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 Hans Koch.
Hans Koch was born on the 13th of August 1912 in Tangerhütte, then part of the German Empire.
As with millions of Germans in the 1930s, Koch believed that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi
Party would create strong a Germany, fix the economy, and put people back to work.
Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power due to the social and political
circumstances that characterized the interwar period in Germany.
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.
This frustration, together with warnings about the growing danger of Communism, created fertile
soil for the growth of radical right-wing groups in Germany - such as the Nazi Party.
On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany
by German President Paul von Hindenburg. Immediately after Hitler came to power,
Germany became a dictatorship, and the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil
and human rights of the Jews and established 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. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its
European allies would establish more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites,
including ghettos. The perpetrators would use these locations for forced labor,
detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and the mass murder of millions.
The most notorious of these concentration camps was Auschwitz located in German occupied Poland
where Hans Koch arrived here in 1940, the same year when the camp was established by Germans.
The longest-serving camp’s commandant - Rudolf Höss - stated in his autobiography that in 1941
he was summoned to Berlin, where Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, informed him
that the Führer had issued an order to solve the “Jewish Question” for good, and that the order was
to be implemented by the SS. Himmler told Höss: “The existing extermination places in the east
are unsuited to a large scale, long-term action. I have designated Auschwitz for this purpose,”
Thus, Auschwitz, the largest of the concentration and extermination camps established on Polish
soil, served concurrently as a labor camp and as a center for the rapid extermination of Jews.
The process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized. When a train stopped at
the platform, the arrivals were lined up in two columns – men and boys in one, women and girls
in the other. The SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed a selection. The only criterion
was the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate, for labor or for death, was determined at will.
The veteran prisoners gathered the belongings of new arrivals in an area known as “Kanada” which
consisted of several barracks which were used to store the stolen belongings of the prisoners.
At Auschwitz, Hans Koch worked in the medical department dealing with
disinfection. It is believed that this was owing to his professional background
as he was a laboratory worker by profession.
Koch’s commando which consisted of around 20 prisoners, most of them Poles,
was tasked with disinfecting the items taken off the prisoners
arriving at the Auschwitz camp. The veteran prisoners would take the victims’ clothes,
shoes, and underwear to the disinfection chambers located near the premises of the
Kanada warehouses and they would disinfect these items with some poisonous bluish agent,
which was contained in round tin cans. They later learned that it was Zyklon B
which was used to kill people in the Auschwitz Birkenau subcamp, which was the main center
used to kill prisoners. Its crematorium contained a gas chamber and furnaces for burning corpses.
The commando also dealt with the disinfection of buildings
as well as the clothes and underwear of the SS staff.
Another of Koch’s responsibilies at Auschwitz was to insert the Zyklon B
into the gas chambers. This is the reason why he became known as the “ Gasmeister” .
On one occasion, at the beginning of fall 1942, about 200 male and female prisoners, all of them
elderly Jews dressed in civilian clothes, were rounded up in front of the Birkenau crematorium.
After they were brought into the building, the victims had to undress and then go inside the
gas chamber. After that, Koch and his two SS colleagues, got to the flat roof of the
crematorium and, having put gasmasks on, they opened the Zyklon B cans and then, through the
holes in the roof, poured their contents into the gas chamber, after which they sealed the
holes off. Immediately after the gas was poured inside, the engine of a car parked in front of
the building was started for a quarter of an hour to cover the screams of the victims, but according
to the witness who survived the Holocaust this was not possible. The witness testified
that the “animal screams that were no longer human” were heard. He added that if he had not
known that there were people in the crematorium, he would never have believed that those screams
were made by humans. These horrific screams lasted a few minutes until everyone inside was dead.
After the victims were murdered, their gold teeth were extracted,
and women’s hair was shorn by the Sonderkommando which were groups of Jews forced to work in
the crematorium. The bodies were hauled to the crematorium furnaces for incineration,
the bones were pulverized and the ashes were scattered in the fields.
One Auschwitz survivor who spoke German later testified that neither Hans Koch
nor other SS men made any secret of how they gassed their victims
and had loud conversations about it. The survivor often heard Koch complaining to his friends of
being tired in the mornings because he had to gas so many prisoners that it had taken him
all night. Those prisoners were innocent men, women and children whose only sin was that
they were Jews or that they were considered "undesirable" and "enemies of the state."
The Auschwitz camp complex was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on the 27th of January 1945.
By then approximately 1,000,000 Jews, 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Sinti and Roma, and some 15,000
prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and other countries had been murdered in the camp.
After the end of the war, Hans Koch 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.
At the trial he did not deny either existence of the gas chambers or his participation
in killing the prisoners. He knew it would be of no help. As numerous Auschwitz survivors claimed,
the extermination procedure of Auschwitz prisoners and of new incoming transports in the Birkenau gas
chambers was so commonly known and so widely discussed that it was absolutely impossible
that a prisoner or an SS man from the camp could be found who would know nothing about it. Koch
also claimed that after participating in the extermination operation(s),
he could not sleep without first drinking a large amount of alcohol.
On the 22nd of December, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in
Krakow sentenced Hans Koch to life imprisonment as opposed to death.
The court cited the orders given to him as attenuating circumstances and another reason was
that Koch did not commit any notable additional acts of brutality against the prisoners.
One Auschwitz survivor testified that Koch had paid no attention to prisoners because he was
constantly preoccupied with the gassing, of either people, or clothing and underwear.
Koch was 42 years old when he died on the 14th of July 1955 in a prison in Gdańsk.
There were no tears shed for Hans Koch.
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