The 6th of June 1944. Allied infantry and armored divisions begin landing on the Normandy coast
in France. This largest seaborne invasion in history marks a turning point in World War 2
and becomes the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. On the following month in July 1944,
the Soviet forces liberate Majdanek - the first major Nazi camp located in German-occupied Poland.
Only after the liberation of the concentration camps, the full extent of Nazi horrors is
finally exposed to the world. Because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food,
only a small percentage of concentration camp inmates survive. Compounded by months
and years of mistreatment and torture, they resemble skeletons and many of them are so
weak that they can hardly move at all. One of the most infamous perpetrators
of this criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Heinrich Josten.
Heinrich Josten was born on the 11th of December 1893 in Malmedy,
then part of the German Empire and was a locksmith by profession.
After Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany became
a dictatorship. The same year Heinrich Josten joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
The SS – Schutzstaffel or Protection Squads - was originally established in April 1925
to protect Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders and speakers and provide security for political
meetings. SS members were subject to strict military discipline and swore an oath of
complete loyalty to Hitler and those appointed by him. In January 1929 Heinrich Himmler became
the head of the SS and the organization greatly expanded in size and strength. By the time Hitler
came into power in 1933, Himmler had made the SS the dominant organization within the Reich.
From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler entrusted the SS first and foremost
with the removal and eventual murder of political and so-called racial enemies
of the regime. The SS became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany and
was staffed by men who perceived themselves as the “racial elite” of the Nazi future.
From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question which
then culminated in 1941, when the leadership planned, coordinated and directed the
so-called Final Solution. This “solution” was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.;
also known as the Holocaust. SS officers were directly responsible for the management of
concentration camps, where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
In one such camp – Flossenbürg– Heinrich Josten arrived in July 1939.
Flossenbürg’s original purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners
for the production of granite for Nazi construction projects.
Until mid-1943, the quarry occupied the labor of about half of the prisoner population.
However, in 1943 the camp became a key supplier of Messerschmitt Bf 109 aircraft parts.
After the outbreak of the Second World War on the 1st of September,
1939, Heinrich Josten briefly served in Waffen-SS regiment.
The Waffen-SS was the military branch of the SS. Although initially restricted to four divisions,
the Waffen-SS eventually fielded more than 20 divisions. This created an armed force of about
half a million men and established a command and operations structure to rival the German army.
The Waffen-SS units took part in most of the major military campaigns of World War II and
were heavily involved in the commission of the Holocaust through their participation in
mass shootings, anti-partisan warfare, and in supplying guards for Nazi concentration camps
Before being sent to Auschwitz in June 1940,
Josten had briefly served in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
At Auschwitz, Josten led firing squads in the gravel pits
several times until the fall of 1941, Initially, a firing squad executed
prisoners near the camp at places where gravel had been extracted—the so-called “gravel pits.”
From the fall of 1941 to the fall of 1943, the majority of executions were carried out in the
walled-off yard of Block 11 in the main camp, in front of a specially built “Death Wall.”
After the war one prisoner remembered how during public executions by hanging, Josten would stand
by the gallows, leaning against it carelessly and nonchalantly while watching the executions.
At Auschwitz, Heinrich Josten became the head of labor deployment office. He would often
stand at the camp’s gate watching hungry and weak prisoners returning from work.
He would yell at them and any of those he didn’t like, he would beat and kick.
Josten was especially hostile towards the Poles. He would torment them as
well as beat and kick them without any reason. On one occasion Heinrich Josten was seen beating
a man working in the motorcycle workshops with universal spanner so fiercely that Josten’s own
pince-nez glasses fell off his nose. While screaming “you Polish pig”,
he beat the poor prisoner on his face and nose so brutally that the man’s fellow inmates were
not able to recognize him. The reason given was that the kick-start gear broke off when
Josten was riding his bike and he accused the prisoner of sabotage. After this beating,
the prisoner’s face remained disfigured for the rest of his life.
Josten’s favorite form of punishment was flogging. The prisoners were flogged publicly over a special
construction called the “goat”. SS men flogged the inmates with heavy sticks or a bullwhip.
While the prisoners were beaten, they had to count out the blows in German,
and if they made a mistake, the counting and beating began again. When he finished,
an inmate had to stand up and say thank you in German. Josten’s blows were especially
strong and painful and he would flog the prisoners with a smile on his face.
In 1944 Heinrich Josten was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer which was equivalent
to first lieutenant. In mid-May the same year,
the Hungarian authorities, in coordination with the German Security Police, began to
systematically deport the Hungarian Jews. SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann was chief of the team
of "deportation experts" that worked with the Hungarian authorities. The Hungarian police
carried out the roundups and forced the Jews onto the deportation trains.
In less than two months from May 15 to July 9, 1944, nearly 440,000
Jews were deported from Hungary in more than 145 trains. Most were deported to
Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection on a rail ramp,
SS functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.
The process of selection and murder, in which Heinrich Josten as an SS officer took part,
was carefully planned and organized. When a train stopped at the platform, veteran prisoners
received the victims and gathered their belongings in several barracks in an area known as “Kanada.”
The arrivals were lined up in two columns – the men and older boys were in one column, and the
women and children of both sexes in the other. – and SS physicians performed a selection. The
criterion was the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate,
for labor or for death, was determined at will.
Josten also actively participated in taking prisoners, mostly those unfit for work, to the
gas chambers. During these actions, especially when unloading transports and loading the men,
women and children onto the trucks to be murdered, Josten was extremely brutal and
was seen beating and kicking them. The SS men kept the people who were
fated to die unaware of what awaited them. They were told that they were being sent
to the camp, but that they first had to undergo disinfection and bathe. After the
victims undressed, they were taken into the gas chamber, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.
After they were killed, Sonderkommando - groups of Jews forced to work in the crematoria - dragged
the corpses out of the gas chambers. They cut off the women’s hair and removed all metal dental work
and jewelry. Then they burned the corpses in pits, on pyres, or in the crematorium furnaces.
Bones that did not burn completely were ground in to powder with pestles and then dumped,
along with the ashes, in the river and in nearby ponds,
strewn in the fields as fertilizer, or used as landfill on uneven ground and in marshes.
In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex,
the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. SS units forced nearly
60,000 prisoners to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. Prisoners suffered from the cold
weather, starvation, and exposure during these death marches. These forced evacuations of
concentration camp inmates over long distances under guard became known as death marches.
After the evacuation of Auschwitz, during the night raid of Soviet planes, Josten found
shelter in a concrete bunker. When one prisoner tried to hide in the same bunker, Josten started
shooting but the prisoner managed to escape and testified about this after the war was over.
After the evacuation of Auschwitz, Heinrich Josten became the camp commandant of the
Boelcke barracks also known as Nordhausen which was a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora
concentration camp located in Germany. Housing conditions were particularly bad
and because there were no bunks, prisoners had to sleep on a thin layer of straw. One of the
garages held four blocks of prisoners still able to work, for whom conditions were slightly better,
but for all prisoners, rations were grossly insufficient to sustain life. Although there
were toilets, they did not work for lack of water, and many prisoners were unable to move.
Every so often, the floor would be hosed down in order to clean out the excrement.
SS guards barely entered the camp, instead allowing the prisoners to die from neglect.
The camp, named by the prisoners a "living crematorium", was operated for only three
months between January and April 1945. Out of 6000 prisoners who passed through the camp,
3000 died due to malnutrition, neglect and unsanitary conditions.
In early April 1945, only a few days before the Nordhausen was liberated by the US soldiers,
Josten and other SS men had fled to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
When the US 3rd Armored Division entered Nordhausen on the 11th of April 1945,
they found hundreds of dying prisoners lying amongst more than a thousand corpses,
including many children and babies. One American soldier wrote "No written word can properly
convey the atmosphere of such a charnel house, the unbearable stench of decomposing bodies,
the sight of live human beings... lying cheek by jowl with the ten-day dead...”
The US Army forced about two thousand Germans from Nordhausen to bury the corpses in mass graves,
a process which took until the 16th of April. According to some accounts,
soldiers of the 104th Infantry Division killed German civilians in Nordhausen who denied
knowledge of the atrocities, believing that they were partially responsible
After the end of the war, Heinrich Josten was finally to face justice and pay for
his crimes. He was captured by the Allies and handed over to the Polish authorities.
Josten was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began in November 1947 and lasted one month.
During the trial, he tried to convince the Court that he had not known anything
about the gas chambers or the murder and ill-treatment of the Auschwitz prisoners.
However, his lies did not help him escape justice. On the 22nd of December 1947, the Polish Supreme
National Tribunal in Krakow found Heinrich Josten guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging.
He was 54 years old when he was executed on the 24th of January 1948.
There were no tears shed for Heinrich Josten
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