During the Second World War, the concentration camp system became a place where ordinary men were transformed into agents of terror. In camps like Bergen-Belsen and Dachau, guards were ordered to break the will of those held behind the wire. But in Buchenwald, one man stood apart even among the SS. He was known simply as the Hangman, and his reputation preceded him wherever he went.
Prisoners understood that if Martin Sommer looked in their direction, there was a strong chance they would be tortured or killed within five minutes. Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer was born in February 1915. After Hitler came to power, he joined the SS quickly, drawn into the organization that Heinrich Himmler was aggressively expanding. What had begun as a personal protection squad for Hitler and senior Nazi officials grew into a vast paramilitary apparatus.
Sommer rose to the rank of Hauptscharführer, a senior sergeant, and was assigned to the concentration camp system. His first posting was Dachau, the first camp established after Hitler took power. From the beginning, Sommer gained a reputation as a guard who treated prisoners with exceptional brutality and contempt. He later transferred to Buchenwald, where the worst of his crimes took place.
Buchenwald had been established in 1937 on a wooded hill near Weimar, and its name literally meant beech forest. Around the camp stretched vast woods that would become the site of countless executions. Prisoners gave those woods a grim nickname: the Singing Forest, because the screams of men tortured there echoed through the night. Inside Buchenwald, Sommer operated with near total freedom.
The camp had a secret medical facility where some 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were killed, and it was in this environment that men like Sommer flourished. But it was not until 1943 that the SS itself began to look into what was happening. Heinrich Himmler ordered a judge from the SS, Georg Konrad Morgen, to investigate corruption in Buchenwald. Morgen discovered that the camp commandant, Karl Otto Koch, and his wife Ilse had been stealing money confiscated from prisoners.
Alongside the Kochs, Sommer’s conduct also came under scrutiny. From eyewitness testimony, the judge learned that Sommer kept a hidden chamber beneath the floor of his office. Inside it, he stored a collection of torture implements. Among them were needles he used to carry out executions by injecting carbolic acid directly into the hearts of prisoners.
This was his final act after long sessions of torture inside his office. He was also said to inject air into the veins of his victims, causing an embolism and then death. According to accounts, Sommer would torture prisoners in the evening, hide their bodies under his bed overnight, and carry them to the crematorium in the morning. Even by the standards of the SS, Sommer was considered extreme.
He regularly whipped prisoners at a flogging post in public, forcing them to count each strike aloud. If a prisoner made a mistake in the count, Sommer would begin the flogging again from the start. Twenty-five lashes could be fatal, leaving a prisoner as a mass of blood. Sommer reportedly gave one man sixty lashes, killing him on the spot.
When he was later brought to trial, he made a wooden model of the flogging post and explained his methods with unsettling detachment. His own account of his conduct was chillingly casual: he claimed he could not say he struck the final blows with the force of the first ones, because one always tired a little. The full extent of his cruelty went even further. A particular group of prisoners suffered his worst abuse: priests and religious figures.
He was seen beating a pastor from Weimar into a pool of blood on the ground inside the camp. According to testimony, he then hanged the man and poured buckets of cold water over him, leaving him to freeze to death in the cold. The worst acts involved the woods around Buchenwald. Sommer killed Austrian priests there, and many gallows were set up among the trees.
The Singing Forest became a place where prisoners were hanged and left exposed to the elements. Many died of frost during the winter after being left suspended in the woods. Two well-known priests, Otto Neururer and Matthias Spanlang, were imprisoned in Buchenwald by the Nazis for acts of resistance against Hitler. Neururer had been arrested after advising a woman not to marry a high-ranking Nazi official whose morals he considered questionable.
He was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald. There, he became one of Sommer’s preferred victims. Neururer was systematically broken and killed by the SS guard. He was accused of performing a forbidden baptism inside the camp, and Sommer prepared a brutal punishment for him.
The Hangman took Neururer and Spanlang into the forest and hung both men head down from a tree. They were stripped of their clothes in a final act of humiliation. Over the course of 34 hours, Neururer was beaten mercilessly until his body finally gave out. Spanlang was killed the same way.
A witness claimed that neither man complained as they died. Sommer’s attacks on clergymen continued. He was said to have beaten a Catholic priest to death for carrying out another religious act for a prisoner inside Buchenwald. He carried out many more hangings in the neighboring forest.
Large groups were led into the woods every day by Sommer, and they never returned. He bound their hands behind their backs and hung them one by one from the trees. The prisoners were suspended in such a way that their arms were behind them, and their full body weight fell on their shoulders. This caused agonizing dislocations, and for hours the men screamed and cried out, their cries heard across the camp.
Sommer’s behavior during this period was bizarre even by the standards of his peers. He claimed to be an envoy from Dante’s hell and referred to himself as the devil himself. Prisoners said he used the skull of one of his victims, with a candle inside it, to light his office. He killed many prisoners with lethal injections.
He reportedly placed a prisoner’s head in an iron vise and turned it until the skull was crushed. The SS investigation that began as a corruption inquiry eventually led to Sommer’s downfall. Heinrich Himmler himself learned of Sommer’s brutality. The SS found him too sadistic even for its own ranks.
He was stripped of his rank and sent to the Eastern Front to serve in a penal battalion. These units were often thrown into battle under the harshest conditions and used as frontline soldiers. Sommer was wounded on the Eastern Front, losing his right leg and left arm. He was captured as a prisoner of war by the Red Army.
The Soviets released him in 1955, and he returned to West Germany, attempting to live an ordinary life. He married, had a child, and even received a pension as a wounded war veteran. But the past did not leave him alone. Sommer was eventually brought to trial for the deaths of at least 101 camp prisoners.
He was convicted of responsibility for the deaths of 25 of them. The Hangman of Buchenwald was sentenced to life in prison. He spent the rest of his life either in prison or in a care facility from which he was not permitted to leave. He died in 1988 at the age of 73.
Despite the scale of his crimes, Sommer was never sentenced to death and no execution was ever carried out against him. He was tried at a time when prison sentences were favored over sending a Nazi to the gallows. He was remembered across Germany as one of the worst war criminals of the Second World War.
The crimes of the Hangman of Buchenwald were numerous, and many of them remain largely unrevealed to this day.