The name of Joseph Kramer still sent a chill through those who remembered the Second World War long after it ended. He was known as the Beast of Belsen, a commandant whose cruelty inside the Nazi concentration camp system marked him out even among men already stained with the worst crimes of the Holocaust. When the camps were liberated in the final days of the conflict, the full horror of what had happened within their fences was uncovered. And among those horrors, one man was singled out for his brutality.
Kramer was born in Munich into a middle-class Roman Catholic family. His parents moved to Augsburg, where he was schooled, and after finishing his education he trained as an apprentice electrician in 1920. Work was hard to come by, and he spent long periods unemployed after brief stints in a department store and as an accountant. In December 1931 he joined the Nazi Party, and the following year he entered the SS.
His training was strict, and he was assigned to work as a prison guard. When war broke out, that role shifted to guarding concentration camps and the inmates held within them. In 1934 he was posted to Dachau as a guard. There he rose quickly, receiving one promotion after another.
He moved into senior leadership positions at Sachsenhausen and at Mauthausen, and his work attracted the attention of senior Nazi officials. Within the camp system Kramer found a purpose that had eluded him in civilian life. He became the assistant to Rudolf Höß, the infamous commandant of Auschwitz, the camp where around one and a half million people would eventually be murdered. Kramer served as his number two, accompanying Höß on inspections of the Auschwitz site and helping to investigate whether it would be suitable for a new oil and rubber plant.
Germany was suffering from shortages of fuel, and the plan was to use camp labour in the facility. His work earned him command of his own camp. In April 1941 he was given control of Natzweiler-Struthof, established in the annexed Lorraine region of France. It was the only camp the Nazis set up on French soil.
There Kramer committed further crimes of the Holocaust. As commandant he personally carried out the gassings of 80 Jewish men and women who had been selected for a Jewish skeleton collection intended for the Reich University of Strasbourg. Forty-six of those inmates were Jews from Greece. He would later admit during his trial that the camp was used to select prisoners for work in the nearby quarry, and that he gassed individuals on the orders of Heinrich Himmler.
He described how he forced people into the gas chamber himself, and stated that the women inside continued to breathe for around half a minute before succumbing to the gas. The Nazis recognized his effectiveness within the system. In 1942 he was promoted to the rank of Hauptsturmführer, the SS rank equivalent to captain. In May 1944 he was transferred to become camp commander of operations at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the main extermination element of the entire Auschwitz complex.
There Kramer oversaw the deaths of tens of thousands of people in the gas chambers and crematoria. He had been brought in to manage the gassings of newly transported prisoners. He would later be deemed responsible for the murders committed at Auschwitz, though he maintained he took no part in the selection process. Witnesses testified otherwise, describing how Kramer took an active role in the selection parades.
In one instance he loaded people onto trucks himself and beat them severely when they resisted. He claimed, “I never took part in the selections… I did not know what the purpose of the gas chamber was. ” At the time of his command there, inmates rose up in revolt on 7 October 1944, destroying a crematorium.
Kramer confirmed that corporal punishment was permitted at Auschwitz and admitted to administering torture around 40 times during his short time there. He also confirmed that guards were allowed dogs, and it was alleged the dogs were set upon prisoners. He was said to have lashed one person with 25 strikes of his whip, to have given out regular beatings, to have shot prisoners randomly with his machine gun, and to have encouraged dogs to be set upon them. It was at Bergen-Belsen that Kramer earned his infamous nickname.
In December 1944 he was transferred from Auschwitz-Birkenau to the camp in northern Germany. Bergen-Belsen had originally been established as a temporary camp for those fleeing Germany, but it had expanded throughout the war. It contained no gas chambers, yet the rule of Kramer was so brutal that he became known as the Beast of Belsen. He claimed that when he arrived, food was not a major problem.
But as new prisoners were transported there, the situation became dire. Allied air raids had brought the German rail network to its knees, and Bergen-Belsen suffered severely from lack of supplies. The weather also made it difficult to get deliveries to the camp quickly. The main problem, however, was overcrowding.
As the Red Army advanced rapidly toward Germany, prisoners from camps in the eastern occupied territories were moved to Belsen. Around 85,000 prisoners were transported in cattle cars or forced marches to the camp. In July 1944, before Kramer became commandant, there had been 7,300 prisoners. By April 1945 there were 60,000.
With such overcrowding and defeat appearing on the horizon, the administrative systems of the camp broke down. Kramer continued to try to rule. In March 1945 he requested help and resources, because at that time between 250 and 400 inmates were dying every day from a terrible typhus epidemic that was sweeping through the camp. Still the prisoners were drafted in.
The end was near, though. With the collapse of administration and the war heading for defeat for the Third Reich, many guards abandoned their duties and fled, leaving the inmates to fend for themselves. Kramer refused to leave. When the British liberated the camp, he even took them on a tour to inspect the horrific sights that greeted them.
Huge piles of corpses surrounded the liberators. Mass graves were filled and overflowing, with nowhere left to bury those who had recently died from the conditions. The British found barracks filled with prisoners, some too emaciated to walk. Disease remained a huge problem inside the camp.
Kramer was imprisoned at Hamelin, where he was placed on trial for his involvement in war crimes. During the proceedings, information emerged about how truly horrific the Beast of Belsen had been. He would routinely beat and kick prisoners too weak to work, select those who were to be gassed, and encourage guards to tear prisoners limb from limb. He allegedly kicked one woman to death during selections and starved a number of Russian inmates to death for stealing bread.
Days before liberation at Belsen, he shot and killed two prisoners who had found rotten potatoes lying on the ground. His activities at Auschwitz were also brought to light. For all his cruelty, he was sentenced to death. He was to be hanged at Hamelin Prison by the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint on 13 December 1945, along with ten of his guards.
The executions began at 9:30 in the morning and continued throughout the day until 4 in the afternoon. First came a number of women, including Irma Grese. Pierrepoint and his assistant carried out the executions. Kramer was held in a small cell in Hamelin Prison, and at the bottom of the row of cells was the execution chamber where Pierrepoint administered his justice.
He performed the executions in pairs. At around 12:15 pm, Kramer along with Dr. Fritz Klein were fetched from their cells and brought to the execution chamber. The gallows with two nooses awaited them, and they made their way up to the scaffold.
At 12:19 pm, Joseph Kramer and Dr. Fritz Klein were hanged simultaneously inside the chamber. They were the first of the men to be executed after the women had been killed. After death was confirmed by the assistant and the doctor, they were cut down.
It is assumed their bodies were then cremated, with the ashes scattered in an unknown location. Joseph Kramer was a man who thrived inside the concentration camp system. With leadership over the mass murder of the innocent, he seemed to have found his purpose in life. He inflicted an enormous degree of suffering and barbarism on thousands while in command of different camps, and he made the lives of tens of thousands of people far worse.
It was a record of horror that earned him one of the most notorious titles of the war: the Beast of Belsen.