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
army remains on the offensive and in July 1944 liberates Majdanek - the first major Nazi camp to
be liberated on the territory of German-occupied Poland. Soviet officials invite journalists
to inspect the camp and to see for themselves the evidence of the horrors that have occurred
there. As Allied and Soviet troops move across Europe against Nazi Germany in 1944 and 1945,
they encounter concentration camps, mass graves, and other sites of Nazi crimes. The unspeakable
conditions the liberators confront shed light on the full scope of Nazi horrors. One of the most
infamous perpetrators of this criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Max Koegel.
Otto Max Koegel was born on 16 October 1895 in Füssen, then part of the German Empire. He was
the fourth son of a carpenter who worked at a local furniture factory. Shortly before his
sixth birthday, Koegel's mother died from complications during childbirth. In 1907,
his father died and Max was sent to live with a family at a nearby farm. He also
had to leave school and began training as a shepherd and later worked as a mountain guide.
The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914 and Koegel volunteered to join the Bavarian
infantry. During the war he was wounded 3 times, including once during the Battle of Verdun,
which was one of the longest and deadliest battles of the war. The German Army attempted
an offensive near the French city of Verdun that quickly devolved into a stalemate. German forces
were subsequently diverted from Verdun when the British launched the Battle of the Somme, and the
Battle of Verdun ended in December when the French recaptured the initial German gains. About 300,000
soldiers were killed and many more were wounded. Before the First World War ended on the 11th
of November 1918, Koegel had reached the rank of corporal and received the Iron Cross second class.
After the war, he returned to Bavaria and worked as a customs clerk. In 1920,
he left the civil service and opened a souvenir shop. However, four years later he filed for
bankruptcy after he was charged with fraud, for which he received a suspended sentence.
He then traveled for work to Switzerland and Austria before returning to Füssen,
where he obtained a job in his father's old furniture factory. During this time,
he joined the Völkischer Bund and Bund Oberland, both extreme nationalist and
anti-Semitic organizations. In 1929, Koegel's eight-year-old son died from
measles and a short time later, his marriage of ten years ended in divorce.
Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came to power in Germany on January 30, 1933,
when he was appointed the Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. By this time Koegel
was already a member of the Nazi Party and the SS, both of which he had joined one year earlier.
Immediately after Hitler came into power, Germany became a dictatorship, and the Nazi
regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and established the first
concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses,
and others classified as “dangerous”. The first concentration camp - Dachau - was
established in March 1933, less than 2 months after Hitler became the chancellor.
It was at Dachau where in 1937 Max Koegel began his concentration camp
career as an adjutant to Hans Loritz – then Dachau’s commandant. Thanks to his drive and
ambition Koegel rose rapidly through the ranks. Dachau, situated near Munich, was established in
March 1933 and became the first Nazi concentration camp. The first prisoner transports arrived in the
camp on the 22nd of March 1933. In October of the same year, Dachau’s commandant, Theodor Eicke,
introduced a system of regulations which inflicted brutal punishments on the prisoners for the
slightest offenses. Eicke ensured that the Dachau camp served as a model for all later concentration
camps. It also became a training center or “a school of violence “for SS guards who were
deployed throughout the concentration camp system. During the first year, the camp had a capacity of
5,000 prisoners. Initially the internees were primarily German Communists, Social Democrats,
trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. However, over time,
other groups were also interned at Dachau, such as Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people,
homosexuals, repeat criminal offenders as well as so called “asocials” whom
the regime incarcerated because they could not, or would not, find gainful employment.
The number of Jewish prisoners at Dachau rose with the increased persecution of Jews. On the
10–11 November 1938, in the aftermath of the Kristallnacht, when Jewish homes, businesses,
synagogues, hospitals and schools were ransacked by the Nazi SA and German civilians, almost 11,000
Jewish men were interned there. Most of the men in this group were released
after incarceration of a few weeks to a few months, many after proving they
had made arrangements to emigrate from Germany. In 1938 Max Koegel became a managing director at
the women’s labor camp at Ravensbrück at the rank of Sturmbannführer which was equivalent to Major.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. Nazi Germany
possessed overwhelming military superiority over Poland. Germany launched the unprovoked attack at
dawn on the 1st of September with an advance force consisting of more than 2,000 tanks supported by
nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes. In all, Germany deployed 60 divisions and nearly
1.5 million men in the invasion. The assault on Poland demonstrated Germany’s ability to combine
air power and armor in a new kind of mobile warfare. The world adopted a new term to describe
Germany’s successful war tactic: Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” The last operational
Polish unit surrendered on the 6th of October. After Poland’s defeat in early October 1939,
Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided the country in accordance with a secret protocol to
the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. Very soon the Nazis started opening up new concentration
camps on the territory of German-occupied Poland and one of them was Majdanek near Lublin.
In 1942 Koegel was transferred from Ravensbrück to Majdanek and became its commandant. In order
to increase efficiency in the mass murder of the Jews and other undesirable enemies of the state
one of his tasks as the camp’s commandant was the installation of gas chambers. Very soon camp
authorities began to use Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners too weak to work in a makeshift gas
chamber. Mass murder operations using poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued
until the end of 1943. There appear to have been three gas chambers at Majdanek; at least two were
shower rooms reconfigured for use of Zyklon B gas. At least one of these two was used to kill human
beings. The SS killed tens of thousands of Jews at Majdanek. Most of them arrived in the camp as
forced laborers and either died as a result of the brutally inhumane living conditions or were killed
in the gas chambers after the Germans determined that they could no longer work. Majdanek’s gas
chambers were also used to kill prisoners from the other camps in Lublin who were no longer able to
work. Some Jewish victims were killed in the gas chambers upon arrival. Many, however, were killed
in shooting operations and many others died of disease, starvation, exposure and overwork.
When the Soviet army liberated the camp on the 24th of July 1944, it was virtually intact and
only a few hundred Jewish prisoners remained alive. Soviet officials invited journalists
to inspect the camp and evidence of the horrors that had occurred there.
Between 80,000 – 120,000 people perished in Majdanek between October 1941 and
July 1944 when the camp was operational. When the Soviet army liberated Majdanek,
Max Koegel was serving as a commandant of Flossenbürg concentration camp,
a position he had been given from April 1943. Flossenbürg’s original purpose was to exploit the
forced labor of prisoners to produce 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
Max Koegel tolerated these atrocities. On the 6th of June 1944, under the code name
Operation “Overlord,” US, British, and Canadian troops crossed the English Channel and landed on
the beaches of Normandy in France. This operation became known as “D-Day” and was the largest
amphibious invasion in history, deploying more than 160,000 Allied troops on air, land, and sea.
50,000 vehicles, some 5,000 naval craft and more than 11,500 aircraft supported
the initial invasion. This largest seaborne invasion in history marked a turning point in
World War 2 and became the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. To rescue Germany
from catastrophic defeat brought about by Adolf Hitler’s increasingly irrational
management of the war, several groups in the German resistance decided to assassinate Hitler.
On July 20, 1944, a young staff officer Lieutenant Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg placed one of the
two bombs in a briefcase under the table in Hitler’s briefing room in the Wolf’s Lair.
However, he was unable to arm the second bomb in time and after Stauffenberg left the room,
the briefcase was coincidentally moved under the heavy support of the table leg. It detonated
but failed to kill Hitler. In the days that followed, Hitler ordered a massive hunt for
conspirators which continued for months. Some of conspirators directly or indirectly involved
in the plot included Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German theologian and pastor, Hans Oster
a German military officer and key figure in the resistance against the Nazis and Wilhelm Canaris,
a German admiral and the chief of the Abwehr – the German military intelligence service.
All 3 conspirators were arrested by Gestapo and subsequently brutally interrogated and
tortured. They were brought to Flossenbürg concentration camp and in a sham trial,
presided by Max Koegel, they were sentenced to death and on the 09 April 1945 they were hanged.
As US forces approached the camp, in mid-April 1945, Koegel ordered the
forced evacuation of prisoners, except those unable to walk, from the Flossenbürg camp.
Between April 15 and April 20, the SS moved most of the remaining 9,300 prisoners in the main camp,
reinforced by about 7,000 prisoners who had arrived in Flossenbürg from Buchenwald, in the
direction of Dachau both on foot and by train. Perhaps 7,000 of these prisoners died en route,
either from exhaustion or starvation, or because the SS guards shot them when they could no longer
keep up the pace. During the march, Koegel instructed the mayors of the nearby towns
to bury the inmates who had been shot on the side of the road or died of starvation and exhaustion.
However, thousands of inmates escaped, were liberated by advancing US troops,
or found themselves free when their SS guards deserted during the night. Fewer than 3,000 of
those who left Flossenbürg main camp arrived in Dachau, where they joined some 3,800 prisoners
from the Flossenbürg subcamps. When the US forces liberated Flossenbürg on April 23, 1945,
just over 1,500 prisoners remained in the camp. As many as 200 of them died after liberation.
Nearly 97,000 prisoners passed through the Flossenbürg system between 1938 and
1945. An estimated 30,000 prisoners died in Flossenbürg and its subcamps or on the
evacuation routes, including 3,515 Jews. After the war, Max Koegel went on the run
and initially managed to evade arrest. However, in June 1946,
he was arrested by U.S. occupation forces in Bavaria and then sent to a prison in Schwabach.
The next day on 27 June 1946 Koegel, then 50 years old, commited suicide by hanging himself.
Koegel, who was in his position responsible for the murder of hundreds of thousands of
people never faced justice for his crimes. There were no tears shed for Max Koegel.
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