The Battle of Stalingrad ended on February 2, 1943, when the German Sixth Army capitulated after five months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties. Exhausted of ammunition and food, it became the first of Hitler's field armies to surrender during World War II. The battle proved a decisive psychological turning point, ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward.
The Soviet Army remained on the offensive. On January 27, 1945, it entered Auschwitz, the largest of the extermination centers, and liberated more than 7,000 remaining prisoners, most of them ill and dying. It is estimated that a minimum of 1.3 million people were deported to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945, and of these at least 1.1 million were murdered.
One of the main perpetrators responsible for these atrocities was Otto Moll.
Otto Moll was born on March 4, 1915, in Hohen Schönberg, then part of the German Empire. Following World War I, which ended on November 11, 1918, a number of right-wing extremist political groups emerged in Germany. One of them was the Nazi Party, which claimed that the Jews had done much to spread defeatism and thus destroy the German army.
Nazis interpreted the terms of the Versailles peace treaty and the steep compensation payments it entailed as revenge by the victors and a glaring injustice. Beginning with the onset of the Great Depression, the Nazi Party rose rapidly from obscurity to political prominence, becoming the largest party in the German Parliament in 1932 with 33.1 percent of the vote. The Communists also gained votes, winning 16.9 percent.
As a result, the small circle around President Paul von Hindenburg came to believe that the Nazi Party was Germany's only hope to forestall political chaos ending in a communist takeover. Nazi negotiators and propagandists did much to enhance this impression. On January 30, 1933, President von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany. Otto Moll was 17 years old.
Three years later, in 1936, Moll joined the SS after having graduated from a professional gardening school. The SS, or Schutzstaffel, had originally been established in April 1925 to protect Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders and speakers and to provide security for political meetings. SS members were subject to strict military discipline and swore an oath of complete loyalty to Hitler and those appointed by him.
In January 1929, Heinrich Himmler became head of the SS, and the organization greatly expanded in size and strength. By the time Hitler came to power in 1933, Himmler had made the SS the dominant organization within the Reich. From the beginning of the Nazi regime, Hitler entrusted the SS first and foremost with the removal and eventual murder of political and so-called racial enemies of the regime.
The SS became a virtual state within a state in Nazi Germany, staffed by men who perceived themselves as the racial elite of the Nazi future. From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for solving the so-called Jewish question, which culminated in 1941 when the leadership planned, coordinated, and directed the so-called Final Solution. This was the genocide of European Jews during World War II, also known as the Holocaust.
SS officers were directly responsible for the management of concentration camps where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
Otto Moll was musically active and became a member of the SS marching band. During a journey with his marching band from Berlin to Oranienburg, the SS truck collided with a car. One SS man was killed and Moll was critically injured. He was treated in a Berlin hospital for several months, suffering from a fractured skull and losing an eye.
It has been suggested that his brain was damaged too, and that 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, 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. At Sachsenhausen, Otto Moll worked as head of the gardener work detail and was protected by Rudolf Höss, who belonged to the camp's leadership.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The last operational Polish unit surrendered on October 6. The German occupation of Poland was exceptionally brutal. The Nazis considered Poles racially inferior and launched a campaign of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and to reduce the Poles to a servile population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.
In May 1940, around 60 kilometers west of Krakow, the Germans established the Auschwitz concentration camp. The direct reason for its establishment was that mass arrests of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing local prisons. The camp's commandant became Rudolf Höss, and the first 30 prisoners, German criminals with green badges, arrived in Auschwitz on May 20, 1940, from the Sachsenhausen camp.
The "greens," as these 30 German prisoners were called, did much to establish the sadism of early camp life, directed particularly at Polish inmates. The first transport of Polish male prisoners, including Catholic priests and Jews, arrived in Auschwitz on June 14, 1940, from Tarnow in Poland. They were given serial numbers 31 to 758.
On May 2, 1941, Höss brought Otto Moll to Auschwitz. Moll lived in the camp with his wife and two daughters. His first wife, Elli, had also worked in the concentration camp but died of blood poisoning in 1940. Moll 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 the prisoners, and because he had a glass eye he had the nickname Cyclops.
At Auschwitz, Moll first supervised the agricultural commando. Thanks to his drive and toughness, in June 1942 he became leader of the notorious penal company, to which 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 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 the killing of people. Before the large crematoria and gas chambers were set up in Birkenau, the largest of the more than 40 camps and subcamps that made up the Auschwitz complex, Moll and his Nazi comrade 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, in which several hundred 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 on the platform, the arrivals were lined up into two columns: men and boys in one, women and girls in the other.
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. Veteran prisoners gathered the belongings of the new arrivals in an area known as Canada, which consisted of several barracks 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. The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them and made the new arrivals believe that they were being sent to the camp where work was waiting for them, but that first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe.
They were taken into the gas chambers, and after the doors were shut, SS men dropped Zyklon B pellets through vents in the roof or holes in the side of the chamber.
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 three 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 the guardhouse wall, killing him on the spot. Moll then drove up to the truck and threw the child's lifeless corpse to his mother.
For his merit in killing innocent men, women, and children, Hitler decorated Moll with the War Merit Cross First Class with Swords on April 20, 1943. This cast significant light on his importance in the extermination of Jews. In addition to him, only Commandant Höss and Josef Klehr, 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 subcamps. In May 1944, he returned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where he was appointed head of all crematoria by camp commandant Rudolf Höss.
During this period, the extermination of Hungarian Jews was to take place. Moll was aware that the plan to handle 10,000 to 15,000 corpses per day would overwhelm the crematoria ovens. So just before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, Moll ordered fire pits to be dug alongside the crematoria, which he provided with a gutter system of his own design.
People from the incoming transports were to be shot and then burned in these fire pits. In this way, fat from the burning corpses would be drained off, collected by inmates with buckets, and tipped into the flames to burn any remaining corpses.
In speeches to new arrivals who were unaware of what awaited them, Moll repeated that they were being sent to the camp where work was waiting for them, but that first they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. Moll told them politely to hang their clothing on hooks, take a shower, and even promised they would be provided with soup and tea or coffee.
They were taken into the gas chambers, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas. The victims were dead within 20 minutes. Johann Kremer, the SS doctor who oversaw the gassings, testified that the shouting and screaming of the victims could be heard through the opening and that it was clear they fought for their lives.
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.
When there were so many incoming transports that the gas chambers in the crematoria were incapable of containing all the new arrivals, Moll's fire pits were used to burn the corpses. The victims were generally shot one at a time, often by Moll himself or by other men, especially Erich Muhsfeldt.
When some people asked Moll to spare their lives, he replied that an order is an order and then killed them without any remorse. The Jews were shot in the back of the head and dropped into the 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 toward the Jews, especially women and children. When he did not throw children into the fire alive with a smile on his face, he would kick them to death. The prisoners did not consider him a human and called him "Schweinehund," which meant pig butcher.
One Holocaust survivor testified that Moll was called a pig butcher because he was not a human being but a butcher who threw children alive into the fire. 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 that they would fall over, and he would watch them burn alive.
The fire pits were also used for smaller groups of victims consisting of up to 200 people. The reason was that using Zyklon B gas for such a small number of people was considered uneconomical and therefore wasteful. As a result, the Germans drove Hungarian children as well as the sick, old, and disabled by truck to the fire pits, where Moll and his colleagues, instructed to shoot them by hand or throw them alive into the flames, were waiting.
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 were personally thrown alive by Moll into the 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 an excellent marksman, and when he felt that prisoners from the Sonderkommando were not working properly, he would shoot them from considerable distances.
One of the very few survivors of the Sonderkommando, a Slovak prisoner named Filip Müller, described Moll's atrocities in the greatest detail. Among other things, Müller reported on the sadistic death torture of "frog swimming" practiced by Otto Moll. Moll chased selected prisoners into one of the extinguishing ponds next to the crematoria and forced them at gunpoint to swim there, croaking constantly until they died of exhaustion.
Müller also recalled how Otto Moll invented camp games such as "brick bashing," in which two groups of prisoners had to smash as many bricks as possible within a certain amount of time, and the losing team was then shot on the spot by Moll. Among Moll's many sadistic specialties also belonged beating people with clubs and iron bars or throwing them against the 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 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. These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as death marches. The prisoners had to march over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions. Inmates suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure on these marches.
Otto Moll led one such death march, and in February 1945 he arrived in Kaufering, the common name of a system of 11 subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp system. The conditions in Kaufering were horrible. The 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 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 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 the Kaufering camp's existence between June 1944 and April 1945, 15,000 out of the 30,000 prisoners died from hunger, disease, execution, or during the death marches.
A few days before the subcamps of Kaufering were liberated between April 25 and April 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 any further. Moll himself shot 26 of them.
On April 28, 1945, Otto Moll arrived at Dachau. When the camp was liberated on the following day by the US 7th Army's 45th Infantry Division, the soldiers could smell not only human excrement but also decaying bodies. Many of these soldiers 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 at the beginning of May 1945 and finally faced justice for his crimes. From November 15, 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 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 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 his involvement in the killing of Jews. However, if he hoped that his lies would help him escape justice, he was wrong.
On May 28, 1946, Otto Moll, then 31 years old, was executed in the courtyard of the Landsberg prison. There were no tears shed for Otto Moll.