The 3rd of February 1947, Hamburg, Germany. The former staff of Ravensbrück,
the largest concentration camp for women in Nazi Germany, hears their sentences read.
After almost 2 months of gruesome testimonies, the world finally learns the truth about the
inhumane mistreatment and torture conducted by the camp’s male and female personnel during its
6-year existence. Out of 16 defendants, 11 are sentenced to death by hanging. One of them is
a former Ravensbrück deputy camp leader who during the final months of the Second World
War supervised the gassing of thousands of women. His name is Johann Schwarzhuber.
Johann Schwarzhuber was born on 29 August 1904 in Tutzing, then part of the German Empire.
Soon after their assumption of power in January 1933, Nazi leaders began to make good on their
pledge to persecute German Jews. During the first six years of Hitler's dictatorship,
from 1933 until the outbreak of war in 1939, Jews felt the effects of more than 400 decrees
and regulations that restricted all aspects of their public and private lives. Nazi propaganda
played an integral role in advancing the persecution and ultimately the destruction
of Europe’s Jews. It created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews and also
encouraged passivity and acceptance of the impending measures against them,
as these appeared to depict the Nazi government as stepping in and “restoring order.”
An integral feature of the regime in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945
were concentration camps. The major purpose of the earliest concentration
camps during the 1930s was to imprison and intimidate the leaders of political, social,
and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.
Johann Schwarzhuber trained as a printer and in April 1933 he joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
Schwarzhuber’s career in concentration camps began at Dachau. Established in March 1933,
it was the first regular concentration camp built by the Nazi government. From 5 May 1933,
Schwarzhuber was a member of the guard team at Dachau, where he completed a two-year training
course under Dachau’s commandant, Theodor Eicke, who introduced a system of regulations which
inflicted brutal punishments on prisoners for the slightest offenses. In the camp, Eicke was known
as Papa Eicke and his guards as Papa Eicke’s boys and under the slogan ‘Tolerance means weakness’ he
advised his men that any SS man with a soft heart should retire at once to a monastery.
Eicke ensured that the Dachau camp served as a model for all later concentration camps. It also
became a training center for SS guards who were deployed throughout the concentration camp system.
One such guard was Johann Schwarzhuber who on 1 September 1939, when the Second World War began,
was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp located near the town of Oranienburg, north
of Berlin. Two months later Schwarzhuber became commanding officer of the Klinkerwerk brickworks.
From the late summer of 1938 the Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced to build the Klinkerwerk
– the world’s largest brickworks - which was located about 2.5 kilometre away from the main
camp. It was intended to supply building materials for the monumental construction projects planned
by the Nazi leadership in the “Reich” capital city Berlin. Each day the SS marched up to 2,000
inmates over the canal bridge to the “Klinkerwerk” brickworks under the gaze of the local Oranienburg
populace. On the way back, the inmates trundled a cart laden with the bodies of that day’s dead.
The detail was especially feared among the inmates as a “death camp”, not least because the SS used
the “Klinkerwerk” as the scene for perpetrating deliberate murder operations. When a barrack camp
was built in 1941, the “Klinkerwerk” gained the status of an independent satellite camp.
In September of the same year, Schwarzhuber was reassigned to Auschwitz concentration
camp in German occupied Poland which was made up of more than 40 camps and sub-camps. The
largest of them - Birkenau - was divided into ten sections separated by electrified
barbed-wire fences and was patrolled by SS guards, including—after 1942—SS dog handlers.
During its three years of operation, it had a range of functions. When construction began in
October 1941, it was supposed to be a camp for 125 thousand prisoners of war. It opened as a
branch of Auschwitz in March 1942, and served at the same time as a center for the extermination
of the Jews. In its final phase, from 1944, it also became a place where prisoners were
concentrated before being transferred to labor in German industry in the depths of the Third Reich.
In November 1943 Schwarzhuber was promoted to Auschwitz II-Birkenau men’s camp director. At
Birkenau, Schwarzhuber, usually under the influence of alcohol, oversaw the
selection process for the gassing of thousands of detainees. Survivors gave ambivalent accounts of
Schwarzhuber: on one hand, thousands of prisoners died under his responsibility but, on the other,
he is said to have saved a group of around 70 children from being gassed by transferring them
to the men's camp. He liked soccer and the prisoners who played with Schwarzhuber would
frequently let him win. In return they lived longer and some of them even became kapos.
According to the Holocaust survivor Filip Müller, Schwarzhuber also took part in the selection
of 200 prisoners from the Sonderkommando in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in February
1944, who were later murdered in the Majdanek concentration camp. Jewish Sonderkommando was
a unit of camp’s prisoners forced to help with the disposal of gas chamber victims.
From November 1944 Schwarzhuber was appointed Lagerführer or a camp leader of several sub-camps
of the Kaufering concentration camp complex. Kaufering 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.
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.
Schwarzhuber’s tenure at Kaufering did not last long, and on 12 January
1945 he received his final deployment to the Ravensbrück concentration camp
which was the only major women's camp established by the Nazis.
With almost all of the Ravensbrück inmates being women, Schwarzhuber effectively commanded the
entire complex, second only to the overall camp commandant Fritz Suhren. The camp was
overcrowded and the sanitation and food supply were insufficient. Many people froze to death due
to a lack of clothing and heating. To combat the overcrowding, daily executions of about 50 inmates
were ordered at the start of 1945. The killings were so cruel, that several camp deputies refused
to oversee the murders until Schwarzhuber took over and the executions proceeded uneventfully.
Ravensbrück was initially not intended to be an extermination camp, but during the last
months of the war, deaths spiked massively. Thousands of women were killed in a newly
built provisional gas chamber, coinciding with Schwarzhuber's arrival in the camp.
In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles,
Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
When the camp was liberated by the Red Army on the 30th of April 1945,
there were about 3,500 sick women, men and children in the camp.
After the end of the war, justice finally caught up with Schwarzhuber when he was
tried at the first Ravensbrück trial which began on the 5th of December 1946
With the main camp leader Fritz Suhren having fled, Schwarzhuber was the highest-ranking
official indicted during the trial. He pleaded 'not guilty' and claimed to have attended only
one mass execution in the camp, when 150 women were gassed at once in the chamber. It is not
clear who gave the order to start mass executions in Ravensbrück—whether it was Suhren as overall
commander or even the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler personally—but with Schwarzhuber in charge
of the women's camp, significant responsibility nevertheless fell on him as deputy commander.
At the trial, Schwarzhuber, a married man with 2 children, claimed that in February
1945 he had received orders from Fritz Suhren to kill all women who were sick or incapable of
marching. These murders were at first carried out by shooting, until Suhren approached Shwarzhuber,
complaining that the killings were not happening fast enough. Consequently,
a gas chamber was erected at Ravensbrück in March 1945 to speed up the killing process.
This explains why prisoner numbers dropped so dramatically from when Schwarzhuber arrived
at the camp in January 1945 to its liberation in April of the same year. The Germans gassed between
5,000 and 6,000 prisoners at Ravensbrück before Soviet troops liberated the camp in April 1945.
Schwarzhuber made the following statement about the gassings at Ravensbrück:
"Between 2300 and 2400 people were gassed in Ravensbrück. The gas chamber was about 9 × 4.5
meters and held about 150 people. The chamber was about 5 meters away from the crematorium.
The prisoners had to undress in a small shed 3 meters from the gas chamber and were taken
through a small room to the gas chamber. I heard groaning and whimpering and after two
or three minutes it grew quiet. " On the 3rd of February 1947 the
British military tribunal sentenced Johann Schwarzhuber to death by
hanging. Although he filed a petition for pardon, but this was recejeced.
Johann Schwarzhuber was 42 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint
carried out the sentence on the 3nd of May 1947 in the Hamelin prison.
There were no tears shed for Johann Schwarzhuber.
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.