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 Otto Moll.
Otto Moll was born on the 4th of March 1915 in Hohen Schönberg, then part of the German Empire.
He was 17 years old when on the 30th of January 1933,
Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg.
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.
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 the 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.
In 1936, three years after Hitler and the Nazi party came into power,
Otto Moll joined the SS after having graduated from the professional gardening school.
Moll was musically active and became a member of the SS marching band. During a journey with this
marching band from Bernau to Oranienburg, the SS truck collided with a car. One SS man was killed,
and Moll was critically injured. He was treated in Bernau Hospital for several months,
suffering from a fractured skull and losing an eye. It is believed that his brain was damaged,
too, and as a result he became a physically and mentally ill person
who was deliberately exploited as a murderer by the criminal Nazi regime.
From 1938 to 1941, Moll was employed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp
which was located north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses,
Roma and Sinti people and, later, Soviet civilians.
One of the camp’s most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son,
who died at Sachsenhausen in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
At Sachsenhausen Otto Moll worked as the head of a gardeners' work detail and he
was protected by Rudolf Höss who belonged to the camp’s leadership. After Höss became the
commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he brought Moll there on the 2nd of May 1941.
During all this time in Auschwitz, Moll lived there with his wife and two daughters.
His first wife Elli had also worked in the concentration camp but died of blood
poisoning in 1940. He remarried only a few weeks after her death.
Many former Auschwitz prisoners described Otto Moll as the worst SS-man in the entire
camp. He distinguished himself with the particular sadism towards the prisoners
and because he had a glass eye, he had a nickname “Cyclops “.
At Auschwitz, Moll fist supervised agricultural commando. However, in June 1942 he became the
leader of the notorious penal company to which the prisoners were assigned for various reasons,
including escape attempts, contact with civilians or the illegal possession of food,
money and additional clothing. Assignment to the penal company,
situated in infamous Block 11, lasted from one month to one year
and the prisoners were not only completely isolated from other prisoners but had to
perform the hardest labor and were continually beaten by the SS men and prisoner functionaries.
After the expansion of Auschwitz into an extermination camp ordered by the
head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, Moll devoted himself primarily to the killing of people.
Before the large crematoria and gas chambers were set up in Auschwitz-Birkenau,
Moll and Franz Hössler had directed the mass killings in Crematorium I and the
gas chambers of the so-called Bunkers I and II. Mass graves were dug in their immediate vicinity,
in which several hundred thousand corpses were buried until September 1942. After some deaths
among SS men and their relatives occurred as a result of contaminated groundwater, the mass
graves were opened and the corpses were burned from September to November of the same year.
In 1943, the four large crematoria and gas chambers in Auschwitz-Birkenau
went into operation. The process of selection and murder
was carefully planned and organized. When a train stopped at the platform,
the arrivals were lined up into 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.
Trucks carried those too infirm to walk, and the rest marched. Before entering the gas chambers,
people were ordered to disrobe. In crematorium I, they undressed either in the yard,
surrounded by a wall, or in the antechamber. Wooden barracks were erected for this purpose
at bunkers 1 and 2. At crematoria II-V, there were special undressing rooms.
On one occasion the truck full of prisoners was being driven to a
gas chamber but turned so suddenly that a woman’s child about 3 years old fell out.
Otto Moll, who was driving behind the truck, took the child by the neck
and then by the leg, and smashed his head against a guardhouse wall killing him on the spot. Then,
Moll drove up to the truck and threw the child’s corpse to his mother. Smashing
children into the concrete walls in front of their mothers was only one of Moll’s specialties.
For his merits in killing innocent men, women and children, Hitler decorated Moll
with the War Merit Cross, First Class with Swords on the 20th of April 1943.
This even casts a significant light on his importance in the extermination of the Jews.
In addition to him, only Commandant Höss and Josef Klehr, the head of the SS disinfection commando,
were decorated with this medal among the Auschwitz personnel.
From September 1943 to May 1944,
Moll was the first commandant of the Fürstengrube and Gleiwitz I which were Auschwitz sub-camps.
In May 1944 he returned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where he was appointed the head of all
crematoria by the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss. During this period, the extermination of Hungarian
Jews was to take place. Moll was aware of the fact that the planned ten to fifteen thousand
corpses per day would overwhelm the crematoria's ovens. So just before the arrival of the Hungarian
transports, Moll ordered fire pits to be dug alongside crematoria which he provided with a
gutter system of his own design. In this way, fat from the burning corpses could be drained off,
collected, picked up by the inmates with buckets and tipped into the flames to burn.
The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them. In his speeches to the new
arrivals, Moll repeated that they were being sent to the camp where work was waiting for them, but
first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. Moll told them politely to hang their clothes
on the hooks, take a shower and even promised they would be provided soup and tea or coffee.
However they were taken into the gas chambers, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.
Moll often strolled through the crowd of arrivals scheduled for gassing,
observed them undressing and lured small children away from their mothers with sweets
in order to throw them outside into the boiling fat of the fire pits. On a few occasions he
was seen picking children up by their hair and then holding them suspended while he shot them.
Sometimes, there were so many incoming transports that the gas chambers were incapable of containing
all the new arrivals. The excess people were generally shot, one at a time, often by Moll
himself or by the other SS men, especially Erich Muhsfeldt. When some people asked Moll to spare
their life, he replied “An order is an order” and killed them without any remorse. The Jews were
shot in the back of their head and dropped into fire. It sometimes happened that some prisoners
put up a fight or children cried. As a punishment, Moll would throw them into the burning pits alive.
Even among the SS men, Moll was notorious for his cruelty and hatred towards the Jews,
especially women and children. When he did not throw the children into the fire alive,
he would kick them to death with a smile on his face. The prisoners did
not consider him a human and would call him “ Schweinemetzger” which meant “pig butcher”.
Moll often led attractive Jewish women to the edge of the fire pits to enjoy their fear.
He would whisper lewd words into their ears,
then shoot them in the back of the head and drop them into the fire.
Another of Moll’s specialties was setting his dog on naked women.
The dog would bound towards them in a rage, chasing them toward the fire pits
while biting and snapping at their legs and buttocks. Moll would then shoot the poor
women in their stomach so that they would fall over and watch them burn to death.
The fire pits were also used for smaller groups of victims consisting of up to 200 people,
as the use of poison gas for such a small number was considered uneconomical and therefore a waste.
The Hungarian children as well as the sick, old and disabled people
were driven by truck to the fire pits by Moll or colleagues
who had been instructed to shoot them by hand or throw them alive into the flames.
During 8 weeks from May 15 to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials,
under the guidance of German SS officials, deported around 424,000
Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection,
SS functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.
As the head of all crematoria, Moll also directed the work of the Jewish Sonderkommando which was
a unit of camp’s prisoners forced to help with the disposal of gas chamber victims.
Those who refused to do the terrible work of the Sonderkommando,
Moll would personally throw alive into burning furnaces.
On one occasion when he found jewelry in the possession of one of the members
of the Jewish Sonderkommando, he poured gasoline over him and set him on fire.
Moll was also known for being a great shooter and when he felt that the prisoners from the
Sonderkommando were not working properly, he would shoot them from considerable distances.
Among Moll’s many sadistic specialties also belonged beating people with clubs and iron bars
or throwing them against electric fences.
After the end of the extermination of Hungarian Jews,
Moll returned to the position of the head of the Gleiwitz I sub-camp.
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 on these marches. Otto Moll let one such death march and in February 1945 he arrived
in Kaufering which was the common name of a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration
camp system. The conditions in Kaufering were horrible. The prisoners deported to each of
11 subcamps had to construct the accommodation themselves. The resulting huts, partially buried
for camouflage from aerial reconnaissance, were completely inadequate for the weather conditions.
Rain and snow leaked through the earthen roofs, and vermin infested the huts. Prisoners had
to sleep on straw that had been spread on the floor. What little food the prisoners did have,
was taken by the SS guards and those who were sick, were fed even less. There were even
incidents of cannibalism, and some prisoners were so desperate to escape from their horrible reality
that they would try to commit suicide, by throwing themselves into the electrical fencing.
At Kaufering, Moll abused and killed prisoners as well as willfully neglected their care.
During Kaufering camp’s existence between June 1944 and April 1945, fifteen thousand
out of 30,000 prisoners died from hunger, disease, executions, or during death marches.
A few days before the subcamps of Kaufering were liberated between the 24th and 27th of April 1945
by the Seventh United States Army, Otto Moll had forced prisoners on a death march
to the Dachau concentration camp. During this death march
he was involved in the shooting of at least 120 Russian prisoners
who were too weak or sick to continue marching any further. Moll himself shot 26 of them.
On the 28th of April 1945, Otto Moll arrived at Dachau.
When the camp was liberated on the following day by The U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division,
the conditions in the camp were terrible. The soldiers could smell not only human excrement
but also decaying bodies and many of these soldiers cried or vomited as they found dozens
of railroad cars filled with thousands of dead bodies, and 30 thousand survivors who looked
like walking skeletons. Many inmates were sick and dying from typhus epidemics and starvation.
Otto Moll was arrested and finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. In November 1945
he was tried at the first Dachau trial which was held within the compound of the former
Dachau concentration camp. On the 13th of December 1945, The US Military Tribunal
found Otto Moll guilty of fatally shooting 26 prisoners who had collapsed from exhaustion
during the death march from Kaufering and sentenced him to death by hanging.
Molls’ crimes at Auschwitz were not part of the indictment and he was never prosecuted for them.
Half a year after his death sentence, he was confronted by his former superior,
Rudolf Höss, during the Nuremberg trials. Even though Moll admitted to some of his crimes,
he largely denied involvement in the killing of Jews.
If he had hoped that his lies would help him escape justice, he was wrong.
In the end, some justice was served. On the 28th of May 1946, Otto Moll,
then 31 years old, was executed in Landsberg prison. There were no tears shed for Otto Moll.