Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll was born on March 4, 1915, in Hohen Schönberg, then part of the German Empire. When Reich President Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Reich Chancellor on January 30, 1933, Moll was 17 years old.
After the Nazi takeover, the regime established a series of detention sites officially called concentration camps. In the 1930s their main purpose was to imprison and intimidate leaders of political, social, and cultural movements seen as threats to the regime.
Moll trained as a gardener and joined the SS on May 30, 1935. In Nazi Germany the SS controlled both the German police forces and the concentration camp system.
From 1939 the SS took responsibility for the so-called Jewish problem. After 1941 its leadership planned, coordinated, and directed the so-called Final Solution, the destruction of European Jews now known as the Holocaust.
Moll was musically active and played in an SS band that performed in SS barracks and public places. In January 1937, while the band traveled from Bernau to Uranienburg, an SS truck collided with a car. Moll was critically injured and was treated for months in a hospital in Bernau. He suffered a skull fracture and lost an eye.
It is suspected that the accident damaged his frontal lobe, an organic injury that can lead to psychological disorders. As a result, Moll became a physically and mentally ill man whom the criminal Nazi regime deliberately used as a murderer.
From 1938 Moll worked at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he led a gardening detail under the protection of Rudolf Höss, who belonged to the camp leadership.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. The last capable Polish unit capitulated on October 6 of that year, and in May 1940 the Germans established the Auschwitz concentration camp about 60 kilometers west of Kraków.
The immediate reason for building the camp was that mass arrests of Poles exceeded the capacity of existing local prisons. The camp commander was Rudolf Höss, Moll's former superior. The first 30 prisoners, German criminals with green triangles, arrived at Auschwitz from Sachsenhausen on May 20, 1940.
These 30 German prisoners, known as the Greens, decisively shaped the sadism of early camp life, which was directed especially against Polish prisoners. The first transport of Polish male prisoners arrived on June 4, 1940, when the Germans deported a group of 728 Poles from the prison in Tarnów to Auschwitz.
Among them were soldiers of the September campaign, members of underground resistance groups, high school students, university students, and a small group of Polish Jews. They received prisoner numbers 31 to 758.
On May 2, 1941, camp commander Rudolf Höss brought Otto Moll to Auschwitz, where he lived in the camp complex with his second wife and two children, a boy and a girl. His first wife Elli had also worked in a concentration camp but died of blood poisoning in 1940. Only a few weeks after her death, Moll married again.
Many former Auschwitz prisoners described Moll as the worst SS man in the entire camp. Because of his glass eye, the prisoners called him Cyclops. He stood out for particular sadism toward the prisoners.
A former Auschwitz prisoner, Benjamin Jacobs, later recalled that Moll's smooth blond hair was cut short, and that in his chiseled face sat a few cold blue eyes, only one of which was real. When he spoke, only the living eye moved. He seemed to have no real feeling in the heart beating beneath his arched chest.
In Auschwitz, Moll initially led an agricultural detail. Josef Glusack, who worked under Moll and survived the Holocaust, later recalled that Moll took particular pleasure in tormenting the prisoners and driving them to work.
Glusack remembered how a prisoner once went into a greenhouse and picked a few onion leaves. Moll noticed, had the prisoner brought to him, took him to a barrel of liquid human fertilizer, stuck him headfirst into it, pulled him out again, and ordered other prisoners to take him to a nearby water basin. The next day the prisoner did not come to work. It was clear that he had died.
With this unit they planted cabbage and cauliflower. Moll was intent on wearing the prisoners down and constantly struck with his whip. Glusack recalled that Moll asked, "Are you cold?" Naturally everyone said yes, because it was very cold at the time. They wore trousers and shirts but no jackets, and the cold days made things very hard for them.
Moll ordered a prisoner to run in a circle around them, and the SS man guarding them fired aimed shots at the runner. About ten prisoners were shot in this way.
Thanks to his commitment and brutality, Moll was appointed head of the notorious penal company in June 1942. Prisoners were sent there for various reasons, such as escape attempts, contact with civilians, or possession of food, money, or extra clothing.
The stay in the penal company, housed in the notorious Block 11, lasted between one month and one year. The prisoners there were completely isolated from the rest of the camp inmates, had to perform the heaviest physical labor, and were constantly mistreated by SS men and functionary prisoners.
Auschwitz II Birkenau, which also served as an extermination center and played a central role in the German plan to murder the Jews of Europe, began operating on March 1, 1942. In Birkenau, Moll from then on devoted himself primarily to the murder of people.
Jewish deportees arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau were immediately subjected to a selection. The selection on the ramp proceeded as follows. After the people got out of the train cars, families were separated and everyone was lined up in two rows.
In one row stood men and older boys; in the other stood women and children of both sexes. They were then led to the camp doctors and other officials who carried out the selection. These usually decided on sight, sometimes supplemented by a brief statement of age and occupation, whether someone was allowed to live or had to die.
Henrik Mandelbaum, who survived Auschwitz, later recalled that people truly believed it was a bath, especially when it was presented to them that way during the journey or directly upon arrival at Auschwitz.
The latter was the specialty of Hauptscharführer Otto Moll, who gave speeches and told people they had come to perform well-paid work. Although they had left their possessions behind, they could build a new life here and acquire new wealth.
He then told them to undress and explained that they would receive fresh clothing because they were going to a place where cleanliness was important and the spread of disease had to be prevented. The gullible people believed every word, undressed, and then entered the supposed shower.
They were not allowed to take valuables with them, only towels and soap. The Germans told them they would get all valuables back in the undressing room. Once the gas chamber was full and the doors were tightly closed, they released Zyklon B, which suffocated the people.
At the same time, because there were also elderly, sick, and disabled people among the transports, a fake ambulance with Red Cross markings drove around, manned by two SS men, to deceive the victims. The sick were brought into the vehicle and then also gassed.
The victims suffocated within 20 minutes. Johann Kremer, the SS doctor who supervised the gassings, later testified that the screaming and whimpering of the victims could be heard through the opening, and it was clear that they were fighting for their lives.
On one occasion a truck full of prisoners drove to the gas chamber. When it suddenly turned sharply, a roughly three-year-old child of a woman fell out. Moll, who was driving behind the truck, first grabbed the child by the neck, then by the leg, and struck its head against the wall of a guard building. The child died immediately. Moll then drove to the truck and threw the child's lifeless body back to its mother.
For his services in the murder of innocent men, women, and children, Otto Moll was awarded the War Merit Cross First Class with Swords on April 20, 1943. This further underlines his central role in the destruction of the Jews. Besides him, only camp commander Rudolf Höss and Josef Klehr, head of the SS disinfection command, were honored with this award among the Auschwitz personnel.
From September 1943 to May 1944, Moll was the first camp leader of the Auschwitz subcamps Fürstengrube and Gleiwitz I. The prisoners there worked, among other things, repairing damaged wagons in the locksmith shop and forge, building roads, and constructing a nearby airfield. From late summer 1944 they were deployed in two 12-hour shifts.
Samuel Stöger, who lost his entire family of 13 relatives during the German occupation of Poland, including his wife and child, later recalled that German foremen who supervised their work in the workshops reported them to the camp leadership for even the smallest offenses.
For example, they were reported for trying to warm themselves at a radiator or for eating leftover food found somewhere. Based on these reports, Moll organized the so-called payment. By this he meant the Sunday punishment by flogging.
This took place every Sunday at noon on two specially built trestles. The blows were carried out by assigned functionary prisoners or SS men. The usual punishment was 50 lashes. Moll announced the sentences personally.
Stöger further reported that Moll also shot prisoners himself for the most trivial incidents. Once he caught Stöger cooking potatoes he had received in the repair workshop. He assumed Stöger had stolen them from the pantry and did not believe his explanations.
He beat Stöger, set his dog on him, and then ordered him to run, as he called it, to freedom, while pointing at the barbed wire fence. When Stöger refused, Moll threatened him with a revolver.
With no other choice, Stöger ran to the fence and began to climb it. Four shots were immediately fired from the watchtower. None hit him. Almost at the same moment, Moll's deputy drove by; he supervised their work in the workshop and knew Stöger was hardworking. He asked Moll for mercy and saved Stöger's life.
Such incidents were very common. The day before Stöger's incident, Moll had shot two of his friends from Kraków in the same way. Prisoners who for some reason received no other work assignment had to carry stones uselessly from a nearby slag heap into the camp and back on Moll's orders. Nearly 100 prisoners from Gleiwitz I died as a result of mistreatment, hunger, and the heaviest physical labor.
In May 1944 Otto Moll returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where camp commander Rudolf Höss appointed him head of all crematoria. During this time the systematic destruction of the Hungarian Jews began.
Moll was aware that the planned 10,000 to 15,000 corpses per day would exceed the capacity of the crematorium ovens. Therefore, even before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, he had fire pits dug next to the crematoria, which he equipped with a specially designed channel system.
People from the arriving transports were to be shot and then burned in these pits. The fat of the burning bodies was drained off, collected by prisoners in buckets, and poured back into the fire to feed the flames.
Moll often strolled among the new arrivals intended for gassing, watched them undress, and lured small children away from their mothers with sweets, only to throw them into the boiling fat of the fire pits.
On several occasions he was observed lifting children by the hair and then shooting them while they hung in the air. When so many transports arrived that the gas chamber and crematoria were no longer sufficient, Moll's fire pits were used to burn the corpses.
The surplus people were usually shot individually, often by Moll himself or by other SS men, especially Erich Mussfeld. When some begged to be left alive, Moll answered that an order is an order and killed them without any sign of remorse.
The victims were killed with a shot to the back of the head and thrown directly into the fire. When some resisted or children cried, Moll threw them into the flames alive as punishment.
Moll also led particularly pretty Jewish women to the edge of the fire pits to enjoy their fear. He whispered obscene words in their ears, then shot them with a shot to the back of the head and let their bodies fall into the fire.
Another of his cruelties was setting his dog on naked women. The dog jumped angrily at them, bit them in the legs and buttocks, and drove them toward the fire pits. Moll then shot them in the stomach so that they fell and burned alive.
The fire pits were also used for smaller groups of victims of up to 200 people. The reason was that using Zyklon B for such small groups was considered uneconomical and was therefore avoided.
For this reason, Hungarian children as well as sick, old, and disabled people were driven by truck to the fire pits. Moll and his colleagues, who had received the order to shoot them by hand or throw them alive into the fire, were already waiting for them.
During the eight weeks from May 15 to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officers, under the guidance of German SS members, deported about 424,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau. There they were selected upon arrival, and SS officials murdered the majority of them in the gas chambers.
After the war, Holocaust survivor Henrik Tauber recalled that Moll took gold items from the box in which the valuables stolen from the deportees were kept and kept them for himself in his briefcase. From the belongings left behind by the gassed victims, he took furs and large quantities of food, especially fat and oil.
With a smile on his face, he then said to the SS men standing around him that one should stock up on supplies, because lean times were certain to come.
As head of all crematoria, Moll was also responsible for the work of the Jewish Sonderkommando, a unit of camp prisoners forced to help dispose of the victims from the gas chambers. Anyone who refused to do the terrible work of the Sonderkommando was thrown alive into the burning oven by Moll personally.
The prisoners did not regard him as a human being and called him the pig butcher. One survivor later testified that Moll was called the pig butcher because he was not a human being but a villain who threw children alive into the fire.
On one occasion he found a gold ring and a watch on a member of the Jewish Sonderkommando. He then poured gasoline over the prisoner and locked him in a cold crematorium oven. The prisoner's name was Labe. He was 20 years old.
The Auschwitz survivor Henrik Tauber, already mentioned, recalled what happened next. Beneath the oven was an ash pit into which gasoline was poured. The flames reached up into the combustion chamber where Labe was locked in. After a few minutes the oven was opened and Labe, completely burned, ran out.
He was then ordered to run around the courtyard of the crematorium and shout that he was a thief. He was then told to climb onto the crematorium's barbed wire fence, which was not electrified during the day. When he reached the fence, Moll shot him.
Moll was also known as an excellent marksman and shot Sonderkommando prisoners from a great distance when he felt they were not working quickly or thoroughly enough.
One of the few survivors of the Sonderkommando, the Slovak prisoner Filip Müller, described Moll's cruelties in particular detail. Müller reported, among other things, about the sadistic death torture of frog swimming, which had been invented by Otto Moll.
Moll drove selected prisoners at gunpoint into a firefighting pool next to the crematorium and forced them to swim and croak like frogs without interruption until they died of exhaustion.
Müller also recalled another of his so-called camp games, the so-called brick smashing. Two groups of prisoners had to smash as many bricks as possible within a certain time. The losing team was then shot on the spot by Moll.
Moll's many sadistic specialties also included beating people with clubs and iron bars and throwing prisoners against the electrified fence.
After the end of the destruction of the Hungarian Jews, Moll returned to his function as leader of the Gleiwitz I subcamp. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet troops approached the Auschwitz camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.
SS units drove nearly 60,000 prisoners westward under guard. These forced marches of camp prisoners went down in history as death marches. The prisoners had to march long distances under extremely harsh conditions. They suffered from cold, hunger, and exhaustion.
Otto Moll led one of these death marches and arrived in February 1945 in Kaufering, a collective term for a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp. The prisoners deported to one of these camps had to build their own accommodations.
The resulting earth huts, some of them underground to protect against aerial reconnaissance, were completely inadequate for the weather conditions. Rain and snow penetrated the earth roofs, and vermin infested the huts. The prisoners had to sleep on straw that lay directly on the ground.
The few food items they had were taken from them by the SS guards, and sick prisoners received even less. There were even cases of cannibalism. Some prisoners were so desperate about their horrific reality that they tried to commit suicide by throwing themselves into the electrified fence.
In the Kaufering 2 camp, Moll was camp leader. He was responsible for the accommodation, food, and clothing of the prisoners, as well as hygiene, work assignments, and the transfer of sick prisoners. But instead of caring for them, he deliberately mistreated, murdered, and neglected them.
In March 1945, when three prisoners tried to cook some potatoes at work, Moll beat two of them with a stick. To the third he said, "You young pig, you cooked potatoes too. I will show you." He then beat him so brutally that the stick broke and the prisoner had to spend two weeks in the infirmary.
When two passersby observed the incident and saw Moll beating the prisoner, he called out to them that they should be glad the Jews were being punished.
On another occasion in April 1945, Moll knocked a Russian prisoner to the ground with a board and struck him on the head with a stone until he collapsed. The dead Russian was then carried into the forest on a stretcher.
In February 1945, on yet another occasion, Moll beat a woman several times with a stick.
The subcamps of Kaufering were liberated by the Seventh US Army between April 24 and 27, 1945. To prevent the liberation of the surviving prisoners, Otto Moll forced prisoners onto a death march toward the Dachau concentration camp.
One transport that Moll accompanied left the Kaufering 2 camp on April 25 or 26, 1945. The transport contained about 150 prisoners. Moll shot 26 of them because they had collapsed from exhaustion. Several of them were Russians and Poles.
On April 29, 1945, Otto Moll arrived in Dachau and left the camp the next day with a formation of SS members marching toward Tirol. This group soon dissolved, and Moll surrendered to the Americans on May 3 or 4, 1945, near Bad Tölz.
Finally, Otto Moll had to answer for his crimes. From November 15, 1945, he was tried in the first Dachau trial, which took place on the grounds of the former Dachau concentration camp.
During the trial Moll lied and claimed that there had been no shootings or mistreatment on the death march from Kaufering to Dachau. He also stated that the prisoners had left the camp with provisions for two days and that he personally had obtained additional food for half a day in Dachau. In reality the prisoners received no provisions at all.
Moll's crimes in Auschwitz were not part of the indictment, and he was never prosecuted for them. When asked about his time in Auschwitz, Moll claimed he had only worked there as a gardener and had no contact with prisoners.
On December 13, 1945, the US military tribunal found Otto Moll guilty of shooting 26 prisoners who had collapsed from exhaustion during the death march from Kaufering. The sentence was death by hanging.
On May 28, 1946, Otto Moll was executed at the age of 31 in the courtyard of Landsberg prison.