On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. The Nazi regime quickly moved to restrict the civil and human rights of Jewish people, gradually excluding them from professions, businesses, and public spaces.
Propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere tolerant of violence against Jews. These campaigns also prepared the German population for harsher measures, including mass deportations and eventually genocide.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies established more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites. These included ghettos, forced labor camps, and killing centers where millions were murdered.
One perpetrator involved in this system was Erich Gustav Lachmann. He was born on November 6, 1909, in Legnica, then part of the German Empire.
In the spring of 1933, the 23-year-old Lachmann joined the paramilitary organization Stahlhelm, also known as the Steel Helmet. The organization had emerged after World War I and was composed largely of disillusioned veterans.
Stahlhelm was one of the largest and most influential veterans’ organizations in Germany during the interwar period. It promoted nationalistic and conservative political ideology.
By the mid-1930s, Stahlhelm was absorbed into the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary wing. Lachmann also became a member of the SA but never joined the Nazi Party.
In September 1933, Lachmann was conscripted into the auxiliary police force. He attended a junior leader training course but failed it, most likely due to his described extremely primitive intellectual abilities.
Despite failing the course, he was promoted to senior sergeant. During the 1930s, Lachmann worked for various companies as a bricklayer.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In September 1941, Lachmann was stationed at the Trawniki camp.
At Trawniki, he was tasked with retraining Ukrainian prisoners of war to serve as SS guards at Nazi extermination camps. Between September 1941 and September 1942, SS and police officials processed and trained about 2,500 auxiliary police guards known as Trawniki men.
Virtually all of them had been Soviet prisoners of war. These Trawniki-trained guards provided guard units for the Operation Reinhardt killing centers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.
German SS and police authorities deployed the Trawniki men in deportation operations from ghettos in German-occupied Poland. They also served as escorts for transport trains from ghettos to killing centers.
While at Trawniki, Lachmann began a relationship with a local Polish woman. In mid-1942, he was sent to the Sobibor extermination camp to serve as the commander of the guards.
German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sobibor between May 1942 and the fall of 1943. Most of the Jews brought there were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide piped into the gas chambers from an engine.
Approximately 250,000 victims were murdered at this killing center. Around 50 German and Austrian personnel served at the site, generally from lower middle-class backgrounds.
Sobibor was constructed as a rectangle, surrounded by a double barbed wire fence woven with tree branches. This design was intended to hide the view of what was inside.
SS officers lived in cottages with colorful names, which helped conceal the camp’s purpose from new arrivals. When a transport of 40 to 60 freight cars arrived at the Sobibor railway station, only 20 cars at a time were taken into the camp.
The victims were brought into the arrival area, where an SS man gave a speech welcoming them. They were told they had reached a transit camp on their way to labor camps.
Before the next part of their journey, they were told to take showers, have their clothing disinfected, and get a meal. About 450 to 550 Jews were forced into the gas chambers at a time.
Once the maximum number of victims was inside, the chambers were sealed and poisonous gas was piped in. Within 20 to 30 minutes, all those inside were dead.
In all, the Germans and their auxiliaries killed at least 167,000 people at Sobibor. The guards under Lachmann’s command supervised prisoner work details and unloaded new transports.
While performing these tasks, they frequently bullied the prisoners. Lachmann himself used his whip on arriving Jews.
Lachmann was also described as a sexual deviant. Two Sobibor survivors testified that they witnessed him raping young Jewish girls at the camp.
He was known for his incompetence. Fellow SS man Erich Bauer called him a thieving alcoholic and somebody who stole like the ravens.
Lachmann was actively involved in the camp’s underground trading economy. He procured food and alcohol for prisoners in exchange for valuables from the sorting barracks.
In September 1942, Franz Reichleitner took over command of Sobibor from Franz Stangl. Reichleitner sent Lachmann back to Trawniki because he deemed him unfit for duty.
When Lachmann discovered he was to be transferred to Treblinka, he deserted with his Polish girlfriend between late 1942 and early 1943.
Two months later, Lachmann was arrested in Warsaw for desertion. An SS police court sentenced him to six years in prison, where he spent most of the remainder of the war.
In March 1945, he was released from an SS penal camp in Dachau concentration camp and assigned to a penal company. After six weeks of military training, Lachmann was deployed as a soldier against the Red Army in Brandenburg.
He was quickly captured and taken as a prisoner of war. A Soviet military tribunal later sentenced him to 25 years in prison with hard labor.
He was released from prison on May 5, 1950. Lachmann returned to West Germany and resumed his pre-war career in masonry.
In the Sobibor trial in Hagen, West Germany, which lasted from September 6, 1965, to December 20, 1966, Lachmann was accused of participating in the mass murder of approximately 150,000 Jews.
During the trial, few Sobibor survivors could recognize him or provide reliable information about his actions at the camp. Lachmann’s own testimony was vague, contradictory, and not always coherent.
He was quoted as saying, “I had nothing against the Jews. I regarded them as all other people. My suits I previously bought from a Jew, Markus, who had a textile firm in Legnica.”
The court found Lachmann to be mentally incompetent because of his extremely primitive intellectual abilities. He was acquitted because of putative duress.
Lachmann was 62 years old when he died on January 23, 1972, in West Germany. There were no tears shed for Erich Lachmann.