Gustav Willhaus was born on September 2, 1910, in Forbach, then part of the German Empire. He came from a Protestant family and, after completing elementary school, trained as a construction mechanic.
From 1924 to 1928, Willhaus was a member of the SA, the Nazi paramilitary force also known as the Stormtroopers or Brownshirts. He then worked in France from 1928 to 1929, and upon returning to Germany he joined the Hitler Youth, the Nazi organization designed to train boys as future fighters and soldiers.
In June 1932, Willhaus joined the Nazi Party, and the following month he became a member of the SS. He had a reputation as a street brawler and sustained serious injuries during a street fight that forced him to stay in the hospital for an extended period.
On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. During this period, Willhaus served in the first battalion of the 85th SS regiment stationed in Saarbrücken.
His involvement included active participation in propaganda and agitation ahead of the Saar territory referendum held in January 1935. The referendum determined the future sovereignty of the Saar Basin, a region between France and Germany that had been placed under League of Nations administration for 15 years after World War I. More than 90 percent voted in favor of reuniting with Germany.
Despite severe spelling difficulties, and reports that even described him as illiterate, Willhaus became sales manager for the National Socialist newspaper Westmark in 1935. In October 1935, he married Elisabeth Riedel, a worker at the Nazi newspaper. The marriage produced one daughter.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. The following year, Willhaus enlisted in the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS.
In November 1941, holding the rank of SS Untersturmführer, equivalent to second lieutenant, Willhaus was transferred to Lviv, today the largest city in western Ukraine and then part of the General Government in German-occupied Poland. There he became a deputy manager at the local branch of the German Armaments Works, or DAW.
With the backing of SS Brigadier Fritz Katzmann, commander of the SS and police district Galicia, Willhaus quickly gained autonomy from his former superior Fritz Gebauer. By March 1942, he had assumed command as head of a labor camp for Jews located next to, but separate from, the DAW facilities at 134 Janowska Street in the northwestern part of the city. It became known as the Janowska camp.
Willhaus moved into a villa at the heart of the camp, and in the summer of 1942 his wife and three-year-old daughter joined him there. A staff of 12 to 15 SS officers administered the camp, while the majority of the guards were Ukrainians who had volunteered for service with the SS.
Living conditions in the camp were brutal, and inmates were often given meaningless tasks designed to exhaust them before their deaths. Many prisoners chose to end their lives by hanging themselves in the barracks rather than endure further suffering.
Upon returning from work, prisoners were forced to run back into the camp. Willhaus and his assistant Fred Vok singled out Jews showing signs of fatigue, leaving them between rows of barbed wire to die.
Each morning, all prisoners faced a roll call inspection by an SS officer, and those who did not pass were immediately executed. One high-ranking SS officer had a particular habit during roll calls: if he disliked a prisoner's appearance, he would shoot him in the back of the neck.
Each SS officer had a preferred method of killing. Victims were murdered for minor offenses, for working slowly, or without reason, with the execution method depending on the mood of the perpetrator. Methods included shooting, beating, choking, hanging, crucifixion upside down, or killing with knives and axes. Women also suffered brutal deaths, often being beaten or fatally stabbed.
In the Janowska camp, the Nazis conducted torture and executions to music. The orchestra members, themselves inmates of the camp, were required to always play the same tune, the "Tango of Death." Among them were noted Jewish musicians from the prewar Polish Lviv Municipal Theater.
During hangings, the Nazis ordered the orchestra to play the tango, and during tortures the musicians had to play the foxtrot. Some evenings, the orchestra musicians were made to play under the camp commander's windows for hours on end.
Shortly before the camp's liquidation, the Nazis ordered 40 orchestra musicians to form a circle. Guards stood tightly around them and commanded them to play. First the orchestra conductor, Jakub Mund, was executed. Then the Nazi commandant ordered the musicians to come to the center of the circle one by one, put their instruments on the ground, strip naked, and be murdered by a shot to the head.
Willhaus, as camp commandant, not only issued murderous orders but also personally tortured and killed Jews on numerous occasions. He would often let sick inmates freeze to death during roll calls or have them placed in water barrels.
Witness accounts depict Willhaus killing his victims without hesitation, yet without visible enthusiasm, treating murder as routine. On Adolf Hitler's 54th birthday, April 20, 1943, he personally shot 54 Jews for entertainment. Willhaus would also shoot prisoners from the terrace of his villa.
His wife Elisabeth was not personally disturbed by the sound of gunfire. In fact, she enjoyed it and often took the rifle into her own hands. She passed the long hours of being a housewife by standing on the terrace and shooting at innocent Jewish prisoners working in her garden.
Her young daughter often watched in amusement and, out of naivety, even clapped when her mother managed to hit an innocent Jewish prisoner with a first shot.
The camp underwent a change in March 1942, when the mass deportation of Jews from the Eastern Galicia region to the Belzec death camp began. Janowska was used as a transit camp, and some Jews were kept there while others were deported to Belzec, where they were murdered in gas chambers. Continual selections took place at Janowska, and those deemed unfit for work were also deported to Belzec.
Willhaus also participated in the mass executions of thousands of Lviv Jews, which took place in the Piaski Ravine directly next to the Janowska camp. In his villa, Willhaus and his wife collected possessions of the murdered, including high-quality clothing, artworks, and various valuable items.
Willhaus remained in constant conflict with his former superior Fritz Gebauer, who still served as head of the Lviv branch of the DAW. Both officers continually engaged in disputes over authority, competed for laborers and materials, and sought to harm each other in various ways, including murdering prisoners belonging to the other. Their mutual animosity was so intense that they often disregarded even basic military protocols.
Additionally, Willhaus named his dog Fritz, the same name as Gebauer, and developed a habit of showering the animal with elaborate curses. In June 1942, Willhaus was awarded the War Merit Cross Second Class for his contributions to the establishment of the Janowska camp.
The evacuation of the Janowska camp began in November 1943, as the Nazis attempted to destroy the traces of mass murder. They forced the prisoners to open the mass graves and burn the bodies.
On November 19, 1943, these prisoners organized an uprising and a mass escape attempt. A few succeeded in escaping, but most were recaptured and killed. The SS staff and their local auxiliaries murdered at least 6,000 surviving Jews from the various forced labor camps in Galicia when the Janowska camp was liquidated in November 1943.
At that time, Willhaus was no longer the Janowska camp commandant. From July 1943, he had been assigned to a Croatian SS volunteer division and later served with other Waffen-SS units.
The Soviets liberated Lviv in July 1944 and carried out a number of investigations into the war crimes committed at Janowska camp. The Soviet Extraordinary State Commission determined that over 200,000 people were murdered at Janowska during its operation. The ashes, mixed with crushed bones, were buried to a depth of two meters in various places.
After the war, Leon Weliczker Wells gave firsthand testimony about the atrocities the Nazis had committed in the camp. He was a Jewish prisoner forced by the Nazis to exhume mass graves and burn the bodies, and he later managed to escape the Janowska camp during the November 1943 uprising.
Leon told the commission that between June 6 and November 20, 1943, his team burned more than 310,000 bodies, including 170,000 in the immediate vicinity of the camp and another 140,000 or more in the area of eastern Lviv. He even testified at Adolf Eichmann's trial in 1961 and repeated the claim of a few hundred thousand victims.
In the aftermath of these horrific events, attention turned to individual acts of plundering. Because Willhaus stole countless valuable items from the Jewish victims of the camp, an investigation case was filed against him. However, in mid-August 1944, the case was dropped.
In November of the same year, Willhaus was promoted to SS Obersturmführer, equivalent to first lieutenant. He was never tried for the atrocities he had committed, but justice eventually caught up with him. He was 34 years old when he was killed in action on March 29, 1945, in Steinfischbach, 60 kilometers northeast of Frankfurt.