The 6th of June 1944. Allied infantry and armored divisions begin landing on the Normandy coast
in France. This largest seaborne invasion in history marks a turning point in World War 2
and becomes the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. One week later on the 13th of June 1944,
Nazi Germany responds with the first V-1 flying bomb attack carried out on London. More than
2,500 V-1s will reach London killing more than 6,000 innocent civilians. The first V-2 rocket,
the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile, hits London on the 8th of September 1944.
These terrifying Revenge weapons with which the Nazis would terrorize people in London
until March 1945 are produced thanks to slave labor from Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp.
The second most powerful man in this camp is Hans Möser.
Hans Karl Möser was born on the 7th of April 1906, in Darmstadt, then part of the German Empire.
It was Germany’s economic collapse during the Great Depression, beginning in 1929 that most
contributed to the Nazi Party’s success. The crisis resulted in widespread unemployment and
poverty and also led to an increase in crime. The resulting anger and fear left the Germans
vulnerable to arguments from both the extreme right and left. One such German was Hans Möser,
a merchant by profession, who joined the Nazi party in October 1929 and the SS in July 1931.
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in Germany in January 1933. Nazi propaganda became
inescapable in Germany. Joseph Goebbels, head of the new Propaganda Ministry, created a cult
of personality that glorified Hitler as Germany’s infallible savior. Nazi propaganda dominated the
press, film, radio, and public spaces. Portraits or statues of Hitler appeared everywhere,
and every city and town renamed a street or public space to honor him. In public,
ordinary Germans were expected to praise Hitler and give the
so-called German greeting "Heil Hitler!". Propaganda permeated school curricula as
well and children learned odes praising Hitler’s leadership in public schools.
In the years between 1933 and 1939, the Nazi regime had brought radical and daunting social,
economic, and communal change to the German Jewish community.
Six years of Nazi-sponsored legislation had marginalized and disenfranchised Germany's
Jewish citizenry and had expelled Jews from the professions and from commercial life.
Following the Kristallnacht pogrom which was a series of coordinated violent riots against
the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories which occurred on the
9th – 10th of November 1938, thousands of Jews remained interned in concentration camps and
by early 1939, only about 16 percent of the Jewish breadwinners had steady employment of
any kind. While in January 1933, some 522,000 Jews by religious definition lived in Germany,
approximately 304,000 of them emigrated during the first six years of the Nazi dictatorship.
The second world war began on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded
Poland. In July 1940 Möser joined the staff at the newly opened Hinzert concentration camp,
located in southwestern Germany. The camp's location was strategically chosen due to its
proximity to the French border, allowing for easy transfer of prisoners from occupied territories.
Hinzert initially housed political opponents of the Nazi regime, including Communists, Socialists,
trade unionists, and other individuals deemed threats to Nazi ideology. However,
as the war progressed, the camp's function expanded to include prisoners of war,
resistance fighters, and individuals persecuted for their religious beliefs
or ethnicity. Prisoners in Hinzert were subjected to harsh conditions, forced labor, physical abuse,
and medical experiments. Many prisoners died as a result of mistreatment, malnutrition,
and disease. Executions, including mass shootings, also took place at Hinzert. In
addition to its role as a concentration camp, Hinzert also served as a training
center or a school of violence for the SS. SS officers received instruction in torture
techniques, interrogation methods, and other brutal practices that they would later implement
in other camps and during wartime operations. At Hinzert, Möser was trained how to mistreat
the prisoners and how to get a maximum amount of work out of them whilst they were still alive.
In May 1943 he was posted to Auschwitz III also known as Monowitz or Monowitz-Buna which was a
sub-camp and from November 1943 a concentration camp to which all the “industrial” sub-camps in
the Auschwitz complex were subordinated. The toughest work for prisoners was for
those employed in the transfer of construction materials, earthworks, transport of narrow-gauge
railway wagons filled with earth and the laying of power cables. The Kommandos,
whose working conditions were less exhausting, were for those prisoners who worked as carpenters,
roofers, painters and electricians. As a result of hard labor, insufficient food,
and in the winter because of insufficient clothing and the poor state of their shoes,
the strength of Monowitz prisoners dropped rapidly and they fell ill. The weak and sick
were sent to the camp hospital, where every two or three weeks the camp doctor carried
out selections and those in worse physical condition were sent to Auschwitz- Birkenau,
where most underwent re-selection and ended up in the gas chambers.
The basic sentences for various offenses recorded by the SS were:
from 4 to 10 nights in a standing cell in which one could not lie down but only stand,
penal labour for 10 consecutive Sundays or exercises and flogging with sticks.
In total, 1,670 prisoners were murdered at the building site or died in the sub-camp hospital,
and 11,000 were sent to Auschwitz Birkenau, where the majority of them
were killed with a lethal injection of phenol or in the gas chambers.
On May 1, 1944, Hans Möser was transferred to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp
located in central Germany. The camp served as a subcamp
of the Buchenwald concentration camp until it became independent in 1944.
The slave-laborers from Mittelbau-Dora were used not only for the production of
V-weapons such as the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rockets which were aimed primarily at London,
but also to extend the nearby tunnels in Kohnstein which is a hill that served as a
natural protection against the Allied bombing for the underground factory named Mittelwerk in which
the V-weapons were produced. These so-called Weapons of Retaliation, as the Germans called
them, were constructed and stored in the underground facilities and bomb-proof shafts.
The inmates at Mittelbau-Dora were treated in a brutal and inhumane manner,
working 14-hour days and being denied access to basic hygiene, beds, and adequate rations.
Prisoners too weak or ill to work were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau or Mauthausen to be killed.
The inmates were subject to extreme cruelty and as a result, they often suffered injuries,
including permanent disability, disfigurement, and death. Severe beatings were routine,
as was deliberate starvation, torture and summary executions. In many cases the prisoners were
compelled to hang other prisoners under penalty of execution if they failed to cooperate. The death
toll at Mittelbau-Dora was high, with estimates suggesting that around 20,000 prisoners died as
a result of the camp's conditions, including malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease.
After the transfer from Auschwitz to Mittelbau-Dora central camp,
Möser served as Deputy Protective Custody Camp Leader and in July he was promoted to
First Protective Custody Camp Leader. In this role Möser’s responsibilities
were sanitation and discipline, and his only superior was the camp commander Otto Förschner.
Möser was a sadist, who enjoyed making the prisoners suffer. When it seemed to him
that the inmates were not working hard enough, he ordered either 25 lashes or imprisonment for them.
Frequently prisoners were brought to his office for interrogation.
Screams of the victims were heard coming out of his office, where they were being beaten while
a group of other inmates awaited their turn to enter his office. He was primarily responsible
for the prisoners receiving a starvation diet of 800 calories daily instead of the authorized
2,000 calories. Often inmate food was stolen by the SS personnel and when Möser was requested to
stop this practice he replied that they received too much to eat. On one occasion Möser got drunk
with an SS sergeant and saw several inmates standing near the kitchen door. He shot five
or six times at this group killing 2 of them. Hans Möser also participated in hangings and
as a reward used to receive “hanging bonuses” which consisted of one third liter of schnapps,
250 grams of special sausage and one package of cigarettes. If the prisoners, who were to
be executed, refused to step up to the gallows, Möser would shoot them. On numerous occasions,
out of pleasure, he would fire several shots at the prisoners, who had been hanged,
after they had been taken down from the gallows. During executions by hanging, he often cut the
ropes of the prisoners while they were still alive. He enjoyed prolonging their suffering
and desperation and would then shoot them dead without any remorse. On one occasion, he said to
one inmate: “The same way, with the same pleasure, as you shoot a deer, I shot a human being. When
I came to the SS and had to shoot the first three persons, my food didn't taste good for three days,
but today it is a pleasure. It is a joy for me.” In early April 1945, as the American 3rd Armored
Division was advancing towards the Mittelbau-Dora, the SS and camp officials decided to evacuate the
camp and its prisoners. Within days, most of the remaining prisoners were sent to Bergen-Belsen in
northern Germany. Thousands were killed during death marches under horrendous conditions. When
American forces liberated Mittelbau-Dora in April 1945, only a few prisoners were still
in the camp. War correspondents took pictures and made films of the dead and dying prisoners
at Mittelbau-Dora. Like the documentation of Nazi atrocities at Bergen-Belsen,
these were published around the globe and became some of the best-known testimonies of Nazi crimes.
At the time of Mittelbau-Dora’s liberation, Hans Möser was not present in the camp.
On April 5, 1945, Möser led a forced evacuation of over 3,000 prisoners,
who were supposed to be transferred by train to the Neuengamme concentration camp.
On April 8, 1945, the inmates were removed from the train and the transport proceeded by
foot march because the railway was bombed. The foot march soon changed into a death march as
thousands of prisoners were forced to march long distances with minimal food, water, and shelter.
They were subjected to violence and brutality from the SS guards, and those who could not keep
up or fell behind were often shot or left to die. On April 13, 1945, the prisoners were forced to
march towards the town of Gardelegen, located in northeastern Germany, where a large barn
and several nearby buildings were prepared as a makeshift prison. However, as the prisoners
arrived, they were locked inside the barn, which was then doused with gasoline and set on fire.
1,016 inmates were burned alive, suffocated, or shot by the SS as they tried in desperation to
escape by digging under the barn’s walls. When on the following day, the US army entered Gardelegen,
they were horrified. Dead bodies were everywhere while the barn was still smoldering. On the
April 21, 1945, the US commander ordered 300 local men from the town of Gardelegen to give
the murdered prisoners a proper burial. The German civilians had to exhume 586 bodies
from the trenches and recover 430 bodies from the barn, placing each body in an individual grave.
After years of Nazi propaganda, the Germans could see with their own eyes the atrocities of
the so-called Master race which demonstrated how it could master only crime, cruelty, and sadism.
At the end of the war, justice finally caught up with Hans Möser when he was arrested and tried at
the Dora Trial which took place between August 7 and December 30, 1947, on the site of the former
Dachau concentration camp. At the trial, he denied everything saying he had never either
tolerated brutal treatment of prisoners or the killed anyone. He even claimed that during his
imprisonment he had been beaten by the British and Americans and had suffered from malnutrition.
However, his lies did not help him escape justice. On the December 30, 1947 the US military tribunal
found Hans Möser guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced him
to death by hanging. He was 42 years old when he was executed on the 26th of November 1948.
There were no tears shed for Hans Möser.
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