Within the concentration camp system of the Second World War, there were a huge number
of violent and barbaric SS guards that inflicted misery onto the prisoners.
Inside the camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Nordhausen, executions were carried out on
a daily basis with them being performed in front of many other prisoners to send a clear
message to others.
But there were some high ranking SS members who acted as the commandants and the person
in charge of the killing operations and running of the camps.
These men such as Rudolf Hoess became the Commandants of the horrific sites, and many
after the war were sentenced to death and were seen as the ones responsible for the
crimes committed there.
One man who was sentenced to death and executed was Otto Foreschner, who worked as a commandant
at a number of sites, including Mittelbau Dora, a savage slave labour site in which
around 20,000 people died during the two years that it was in operation.
It was known for being one of the most brutal and inhumane sites, where prisoners were forced
to work very long hours and were deprived of basic necessities.
Join us today as we look at the Justified Execution Of The Commandant of Mittelbau-Dora,
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Otto Forscher was born in 1902 inside of a small town in Bavaria.
He was brought up on his family’s farm, and was given a normal upbringing.
It was within Bavaria and the lands around which the Nazi’s emerged and Adolf Hitler’s
Munich Putsch placed the politician in the forefront of the world’s press and eyes.
Forschner in 1922 enlisted to become part of the Reichsheer, the official German armed
forces that remained following the First World War.
The numbers of soldiers and what they could do was limited, however Forschner then remained
in the armed forces for the next 12 years.
When he left the army, he was then involved in the SS and he joined the group led by Heinrich
Himmler, and he was transferred and assigned to it’s military wing, the Waffen SS.
But as an SS man, between April 1934 and December 1936, he was part of an SS training camp and
following this he then became a paid up member of the Nazi party.
However in 1941 following the launching of Operation Barbarossa and the German invasion
of the Soviet Union, he served as an officer in the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking.
This detachment were part of heavy fighting during the intense battles of the Eastern
front, but during this Forschner was injured in battle and was then declared unfit for
combat duty.
He was then transferred to the SS Death’s Heads Unit, and initially he was sent to Buchenwald
Concentration camp.
At Buchenwald he was involved in the economic part of the camp, and was involved in making
sure that the site was profitable through the use of slave labour.
It was a relatively senior position, and they were in charge of maintaining law and order,
and also regularly took roll call and they often worked with Aufsehreins and female guards
to ensure that law and order was maintained.
But after being valued in his role at Buchenwald, he was considered for a senior position, and
was then given commandant as the commandant of the newly built Mittelbau-Dora concentration
camp.
Initially it worked as a sub camp of Buchenwald, however it became one of the most brutal and
savage camps of the Second World War.
Prisoners came there from all over Europe, and many were political prisoners, however
they suffered extreme cruelty.
They suffered from many injuries from the work that they were forced to conduct.
In total 60,000 prisoners worked at Mittelbau Dora and it’s camps, and it’s believed
that around 20,000 were killed.
There were around 350 prisoners executed by hanging there with 200 accused of sabotage,
but the camp saw huge transfers of prisoners from Auschwitz and other sites.
At Mittelbau Dora, the tunnels there where prisoners worked were top secret, and many
were used for the production of rockets including the V-2, the colossal wonder weapon.
The purpose of the camp was to supply slave labourers for work in the V-weapons programme.
As well as being the commandant of Dora, he was also a managing director of the Mittelwerk
GmBH company where the slave labourers and prisoners would work.
There were virtually no sanitary facilities at his camp except for barrels that were used
as toilets, and and many people died from hunger, overwork, the cold weather and thirst
as they were worked to death with little food and water.
In the winter months, the death toll there was severe with the cold weather, and it was
said that the work detachments of Mittelbau Dora had the highest death rate of any other
camps in the concentration camp system.
Otto Forschner ultimately oversaw the conditions there, and was later replaced as the managing
director of the company for the V-weapons production in April 1944.
However he attracted criticism from the Gestapo and also the SD because of his work at the
camp.
He was criticised often by the forces for being too lenient and soft on prisoners despite
the huge death toll.
The Gestapo and SD believed that he should have driven more people further to their deaths.
He was seen as too soft, and they also criticised how he selected some of the Kapos and prisoner
functionaries to work, as he selected a number of German Communist inmates for these positions,
and the Gestapo suspected he could have had communist sympathies.
But because of this, his reputation was damaged as in November 1944, many of the Kapos be
appointed were found to have been involved in resistance inside Mittelbau-Dora.
They had been involved in sabotaging the V-Weapons project and not making the armaments to specification,
and this cost the German army a huge fortune.
They were creating rockets which would not work because of the sabotage, and on top of
this Otto Forschner failed to report a suspicious payment of 10,000 reichsmarks which he had
been given as the boss of Mittelwerk.
Because of this in February 1945, he was sacked as the Commandant and then he was replaced
by Auschwitz Commandant Richard Baer.
He did serve briefly as the commandant of a sub-camp known as Kaufering, which fell
undertake Dachau complex.
Here 15,000 prisoners died, but in April 1945 as the camp was liberated he was arrested
by the American Army.
He was then considered a defendant in the Dachau Concentration Camp trial, and he was
tried along with 40 other officials who worked at sub camps and at Dachau.
Of the defendants, 36 were sentenced to death, and 28 of them were hanged.
Otto Forschner was indicted on charges of war crimes which came from his time as the
commandant of Kaufering.
Forschner was only the commandant for a couple of months, but conditions there were terrible.
One former prisoner stated, ‘And – the attrition was very very high.
And – but there the bodies weren't burned.
They were taken to a site in mass graves, huge mass graves.
I don't think they have ever been found.
I wouldn't be able to find outside Kaufering.
And huge mass graves.
It's not very far from the Landberg prison […] And – it was so bad – that – we
had a lot of suicides there.
People were going into the electric wires.
And I remember, that's the only time I ever saw cannibalism.
There was so little food in '45 there out – in January, February, in March…’
In the days that Forschner was the commandant, things were terrible and prisoners were forced
on a death march, which resulted in large scale executions, and killings.
He would have received information as to the death marches, but the crimes he committed
as the commandant of Mittelbau-Dora also came to light.
For this he was sentenced to death.
Many former concentration camp guards and members of staff were executed at Landsberg
Prison after the war.
A couple of gallows stood in the courtyard of the prison that took the lives of many
former Nazi guards and SS members.
On the 28th May 1946, Otto Forschner was led from his prison cell and he was flanked by
members of the military police who confirmed his identity at the bottom of the stairs of
the gallows.
A priest also accompanied him to his execution, and then Forschner was led up the stairs of
the gallows.
The hangman secured the noose around his neck after they placed a black cap over his head.
Quickly he released the lever and following this Otto Forschner plunged through there
trapdoor.
Otto Forscher was the commandant of two concentration camps who throughout the Second World War
was involved in the running of some of the most barbaric and brutal camps used by the
Nazis to inflict pain and suffering onto thousands of people.
Despite him attracting some criticism at times for not being harsh enough, he was a man who
drove thousands of people to their deaths, and he oversaw some of the most brutal conditions
inside the concentration camps.
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