Following the Second World War, there were a number of war crimes trials held which brought
the perpetrators of the Holocaust to justice.
On trial were a number of high ranking members of the SS who were in charge of the concentration
camps, and a number of former commandants were brought in front of a judge.
Josef Kramer was known as ‘The Beast of Belsen,’ for his rule over the infamous
concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
Belsen became a huge site of death and depravity where over 50,000 people were horrifically
killed.
One of the worst camps, Belsen was known for its conditions where Anne Frank and other
inmates succumbed to the disease.
There was a huge lack of food at the camp, but Kramer was an experienced camp guard,
who was known for being responsible for thousands of deaths.
He was a violent and barbaric man, who was sentenced to death after the war.
Join us today as we look at, ‘The DISGUSTING Crimes Of Josef Kramer - The Beast of Belsen.’
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Josef Kramer joined the Nazi Party in 1931, and the following year he joined the SS.
He trained inside of the SS to work as a prison guard, and then as a concentration camp guard.
In 1934, he was assigned to Dachau to work as a guard, but inside of the camp he caught
the attention of senior members of staff.
He gained a number of promotions, and he was then appointed to different positions as a
senior guard at Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen.
He was transferred to different camps, but eventually he ended up at Auschwitz.
He was an assistant to Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz who was known for creating the
death camp and expanding it to the scale that it was.
Auschwitz became the largest camp used during the Holocaust, and it was where the largest
amount of people were killed in one individual camp.
Kramer was involved with Hoss’ plans to expand the camp, and accompanied him on a
visit to create a new oil and rubber plant at the camp nearby, which would be staffed
by Auschwitz’ prisoners.
But Kramer must have dreamed of being in control of his own camp, and in April 1941, he was
transferred to become the Commandant of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp.
It was the only concentration camp established by the NAzis in French lands today, and he
reigned here with fear and terror.
He claimed at his trial that at Natzweiler, it was built to let prisoners work nearby
in a quarry, but before him there were no gas chambers.
It was he who ordered the gas chambers to be built, on the orders of Heinrich Himmler.
He claimed that prisoners at the camp were not transported elsewhere for experiments,
however it’s claimed that in his camp, many bodies were taken from Natzweiler to Strasbourg,
where Dr Hirt.
then performed disturbing experiments.
As the commandants of Natzweiler, Kramer himself personally carried out the gassing of 80 Jewish
men and women in the gas chambers he had overseen the construction of.
Then these bodies were sent to become anatomical specimens and the Reich University of Strasbourg.
Those who were gassed then had their remains displayed in a proposed Jewish skeleton collection.
There were 57 men gassed, and 29 women and one victim was shot dead as he fought against
being gassed.
Following his role in charge of Natzweiler, Kramer became a captain and then transferred
to become the Lagerfuhrer or Camp commander of Auschwitz II Birkenau.
Birkenau was the main killing element and extermination part of the Auschwitz complex,
and he was brought to the camp to oversee the gassings of hundreds of thousands of prisoners.
He was there to hep manage gassings of thousands of Jews who were transported to the camp in
mass deportations.
Kramer later claimed at trial that, ‘I recieved a written order from Hoess that I had nothing
to do with either the gas chambers of the incoming transports.
At Auschwitz, the Political department was also responsible for all the selections from
incoming transports for the gas chamber.
In the crematorium, the SS and prisoners, sonderkommando were under the command of the
commandant of Auschwitz, Hoess.
As the place where the transports generally arrived was in the middle of my own camp,
I was sometimes present at their arrival.
The people who took part in supervising and who were responsible for the security were
partly from Auschwitz Number I, and partly from my own camp at Birkenau, but the selections
of these people who had to supervise was done by the commandant of Auschwitz I.
The actual selections of the internees were only made by the doctors, those who were selected
for the gas chambers went to different crematoria, those who were found fit to work came into
two different parts of my camp, because the idea was that in a few days they were to be
re-transferred to different parts of Germany for work.
However, Kramer tried to portray himself as sub-ordinate to the camp commander, but there
were a huge number of witnesses who saw his acts at Auschwitz.
Witnesses said how he took an active part in the selections, and he himself chose the
people to be killed instantly inside the gas chambers, playing god with people’s lives.
In one example, he was noted to have loaded and driven people onto the trucks, and that
he beat them violently and barbarically if they refused.
He gained a reputation for being a beast, and a hard and violent ruler inside of his
camp.
When he was accused of participating in the he said, ‘No I never took part, not did
the other SS members of my staff.’
He blamed the doctors, and continued to maintain his innocence but this was a complete lie.
He was completely barbaric, and ordered many people to their deaths, but he was then transferred
from Asuchwitz to Bergen Belsen.
In December 1944, Kramer was transferred across from Asuchwitz Birkenau to Bergen Belsen,
a camp near to the village of Belsen.
It began as a temporary camp for those leaving Germany, but then it became a huge camp.
As the war turned against the Germans, huge numbers of prisoners were evacuated to Belsen,
and Kramer became the commandant of Belsen overseeing the conditions.
He was known as the Beast of Belsen for his horrific rule over the prisoners, and he oversaw
the camp in its final days as the conditions became incredibly disgusting and awful, and
as more prisoners came to the camp, things got a lot worse.
Kramer remained devoted to Hitler and the Nazis even as the Third Reich was falling.
Between 1943 and 1945, Belsen’s numbers swelled heavily, to around 120,000, and 55,000
remain unknown as the camp records were destroyed.
There were no gas chambers at Belsen, but the majority of prisoners 50,000 of them died
due to the conditions there.
In March 1945, at least 18,000 prisoners died in a month due to the disease, starvation
and beatings administered.
Typhus and other diseases ran rampant across the camp, and prisoners were given hardly
any food and water, and the sanitation at Belsen was virtually non existent.
It was hell on earth, and it was Kramer who oversaw all of this.
He was the one virtually responsible for this, and did nothing to prevent further deaths.
As the end of the war in Europe came, the administration of the camp collapsed, and
many of Belsen’s guards left and fled for their safety, worried about the crimes they
had committed.
Because of this, prisoners were left to it without supervision, and a huge number of
corpses were left around the camp unburied.
Corpses were rotting out in the open, and rats ate them and infested the camp.
Kramer remained at his post, and oversaw a number of guards who stayed.
When he arrived at Belsen, Kramer claimed he found 15000 prisoners, who were very overcrowded
then, but things got much worse.
He tried to claim that the food situation at the camp was not too bad, but then blamed
the weather for the difficulty in obtaining food and also he said that his camp was an
afterthought following the towns and cities nearby.
He claimed that, ‘there were lavatories in the men’s compound and a few in the women’s
camp, but there were not enough.
As the prisoners arrived something had to be done in a hurry, so I ordered ditches were
to be dug.’
Evidence was found that Kramer did send to his superiors complaints regarding the overcrowding
and lack of food at Belsen.
He said, ‘the incidence of disease is very high here in proportion to the number of detainees.
The number of sick has greatly increased, the fight against spotted fever is made extremely
difficult by the lack of delousing.’
There was also a problem with violence at the camp too, and there were shootings and
executions carried out at a daily basis.
Kramer was known for kicking and beating prisoners on a daily basis, and that he sometimes did
this to their deaths.
When the British arrived at Bergen-Belsen to liberate the camp, Kramer even showed the
liberators round almost as a proud and sick tour guide, showing them the different aspects
of the camp.
He went with them on the inspection, and pointed out the mass graves and the piles of dead
bodies lying everywhere.
He showed the huts off, which were overcrowded and showed no space for the prisoners, and
the prisoners were showed emaciated and dying.
He seemed proud of his work at Belsen, but ultimately he would pay for it.
He was captured as a prisoner of war, and was then taken to trial at the Belsen trials
along with a number of other guards.
On the 17th November 1945, he was sentenced to death for his crimes at Auschwitz and at
Bergen Belsen.
Ultimately Josef Kramer gained the nickname the beast of Belsen for his crimes in overseeing
the camp which became the site of death for thousands in the final years of the camp’s
operation.
Despite going to the camp late in the war, he did nothing and virtually nothing to improve
the conditions of the prisoners who were sent there.
It was ultimately he and his staff who should get the blame for the large deaths, along
with the hierarchy of the SS who deported thousands to Belsen.
Kramer gained a horrific reputation from his work at Auschwitz, and in this role here he
was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands at Birkenau who were driven into
the gas chambers.
He himself took part in the selections, and he was known for driving people into the gas
chambers quicker.
He was a violent brute of a man, and someone who prided himself on this reputation.
Across a number of different camps, he had committed various atrocities, and because
of this was sentenced to death.
His crimes were endless, and today many of them remain untold.
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