1940s, World War 2, German-occupied territories. A criminal Nazi regime gives unlimited power
to frightenly dangerous and unintelligent individuals. A
power that should have never belonged to them. Influenced by Nazi ideology, these individuals are
willing to commit horrific crimes in the name of what they
believe to be the Aryan master race. After the war, they would become infamous for their sadistic
and brutal treatment of prisoners. One of these torturous monsters was Hans Möser.
Hans Möser was born on the 7th of April 1906 in Darmstadt,
then part of the German Empire and he was a merchant by profession.
In October 1929 he Joined the Nazi Party and in July 1931 he joined the SS.
Möser had been posted to the various concentration camps such as Hinzert,
Neuengamme and Auschwitz before he was sent to Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp
in May 1944 where ho committed his worst crimes.
Hans Möser was a sadist and he enjoyed torturing the prisoners
who were forced to work 14 hours a day and did not have access to even basic hygiene.
The slave-laborers from Mittelbau-Dora were used not only for 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 which served as a natural protection against the Allied bombing
for the underground factory named Mittelwerk in which the V-weapons were produced.
As a protective custody camp leader, Möser ‘responsibilities were discipline and sanitation,
and his only superior was the camp commandant.
Möser did everything to make the suffering of the inmates
as terrible as possible. When the prisoners were brought into his office for interrogation,
screams of the poor victims could be heard from within as he was beating them brutally.
Hans Möser also participated in hangings. He also used to receive “hanging bonuses” which consisted
of one third liter of schnapps, 250 grams of special sausage and one package of cigarettes.
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 death without any remorse. He was even seen shooting
at the prisoners, who had been hanged even though they were already dead.
With the same joy and cruelty, he hanged two prisoners when they attempted to escape.
On one occasion when Möser got drunk in the kitchen,
he started to shoot at the prisoners who were passing by killing two of them.
One of the reasons why the starving prisoners had almost nothing to eat was that their food
had been stolen by the SS personnel. Möser was laughing when he was questioned about it
saying that the prisoners were receiving too much to eat anyway.
When it seemed to Möser that the prisoners were not working hard enough,
he ordered either 25 lashes or imprisonment for them.
On one occasion, he said to one inmate: “The same way, with the same pleasure, as you shoot 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,
Hans Möser was a transport leader during the evacuation of prisoners from the camp.
The Nazi regime needed the prisoners as slave labor and the Nazis wanted to
remove all the evidence of the horrors and brutality the poor inmates had experienced.
The main objective of this particular death march was to transport the prisoners to other camps
such as Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen, or Neuengamme by train or by foot. Those
who could no longer walk, were killed. The largest atrocity of this death march
occurred on the 13th of April, 1945 in the area of town called Gardelegen. Out of 4,000
prisoners who arrived here, more than 1,000 were too weak or sick to continue marching any further.
After they were forcibly taken into a large barn, the SS guards barricaded the walls and
set fire to gasoline-soaked straw. 1,016 inmates were burned alive, suffocated,
or shot by the SS as they tried in desperation to escape by digging under barn’s walls.
This inhuman tragedy became known as Gardelegen massacre.
When on the following day, U.S. 102nd Infantry Division entered Gardelegen, they were horrified.
Dead bodies were everywhere while the barn was still smoldering.
On the 21st of April, 1945 the local commander of the 102nd Infantry Division 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.
Such crimes could not be left unpunished. In the end, justice finally caught up with
Möser when he was arrested by the allies and tried at the Dora Trial
which was a part of the Dachau trials. At the trial, Hans Möser denied everything saying
he had never neither tolerated brutal treatment of prisoners nor killed anyone. He even claimed that
he had never had a conversation about his pleasure in killing the inmates and accused the British
and Americans of beating him and malnutrition. However, his lies did not help him escape justice.
On the 30th of December, 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.