On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armoured Division liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Beside thousands of unburied bodies, they found around 60,000 prisoners suffering from starvation and disease amid outbreaks of typhus and tuberculosis.
Food rations were extremely small. The official ration was half a liter of coffee in the morning and half a liter of soup for lunch and dinner. Sometimes, but no more than twice a week, prisoners received bread. In the final period of their detention, there was no bread at all.
The Allies arrested the Nazi guards, men and women, who were responsible for these atrocities and who had been unable to flee before the sudden arrival of British troops. One of them was Karl Francioh.
Karl Francioh was born on October 5, 1912, in the town of Reisen in Brandenburg, Germany. He was married and had four children. Before the war, he worked as a coal miner.
After the war began, he worked as a cook in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of the Third Reich. On April 17, 1940, he became a member of the SS.
Francioh began working in a kitchen in Posen as an SS member, and from there he was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. However, he committed his worst atrocities at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he arrived in March 1945 to continue his work as a cook.
According to his testimony, all the prisoners wanted to work in the kitchen because it was a good job. He forgot to mention that these prisoners were forced to work at least 18 hours a day.
Karl Francioh was extremely harsh and brutal. On several occasions, he was seen shooting hungry prisoners simply for trying to take potato peels. He enjoyed beating prisoners with a rubber tube and had no mercy on them.
One female prisoner testified that when she was carrying a container with her friend to the kitchen, Francioh came out and shot her friend dead for no reason. On another occasion, he mercilessly shot a pregnant woman in the arm. She died as a result.
Francioh's reign of terror continued until the final moments of the war. On the day British forces arrived, he saw a female prisoner bending down to pick up some potato peels and immediately shot her.
He was accused of shooting about 50 prisoners even after the British army arrived. He was arrested by British forces along with other German Nazi criminals, including Wilhelm Dörr and Dr. Fritz Klein, and was forced to help bury the thousands of bodies lying around the camp in mass graves.
He was tried in the Belsen trials and convicted of the atrocities committed during his time at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. As with his other Nazi colleagues, he pleaded not guilty to the charges against him and denied everything he was accused of.
He even claimed that he had not fled with his wife when he could have because of his love for the prisoners. However, his lies did not help him escape justice.
A court sentenced Karl Francioh to death by hanging. He was 33 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on December 13, 1945. No tears were shed for Karl Francioh.