The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party,
is appointed chancellor of Germany and aims to lead the German “master race” to victory
in the "racial struggle" against those deemed as “inferior” peoples, especially the Jews.
The Nazi regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and
gradually excludes them from professions, businesses, and public spaces. The first
concentration camp – Dachau – is established less than 2 months after Hitler became the chancellor.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies would establish more than
44,000 camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos. The perpetrators would use
these locations for forced labor, detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and
the mass murder of millions. One such perpetrator is a German Nazi Commandant Karl Künstler.
Karl Künstler, a son of a barber, was born on the 12th of January 1901 in the municipality of
Zella then part of the German Empire. In 1915, after completing school Karl
worked at a post office in Kassel against the wishes of his parents.
The First World War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed the armistice
in the Compiègne Forest in France. The victorious powers imposed a series of treaties upon the
defeated powers. Among the treaties, the 1919 Treaty of Versailles held Germany responsible for
starting the war and liable for massive material damages. The treaty imposed harsh penalties on the
Germans including the loss of 13% of its prewar territories, extensive reparation payments and
demilitarization of the Rhineland. The Reichswehr – the German Army - was restricted to 100,000
men. Karl Künstler joined it in 1919 and in addition to various training courses,
he attended Army Technical School of Management and Economics.
In 1929 he got married and the marriage produced two children.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933.
Hitler gained popularity by defying the hated peace terms,
forced on Germany in 1919. Violence was harnessed as an instrument of government and was unleashed
on anyone who resisted the regime or was considered outside the national community.
Those targeted by the Nazis were sent to concentration camps to be forced into compliance.
The SS was responsible for their management which Künstler had joined in 1929.
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 January 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.
In 1936, Künstler completed the course at the SS training camp at Bad Tölz which was one
of the SS-Junker Schools leadership training facilities for officer candidates of the SS.
Heinrich Himmler intended for these schools to mold cadets for future service in the officer
ranks of the SS. In these training facilities cadets were taught to be adaptable officers who
could perform any task assigned to them, whether in a police role, at a Nazi concentration camp,
as part of a fighting unit, or within the greater SS organization. Political and ideological
indoctrination was part of the syllabus for all SS cadets but there was no merger of academic
learning and military instruction like that found at West Point in the United States. Instead,
personality training was stressed, which meant future SS leaders were shaped above all things
by a National Socialist worldview and attitude. Instruction was designed to communicate a sense
of racial superiority, a connection to other dependable like-minded men, ruthlessness,
and a toughness that accorded the value system of the SS.
In January 1939, Künstler became a commandant at Flossenbürg concentration camp after the previous
commandant Jakob Weiseborn had turned up dead in his apartment under mysterious circumstances
on the 20th of January 1939, spawning rumors that he had committed suicide to avoid scandal. It was
under Künstler, who was regarded as arbitrary, that the death toll in the camp skyrocketed.
Flossenbürg’s original purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners
for the production of granite for Nazi construction projects. Until mid-1943 when
the camp became a key supplier of Messerschmitt Bf 109 aircraft parts, the quarry occupied the
labor of about half of the prisoner population. The conditions under which the camp authorities
forced the prisoners to work and the absence of even rudimentary medical care facilitated the
spread of disease, including dysentery and typhus. In addition to the dreadful conditions, the
Germans created such harsh living conditions for the prisoners that they often committed suicide.
The camp’s Nazi personnel would often carry out executions, punish the prisoners with whipping,
and order long and extremely tiring roll calls. The camp commandant Karl Künstler
tolerated these atrocities. A condition unique to Flossenbürg was
the presence and “veteran status” of the numerous criminal offenders in the prisoner population.
Tolerated by the SS, they tended to dominate the prisoner administration, which, as a result,
was particularly brutal and corrupt. This hierarchy of criminal prisoners distinguished
itself in the sexual exploitation of lower ranking prisoners. Coerced homosexual relationships and
outright rape occurred frequently enough to induce the camp authorities to segregate male
minors in a separate barracks, in a futile attempt to prohibit efforts to sexually prey upon them.
In addition to the generally high mortality rate, the camp authorities conducted numerous
individual and mass shootings characterized as “executions.” Between February and September 1941,
camp authorities shot about 500 Polish prisoners, including a July 1941 shooting of 40 Polish
prisoners at the SS firing range outside the camp. It was Künstler who was in his position not only
responsible for mass executions of Polish and Soviet prisoners, but also took part in them.
He also introduced a two-week special leave for guards who shot prisoners trying to escape.
Künstler’s reign of terror ended in August 1942, when he was relieved from his post as
commandant of the camp by Oswald Pohl - the head administrator of the Nazi concentration camps.
Karl Künstler was succeeded for two months by his deputy, Karl Fritzsch, before Egon Zill,
who proved to be even more sadistic than Künstler, was appointed camp commandant. The reasons for
Künstler's dismissal as camp commandant lay in his debauchery and his chronic alcohol abuse.
Künstler, like other concentration camp commandants and personnel, was caught in
the sights of SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who prosecuted corruption in the concentration camps.
Among the Nazis indicted by Morgen also belonged Karl-Otto Koch, the commandant of Buchenwald and
Majdanek camps, who was executed in 1945 for three unauthorized murders and embezzlement.
Karl Künstler was then transferred to the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division "Prinz
Eugen” which was a mountain infantry division of the Waffen-SS which from 1942 to 1945 fought a
counter-insurgency campaign against communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance forces in occupied
Yugoslavia. The Waffen-SS was an armed branch of the German Nazi Party that served alongside
but was never formally part of the Wehrmacht – the German Armed Forces - during World War II.
Between the 16th and the 20th of April 1945, during the last days of World War II,
Künstler fought in the Battle of Nuremberg which was a five-day battle between the forces of
the United States 7th Army on one side, and Nazi Germany on the other. As it became clear that Nazi
Germany was losing the war, the Nazi regime faced manpower shortages. Thus, among the units which
supported the German defense of Nuremberg were the Russian Liberation Army and the Volkssturm.
The Russian Liberation Army also known as the Vlasov army after its commander Andrey Vlasov,
was a collaborationist formation, primarily composed of Russians,
that fought under German command during World War II. Vlasov, a Soviet general, agreed to
collaborate with Nazi Germany after having been captured on the Eastern Front. The soldiers under
his command were mostly former Soviet prisoners of war but also included White Russian émigrés,
some of whom were veterans of the anti-communist White Army from the Russian Civil War .
The Volkssturn or the People’s Storm was a new defensive militia into
which males aged between 16 and 60 were inducted from the 18th of October 1944.
The militia joined the regular military in the last defensive battles against the Allied troops.
The Volkssturm comprised one of the final components of the total war promulgated by
Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, part of a Nazi endeavor to overcome their enemies'
military strength through sheer force of will. Poorly equipped and inadequately trained,
thousands of males fought and died for the German war effort even as defeat had become inevitable.
Even though American forces heavily outnumbered the German forces,
German resistance was so great that American heavy artillery and air support was deployed.
The Battle of Nuremberg saw some of the fiercest urban combat during the war and it took four days
for the United States to capture the city. The battle, which lasted from the 16th to the
20th of April 1945 was a blow to Nazi Germany as Nuremberg was a center of the Nazi regime.
The Nuremberg Rallies took place in the city and to lose the city to the Americans took a
heavy toll on already low German morale. The battle, which devastated the city,
came to an end on the 20th of April 1945, the day of Adolf Hitler’s 56th birthday.
Among those who lost their lives during the battle was also Karl Künstler,
then 44 years old. However, he was declared dead only in 1949.
There were no tears shed for Karl Künstler.
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