the gas chambers of the so-called Bunkers I and II.
Mass graves were dug in their immediate vicinity, in which several hundred thousand corpses were
buried until September 1942. After some deaths among SS men and their relatives occurred as
a result of contaminated groundwater, the mass graves were opened and the corpses were burned
from September to November of the same year. In 1943, the four large
crematoria and gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau went into operation.
The process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized. When a train stopped at
the platform, the arrivals were lined up into two columns – men and boys in one, women and girls in
the other. The SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed a selection. The only criterion was the
appearance of the prisoners, whose fate, for labor or for death, was determined at will. The veteran
prisoners gathered the belongings of new arrivals in an area known as “Kanada” which consisted
of several barracks which were used to store the stolen belongings of the prisoners. Trucks
carried those too infirm to walk, and the rest marched. Before entering the gas chambers, people
were ordered to disrobe. The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them
and made the new arrivals believe that they were being sent to the camp where work was waiting for
them, but first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. However, they were taken into the
gas chambers and after the doors were shut, SS men dropped Zyklon B pellets through vents
in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber. 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 the 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. In May 1944 he returned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau
camp, where he was appointed the head 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. In his speeches to the new arrivals who were
unaware of what awaited them, Moll repeated that they were being sent to the camp where work was
waiting for them, but first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. Moll told them politely to
hang their clothes on the hooks, take a shower and even promised they would be provided soup and tea
or coffee. However they were taken into the gas chambers, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.
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. Moll often strolled through 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. Even among the SS men, Moll was notorious
for his cruelty and hatred towards the Jews, especially women and children. When he did
not throw the children into the fire alive, with a smile on his face he would kick
them to death. 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.” 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 poor 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. 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. On one occasion when he found jewelry
in the possession of one of the members of the Jewish Sonderkommando, he poured
gasoline over him and set him on fire. 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 conditions in Kaufering were
horrible. 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, Moll abused and killed prisoners
as well as willfully neglected their care. During the Kaufering camp’s existence between
June 1944 and April 1945, fifteen thousand out of the 30,000 prisoners died from hunger,
disease, executions, or during death marches. A few days before the subcamps of
Kaufering were liberated between the 24th and 27th of April 1945
by the Seventh United States Army, Otto Moll had forced prisoners on a death
march to the Dachau concentration camp. During this death march he was involved in the
shooting of at least 120 Russian prisoners who were too weak or sick to continue marching
any further. Moll himself shot 26 of them. On the 28th of April 1945, Otto Moll
arrived at Dachau. When the camp was liberated on the following day by The U.S.
Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division, the soldiers could smell not only
human excrement but also decaying bodies and many of these soldiers cried or
vomited as they found dozens of railroad cars filled with thousands of dead bodies,
and 30 thousand survivors who looked like walking skeletons. Many inmates were sick and
dying from typhus epidemics and starvation. Otto Moll was arrested at the beginning
of May 1945 and finally 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. 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. Molls’ crimes at Auschwitz were not part of
the indictment and he was never prosecuted for them. Half a year after his death sentence,
he was confronted by his former superior, Rudolf Höss, during the Nuremberg
trials. Even though Moll admitted to some of his crimes, he largely denied
his involvement in the killing of Jews. However, if he had hoped that his lies
would help him escape justice, he was wrong. On the 28th of May 1946, Otto Moll, then 31 years old, was executed in
the courtyard of the Landsberg prison. There were no tears shed for Otto Moll. Thanks for watching the World History
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