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,
23 defendants out of the 41 are sentenced to death by hanging.
One of them is Maximilian Grabner a sadistic Gestapo chief at Auschwitz.
Maximilian Grabner was born on the 2nd of October 1905 in Vienna, then Austria-Hungary.
Grabner had a simple school education and worked as a lumberjack in the 1920s.
In 1930 he joined the Austrian Police and worked first as a police officer and later as a detective
at the police headquarters in Vienna. In 1932 Maximilian Grabner joined the
Nazi Party and after the Anschluss, when German troops invaded Austria and
incorporated Austria into the German Reich on the 12th of March 1938, he joined the SS. Soon after,
Grabner became a member of the Gestapo, which was an official secret police of Nazi Germany.
When in May 1940 the Nazis established Auschwitz, the most notorious concentration camp located
in Nazi-occupied Poland, Maximilian Grabner became the camp’s Gestapo chief.
As the Head of the Political Department in Auschwitz, Grabner's responsibilities
were to to fight against and suppress any resistance movements within the camp
as well as prevent any attempts to escape or make contact with the outside world.
Grabner was bloodthirsty and every time he appeared in the camp;
he terrorized the prisoners. While some inmates were arrested and executed by firing squad,
the others were locked in bunkers and tortured. His specialties were water torture,
nail puncturing or using specialized tools with which to compress the inmate’s fingers.
The smallest violations of rules were punished with death.
In fatality reports he ordered death of the murdered prisoners to be camouflaged
as "natural" reporting it most often as typhoid fever.
Maximilain Grabner considered everything that was Polish to be vulgar and lacking in quality and
good taste. He hated the Poles, especially the members of the intelligentsia such as teachers,
priests, physicians, and other prominent members of Polish society. He shared this hatred towards
the Poles with Hans Aumeier, Auschwitz deputy commandant. However, while Aumeier tolerated
them as long as they were of some use to him, Grabner was killing them without any remorse.
Maximilain Grabner was also active in carrying out the selections on the ramp.
In order to keep the victims calm before they were murdered in gas chambers with poisonous gas Zyklon
B, Grabner told them politely to undress, hang their clothes on the hooks, take a shower and
promised they would be provided soup and tea or coffee. However, they were soon murdered.
Maximilian Grabner never missed a chance to kill poor Jews.
Once, 250 Jewish men, women and children were to be killed in a gas chamber. During a gassing
Zyklon B had to be thrown down through both openings of the gas-chamber room
at the same time. 2 guards were required to do this
but, on this occasion, only one of them showed up. Grabner immediately asked the other SS man
to pour the Zyklon B into the opening killing all 250 innocent people inside.
On one occasion a woman who was tortured in block 11 was to be shot at the death wall. However,
she was not wounded by the gunfire because she fell after losing consciousness due to the shock
and fear. Because the crematorium was overloaded,
her body and the other corpses were put to one side, in order to be burned in the evening.
When in the evening the woman regained consciousness and started to beg
to have her life spared, Grabner was informed about the situation by a guard who was present
in the crematorium and he came over immediately and shot the poor woman with his own revolver.
On another occasion, a Kapo of the Sonderkommando, which was a unit of camp’s prisoners forced to
help with the disposal of gas chamber victims, asked Grabner to provide him with one more inmate
because 1 prisoner had died. Grabner replied that he could not give him one inmate but could give
him 5 prisoners instead on one condition. The Kapo would have to kill 4 other prisoners in his unit.
Then Grabner asked the Kapo how he was beating the inmates.
When the Kapo showed Grabner the rubber truncheon, Grabner grabbed the iron rod
and explained to the Kapo that he should beat the prisoners with such a rod instead.
Maximilian Grabner remained in his position at Auschwitz until November 1943,
when he was dismissed and arrested on account of numerous abuses of power and corruption.
Instead of fighting theft and corruption, Grabner was accused of having enriched himself to a
considerable extent by plundering the possessions of murdered Jews.
Even though these stolen possessions were considered the property of the Nazi Party
and the SS, Grabner often sent these items to his Vienna apartment instead.
Maximilian Grabner was also accused of carrying out the arbitrary shooting of 2,000 inmates
without execution warrants. The prosecutor requested a 12 year sentence but because the
head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller, refused to cooperate, the trial was never completed.
After the end of the war, Maximilian Grabner was finally to face justice
and pay for his crimes. He was captured by the Allies and handed over to the Polish authorities.
He was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began in November, 1947 and lasted one month. At the trial,
Grabner claimed that he was only involved in the murder of millions of people
out of consideration for his family. He even said that he had never been an anti-Semite.
However, his lies did not help him escape justice. On the 22nd of December, 1947,
the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Grabner to death by hanging.
He was 42 years old when he was executed on the 28th of January 1948,
There were no tears shed for Maximilian Grabner.