One of the most sadistic guards ever to serve inside the Nazi extermination machine at Auschwitz-Birkenau was hanged on May 25, 1946, at Landsberg prison, bringing an end to a life that investigators and survivors alike believed had been responsible for the deaths of roughly twenty thousand innocent people.
Otto Moll, known to prisoners and historians as the Butcher of Auschwitz, was walked to the gallows by American military guards who had taken custody of him after his capture at the end of the Second World War. He was in his early thirties when he was executed, a relatively young man whose name had become synonymous with the most depraved acts committed inside the largest and deadliest camp established by the SS.
Moll was born on March 4, 1915, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, at a time when the First World War was engulfing Europe. His early life appeared unremarkable. Before joining the Nazi apparatus, he worked as a gardener, a modest trade that would later be twisted into a grotesque parody when he was placed in charge of work details tending the grounds of a concentration camp.
He joined the SS on May 1, 1935, but the first unit he belonged to was unusual. He became part of a battalion orchestra, entertaining SS men inside barracks and training centers. In January 1937, while returning from a performance, the truck carrying him and his fellow musicians crashed, killing one of his bandmates.
Moll suffered a severe blow to the head, sustained head trauma, and lost the sight in his right eye.
Some historians have argued that this injury altered his personality, making him more volatile and violent. Others have gone further, claiming the head wound turned him into a psychopath, a man who was both mentally and physically ill. One German historian has even suggested that Moll was exploited by the SS, manipulated into becoming a monster.
Such arguments, however, have done little to diminish the horror of what he did.
After his recovery, Moll joined the SS Death’s Head unit, the formation responsible for overseeing and running the concentration and extermination camps across Nazi Germany. He was well regarded within the SS and returned to gardening duties, overseeing a work detail of prisoners who maintained the grounds. In 1941, he was transferred from Sachsenhausen to Auschwitz, which was expanding on an enormous scale under the direction of Rudolf Hoss, who had been given permission by SS chief Heinrich Himmler to build a vast camp complex designed to murder as many people as possible.
To carry out that mission, Hoss needed large numbers of guard staff, and men and women were transported to Auschwitz to serve as guards. Many of them became completely barbaric. Moll was among them.
At Auschwitz, he was initially placed in charge of prisoners who dug the mass graves for executions. Shooting was a common method of killing inside the camp, and Moll quickly distinguished himself by his enthusiasm for it.
For more than three and a half years, Moll worked in various roles at Auschwitz. In 1944, he became director of employment services at the camp and was closely linked to the crematoria at Birkenau, the main extermination center. He and Hoss were decorated together by Hitler, receiving the War Merit Cross First Class with Swords.
Moll justified whatever he demanded of inmates by screaming a single phrase: an order is an order.
By 1944, it had become clear that the crematoria at Auschwitz were not large enough to burn all the bodies of those killed in the gas chambers. Huge deportations were taking place as people from across Europe were sent to Auschwitz to be murdered. Moll forced inmates to dig open-air pits so bodies could be burned inside them when the ovens and crematoria could not cope.
He also converted a farmhouse into another gas chamber.
One former worker who observed Moll described his actions in chilling detail. He said that at that time, on average, around eighteen thousand Hungarians were murdered daily at Birkenau. Transports came from dawn until dusk.
Around twenty percent of those arriving were sent to the camp and recorded in series A and B. The rest were gassed and incinerated in the crematorium furnaces. In cases where there were not enough prisoners, they were executed by shooting and burned in pits.
As a rule, a gas chamber was only used for groups larger than two hundred people because it was uneconomical to use it for smaller groups. Sometimes, during executions by shooting, prisoners put up a fight or children cried. On those occasions, Oberscharfuhrer Moll would throw these people into the burning pits alive.
The same witness described scenes that defy comprehension. Moll ordered a naked woman to sit on the corpses near a pit while he shot prisoners and threw them onto the burning pit, ordering the woman to jump and sing. She did so in the hope of saving her life.
After executing everyone, Moll shot the woman, and she was incinerated.
On another occasion, Moll found a few rings and a watch on a boy from the witness’s group. He halted the boy in the crematoria, had him thrown into the furnace, started a fire using paper, then got him out again. He hanged him by his arms, tortured and interrogated him to find out where he had gotten the items.
The boy told him everything and identified the prisoner who had given them to him. He was then set on fire from the waist down and ordered to run toward the wires, where he was executed.
More workers continued to testify about his evil. Another member of the Sonderkommando said that Scharfuhrer Moll was the most degenerate of the lot. Before his arrival at the camp, he was in charge of the work at the bunkers where they incinerated the gas victims in pits.
He was then transferred for a while to another section. In view of the preparations necessary for the reception of convoys from Hungary in 1944, he was put in charge of all crematoria.
It was Moll who organized the large-scale extermination of people arriving in those convoys. Just before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, he ordered pits to be dug alongside crematoria five and restarted the activity of Bunker Two, which had been lying idle. In the yard of the crematory, there were notices on posts with inscriptions telling new arrivals from the transports that they were to go to the camp where work was waiting for them, but that they first had to take a bath and undergo disinfection.
For this, it was necessary for them to undress and put all their valuables in baskets specifically placed for that purpose. Moll repeated the same thing in his speeches to the new arrivals.
There were so many convoys that sometimes the gas chambers were incapable of containing all the new arrivals. The excess people were generally shot one at a time, often by Moll himself. On several occasions, Moll threw people into the flaming pits alive.
He also practiced shooting people from a distance. He treated and beat Sonderkommando prisoners, treating them like animals.
Those who were in his personal service told investigators that he used a piece of wire to fish out gold objects from a box containing jewels taken from new arrivals and took them off in a briefcase. Often, the objects left by the people who came to be gassed included furs and different types of food, particularly fats. When he took the food, Moll said to the SS around him that one had to take advantage before the lean years came.
Under his direction, the Sonderkommando was strengthened and increased to around one thousand prisoners.
Further accusations against Moll state that the head of the crematorium once took a child away from its mother. A witness said he saw it in Crematory Four. There were two huge pits where the corpses were burned.
He threw the child into the boiling corpse fat that had collected in ditches around the pit and then said to his assistant, now I’ll eat till I’m satisfied, now I’ve done my duty.
Another way Moll satisfied his perverse murder lust was the killing of little children, whom he threw alive into the boiling human fat at the front of the side pits. When the camp commandant or other SS commanders appeared at the site of the crematoria, however, Moll controlled himself and subdued his abnormal tendencies. Then the machinery of murder took its customary factory-like course without any special excesses.
He was a completely brutal man who would slaughter and ππΎππ the most vulnerable, including children. It was said he was very scary and also jealous. One time he was overheard saying that if Adolf Eichmann ordered him to execute his own family, then he would have done it.
He would burn children alive and would shoot women who were forced to strip. He beat and bludgeoned prisoners to death with clubs and iron bars. He also set dogs on people and threw prisoners against the electric fences.
He was a barbaric executioner, and it is believed that he murdered around twenty thousand people himself with his execution squad. His squads were said to have been very dangerous. But as the tide of the Second World War turned against the Germans, Auschwitz-Birkenau was abandoned by the SS in January 1945.
Moll was then sent to Dachau, where he arrived with a group of prisoners on a death march.
He was subsequently arrested by American forces who liberated Dachau. He later admitted that he had wanted Auschwitz bombed and that he had wanted to ππΎππ the remaining prisoners. In November 1945, Moll was placed on trial in front of an American Military Court in what became known as the Dachau trials.
What was ππ½πΈπΈππΎππ to many observers was that he was only tried for his actions inside Dachau and not for what he had done at Auschwitz. His crimes at the extermination camp were not considered in the proceedings. He was accused of shooting and executing people who collapsed during the death march, and for this he was sentenced to death for the executions of twenty-six people.
He was transferred to Landsberg prison to await his execution. On May 20, 1946, he was taken from his prison cell and led to a courtyard where a scaffold stood. He was led up the stairs quickly.
An executioner took possession of Moll, placed a noose around his neck and a black cap over his head. He was placed over the trapdoor, and it was released.
Otto Moll was a brutal and barbaric guard who worked inside Auschwitz and was responsible for the executions and deaths of thousands. It is believed that twenty thousand people were killed by Moll and his groups of executioners and death squads. He was a man who was unhinged, and he himself was executed.
His work at Auschwitz was not taken into account during his trial. He was executed only for the crimes he participated in while he was, for a short time, at Dachau. The hanging of the Butcher of Auschwitz closed one chapter of the Holocaust’s long ledger of atrocity, but the testimony of those who survived him ensures that the memory of his crimes will not be forgotten.