On April 15, 1945 the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp. A smell of decaying bodies horrified them. They found 13,000 unburied death bodies and almost
60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. Other thousands of inmates died of various
diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp’s liberation. The
British forces managed to capture male and female Nazi guards responsible for these horrors and
forced them to help bury the dead bodies in mass graves. One of these SS guards was Franz Stofel.
Franz Stofel was born on 5th October, 1915, in Hamburg. He used to be a clerk and in October 1934
he joined Reichswehr - the German Armed Forces.
He then left the Reichswehr and in April 1936 he volunteered for the SS. According
to his testimony, he wanted to become a professional soldier. However, the SS in
1936 had nothing to do with the soldiering but provided concentration camp guards instead.
Between 1936 and 1944 he was posted to Dachau Concentration camp where he held positions in
the warehouse area and later, he was responsible for small working parties.
In January 1944 he moved to Mittelbau–Dora concentration camp where he served as a
commander for the construction of Kleinbodungen which was Mittlebau–Dora’s satellite camp.
He became a leader of Kleinbodungen and supervised prisoners working on V1 and V2 ballistic missiles.
It was during the evacuation of this camp ordered in April 1945 when Franz Stofel committed his
worst crimes. Stofel was one of the 45 SS men who led a brutal march to Bergen-Belsen concentration
camp. The ill and starving prisoners had to walk 25-30 kilometers per day in wooden shoes.
While 610 prisoners left Mittelbau-Dora on April 4, 1945, only 590 inmates
arrived at Bergen Belsen on April 11, 1945. When he was asked about the difference of 20 men,
Stofel responded that 5 were shot because they either tried to escape
or they could not keep up with the pace. He did not know what happened to the rest.
Stofel claimed he had been with his deputy Wilhelm Dörr all the time during the death march.
During the death march, Dörr was seen killing the prisoners who had become ill
or too weak to march any farther. However, according to Stofel’s testimony after the war,
Dörr did not kill anybody.
Stofel claimed that prisoners who had bad feet were allowed to sit on the hand-cart.
He forgot to mention that they were shot the next morning.
All this could not happen without Stofel’s consent.
After the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, he was captured by the British forces
together with his deputy Wilhelm Dörr. He was tried at the Belsen Trials and convicted
of atrocities which occurred during the death march from Mittelbau-Dora.
As with his other Nazi colleagues, he pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against
him and denied everything he was accused of. Stofel even said that during the death march,
the prisoners had had good sleep at night and enough food. However, coffee in the morning, 500
grammes of bread and 40 grammes either of sausage or cheese during the day was hardly enough.
He also claimed that they had also got hot meals in the evenings.
However, prisoners had very limited recollections of that.
Stofel's lies did not help him escape justice. On November 17, 1945 a tribunal sentenced Franz
Stofel to death by hanging. He was 30 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint
carried out the sentence on 13 December,1945. There were no tears shed for Franz Stofel.