The Allied landings in Normandy on June 6, 1944, marked a turning point in World War II and the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. The following month, in July 1944, Soviet forces liberated Majdanek, the first major Nazi camp in German-occupied Poland. Only after the liberation of the concentration camps did the full extent of the Nazi horrors become known to the world.
Because of forced labor and lack of food, only a small percentage of concentration camp inmates survived. Compounded by months and years of mistreatment and torture, many resembled skeletons and were so weak they could hardly move. One of the most infamous perpetrators of this criminal regime was Otto Moll.
Otto Moll was born on March 4, 1915, in Hohenschönberg, then part of the German Empire. He was 17 years old when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, by President Paul von Hindenburg.
Hitler and the Nazi Party rose to power amid the social and political circumstances of interwar Germany. Many Germans could not accept their country's defeat in World War I, arguing that starvation and weakness in the rear had paralyzed the front and caused its collapse. They claimed the Jews had spread defeatism and destroyed the German army.
They interpreted the Versailles Peace Treaty and its steep compensation payments as revenge by the victors and a glaring injustice. This frustration, along with warnings about the growing danger of communism, created fertile soil for radical right-wing groups such as the Nazi Party.
Immediately after Hitler came to power, Germany became a dictatorship. The Nazi regime quickly restricted the civil and human rights of Jews and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others classified as dangerous.
The first concentration camp, Dachau, was established in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler became Chancellor. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos. These locations were used for forced labor, detention of people deemed enemies of the state, and the mass murder of millions.
In 1936, three years after the Nazi Party came to power, Otto Moll joined the SS after graduating from a professional gardening school. He was musically active and became a member of the SS marching band.
During a journey with his 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 also damaged. 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, located north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people, and later Soviet civilians. One of its most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son, who died there in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
At Sachsenhausen, Otto Moll worked as head of the gardeners work detail and was protected by Rudolf Höss, who belonged to the camp's leadership. After Höss became commandant of Auschwitz, he brought Moll there on May 2, 1941.
During all his time at Auschwitz, Moll lived there with his wife and two daughters. His first wife, Eleonore, 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 particular sadism toward prisoners, and because he had a glass eye, he was nicknamed Cyclops.
At Auschwitz, Moll first supervised an agricultural commando. In June 1942, he became leader of the notorious penal company, to which prisoners were assigned for reasons including escape attempts, contact with civilians, or illegal possession of food, money, and additional clothing.
Assignment to the penal company, situated in the infamous Block 11, lasted from one month to one year. Prisoners were completely isolated from other prisoners, had to perform the hardest labor, and were continually beaten by SS men and prisoner functionaries.
After the expansion of Auschwitz into an extermination camp, ordered by SS head Heinrich Himmler, Moll devoted himself primarily to killing. Before the large crematoria and gas chambers were set up in Auschwitz-Birkenau, Moll and Franz Hössler directed mass killings in crematorium 1 and the gas chambers of the so-called bunkers 1 and 2.
Mass graves were dug in their immediate vicinity, where several hundred thousand corpses were buried until September 1942. After some deaths among SS men and their relatives from contaminated groundwater, the mass graves were opened and the corpses burned from September to November of that 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, arrivals were lined up into two columns, men and boys in one and women and girls in the other.
SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed the selection. The only criterion was the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate, for labor or for death, was determined at will. Veteran prisoners gathered the belongings of new arrivals in an area known as Canada, consisting of several barracks used to store stolen belongings.
Trucks carried those too infirm to walk, and the rest marched. Before entering the gas chambers, people were ordered to disrobe. In crematorium 1, they undressed either in a walled yard or an antechamber. Wooden barracks were erected for this purpose at bunkers 1 and 2, and at crematoria 2 to 5 there were special undressing rooms.
On one occasion, a 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, driving behind the truck, took the child by the neck and then by the leg and smashed his head against the guardhouse wall, killing him on the spot. Moll then drove up to the truck and threw the child's corpse to his mother.
Smashing children into 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 April 20, 1943. This event casts significant light on his importance in the extermination of Jews. Besides him, only Commandant Höss and Josef Klehr, head of the SS disinfection commando, received this medal among Auschwitz personnel.
From September 1943 to May 1944, Moll was the first commandant of Fürstengrube and Gleiwitz I, which were Auschwitz subcamps. In May 1944, he returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where commandant Rudolf Höss appointed him head of all crematoria.
During this period, the extermination of Hungarian Jews was to take place. Moll was aware that the planned 10,000 to 15,000 corpses per day would overwhelm the crematoria's ovens. Just before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, he ordered fire pits dug alongside the 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 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 new arrivals, Moll repeated that they were being sent to a camp where work awaited 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 with soup and tea or coffee. Instead, 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 holding them suspended while he shot them.
Sometimes there were so many incoming transports that the gas chambers could not contain all the new arrivals. The excess people were generally shot one at a time, often by Moll himself or by other SS men, especially Erich Muhsfeldt. When some people asked Moll to spare their lives, he replied, "An order is an order," and killed them without remorse.
The Jews were shot in the back of the head and dropped into fire. It sometimes happened that some prisoners put up a fight or children cried. As punishment, Moll would throw them into the burning pits alive.
Even among the SS men, Moll was notorious for his cruelty and hatred toward Jews, especially women and children. When he did not throw children into the fire alive, he would kick them to death with a smile on his face. Prisoners did not consider him human and called 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 toward them in a rage, chasing them toward the fire pits while biting and snapping at their legs and buttocks. Moll would then shoot the women in the stomach so they would fall over, and watch them burn to death.
The fire pits were also used for smaller groups of up to 200 victims, since the use of poison gas for such a small number was considered uneconomical and therefore a waste. Hungarian children, as well as the sick, old, and disabled, were driven by truck to the fire pits by Moll or colleagues instructed to shoot them by hand or throw them alive into the flames.
During eight 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. Upon arrival and after selection, SS functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.
As head of all crematoria, Moll also directed the work of the Jewish Sonderkommando, a unit of camp 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 Jewish Sonderkommando members, he poured gasoline over him and set him on fire. Moll was also known for being a great shooter, and when he felt that Sonderkommando prisoners were not working properly, he would shoot them from considerable distances.
Among Moll's many sadistic specialties were 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 head of the Gleiwitz I subcamp.
In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz 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 cold weather, starvation, and exposure on these marches.
Otto Moll led one such death march, and in February 1945 he arrived at Kaufering, the common name of a system of 11 subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp system. The conditions in Kaufering were horrible.
Prisoners deported to each of the 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 spread on the floor. What little food they had was taken by the SS guards, and those who were sick were fed even less. Some prisoners were so desperate to escape their horrible reality that they tried to commit suicide by throwing themselves into the electrical fencing.
At Kaufering, Moll abused and killed prisoners, as well as willfully neglecting their care. During Kaufering camp's existence between June 1944 and April 1945, 15,000 out of 30,000 prisoners died from hunger, disease, executions, or during death marches.
A few days before the Kaufering subcamps were liberated between April 24 and 27, 1945, by the 7th 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. Moll himself shot 26 of them.
On April 28, 1945, Otto Moll arrived at Dachau. When the camp was liberated the following day by the US 7th Army's 45th Infantry Division, conditions in the camp were terrible. Soldiers could smell not only human excrement but also decaying bodies, and many cried or vomited as they found dozens of railroad cars filled with thousands of dead bodies and 30,000 survivors who looked like walking skeletons. Many inmates were sick and dying from typhus epidemics and starvation.
Otto Moll was arrested and finally faced justice. In November 1945, he was tried at the first Dachau trial, held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp. On December 13, 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.
Moll's crimes in 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 his lies would help him escape justice, he was wrong. In the end, some justice was served. On May 28, 1946, Otto Moll, then 31 years old, was executed in Landsberg prison. There were no tears shed for Otto Moll.