December 22, 1947, Krakow, Poland. The former staff of Auschwitz - the deadliest German Nazi
concentration camp – hears their sentences read. After a month of gruesome testimonies, it is
revealed that the many SS officers were involved in the acts of inhumane torture and the mass
murder of prisoners often for pleasure, and that their cruelty went far beyond what their superiors
ordered them to do. One of the perpetrators of this criminal Nazi regime is Anton Lechner.
Anton Lechner was born on the 18th of November 1907 in the village of Buchers,
then part of Austria-Hungary. He was 10 years old when in October 1918
the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia.
50 percent of the Czechoslovak population consisted of Czechs.
Germans and Slovaks accounted for 22 and 16 percent respectively. Anton Lechner
was a Sudeten German which was a name for ethnic Germans living in Czechoslovakia.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power. One of the reasons was that many Germans
could not concede their country’s defeat in World War I, arguing that “backstabbing” and weakness in
the rear had paralyzed and, eventually, caused the front to collapse. The Jews, they claimed,
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.
Hitler claimed that Communists, and Jews had surrendered German honor to a shameful peace.
From 1933, the Nazi Regime began not only to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews -
establishing the first concentration camps, but it also demanded the “return” of the Sudetenland,
to the German Reich. The Sudetenland was a border area of Czechoslovakia on which the ethnic German
population of Czechoslovakia, including Anton Lechner, lived. This part of Czechoslovakia also
contained the Czechoslovak Army's defensive positions in event of a war with Germany.
In late summer 1938, Hitler threatened to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland was ceded
to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy, and Germany held a conference in Munich
between the 29th and 30th of September 1938. In what became known as the Munich Agreement,
they agreed to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace
from Hitler. The Czechoslovaks were not invited to the conference and felt they had been betrayed by
the British and French governments. However, many Sudeten Germans welcomed the German annexation of
the Sudetenland and changed their citizenship to German. Anton Lechner was one of them.
On the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months after the annexation of the Sudetenland,
Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia,
in flagrant violation of the Munich Agreement. Adolf Hitler himself arrived in Prague
and on the 16th of March 1939, by a proclamation from Prague Castle, established the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia which by contrast to the Sudetenland, consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs.
The same year, Anton Lechner joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with Germany and the Soviet Union
dividing and annexing the whole of the country. 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 first 30 prisoners, the German criminals
with green badges, arrived in Auschwitz on the 20th of May 1940 from the Sachsenhausen camp.
These mandatory colorful badges of shame, primarily triangles,
were used to identify why the inmates had been placed in the camp. Green badges were set for
convicted criminals who were likely of a tough temperament suitable for kapo duty. The kapos
were prisoners in Nazi camps who were selected by the SS to supervise the other camp’s inmates in
exchange for better food, clothing and housing and they were often as brutal as their SS supervisors.
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.
In the beginning, as with most German concentration camps,
Auschwitz I served three purposes: to incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the Nazi regime; to
provide a supply of forced laborers for deployment in SS-owned construction-related enterprises
and to kill small, targeted groups of the population. It was only in 1942 when Auschwitz
also became the largest of the extermination centers where the final solution to the Jewish
question – which referred to the Nazi plan to murder European Jews - was carried out.
During the Holocaust, Auschwitz was the
only location where concentration camp prisoners received tattoos.
Incoming prisoners were assigned a camp serial number which was sewn to their uniforms.
However, only those prisoners selected for work were issued with serial numbers. Those
prisoners sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.
Anton Lechner, a coach-driver by profession, had arrived in Auschwitz in 1941. It was one year
before in February or March 1942, that the first transports of Jewish men, women, and children,
sent to Auschwitz as part of the “final solution”, was sent straight to the gas chamber.
At first, Lechner became a guard. He was known not only for being vulgar and harsh, but also
for beating prisoners without any apparent reason until they were covered with blood. He enjoyed
mistreating the prisoners which he often performed under the influence of alcohol. And the more
he drank, the more sadistic he became. On a few occasions, when the prisoners whom he was beating
fell to the ground, he was seeing jumping on them and then kicking them, aiming at their kidneys.
His true reign of terror began when he became deputy head of the clothes’ storerooms
which was storage facilities that became known as the “Kanada” warehouses
because the prisoners saw them as the land of plenty.
The buildings were used to store the stolen belongings of deported prisoners,
mostly murdered Jews. When the mass gassing of Jews began in early 1942,
the Germans allowed the victims to bring up to 100 pounds or 45 kilograms of food, alcohol,
household items, clothing, medication and other valuables. While they were taken to be murdered
in the gas chambers, the veteran prisoners, appointed from the registered inmates who had
been admitted to the camp earlier as slave labour, gathered their belongings in “Kanada” warehouses.
Anton Lechner not only mistreated the prisoners working under his command, but often stole the
belongings of murdered Jews. He used to sell a large quantity of stolen clothes, underwear
or footwear and then blamed it on prisoners who were severely punished for these false charges.
When his superiors found about that Lechner was stealing the items regarded as the
property of the Reich, they transferred him to another department. As a result,
until December 1944 he served as a reserve vehicle driver.
Anton Lechner remained in the camp until December 1944 or January 1945 when Soviet forces approached
the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.
These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as the death marches.
The prisoners had to march over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
When on the 27th of January 1945, the Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, they found only
7000 surviving prisoners. Most of them were ill and dying.
In total, more than 1.1 million people died at Auschwitz, including nearly one million Jews.
After the end of the war, Anton Lechner was finally to face justice and pay for his crimes.
He was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began in November, 1947 and lasted one month.
Unlike his colleagues such as Maria Mandl who used to beat the prisoners with whip
and kick them to death, he did not receive the death penalty.
On the 22nd of December, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow
sentenced Anton Lechner to life imprisonment.
However his life imprisonment lasted only a few years as he was released in 1957.
Lechner was 67 years old when he died as a free man on the
14th of September 1975 in Eppingen, Germany There were no tears shed for Anton Lechner.
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