Gerhard Palitzsch was born on June 17, 1913, in the village of Grossopitz near Dresden, then part of the German Empire. A farmer by profession, he joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1933.
His career in the concentration camp system began the same year, when he became a guard at the Oranienburg and Lichtenburg camps. Three years later, in 1936, he was sent to Sachsenhausen, where he served as a block leader.
When the Nazis established Auschwitz in May 1940, Palitzsch did not arrive alone. From Sachsenhausen he brought 30 German prisoners with green badges, the color used to mark convicted criminals considered tough enough for kapo duty.
Kapos were inmates selected by the SS to supervise other prisoners in exchange for better food, clothing, and housing. They were often as brutal as their SS overseers.
At Auschwitz, Palitzsch became report leader and, together with his kapos, unleashed a reign of terror. His main responsibility was carrying out executions at the death wall.
He performed the job willingly and with a smile, giving the impression of a man returning from a successful hunt. His specialty was shooting prisoners in the back of the head with a small-caliber gun fitted with a silencer.
In the presence of a prisoner who survived the Holocaust, Palitzsch claimed he had killed some 25,000 people this way. He was proud of the number and would attend roll call with his boots soaked in his victims' blood. He was allegedly paid 5 marks for each person executed.
Palitzsch was a sadistic psychopath who enjoyed torturing victims before killing them. He whipped prisoners with 10 to 25 strokes, then forced them to move in the "frog" position for 500 meters to the bunker, where they waited hours for execution while being harassed and tortured.
Regardless of the season, naked prisoners were kicked and spat on before being killed. He took pleasure in beating and killing even small children.
On one occasion, Palitzsch ordered little Jewish girls to run around a closed yard, shooting at them as if they were rabbits. After killing them all, he was seen calmly smoking a cigarette with a smile on his face.
He enjoyed making victims suffer as much as possible, sometimes killing children first and then their parents so the parents would live to see their children murdered. After the war, a former Polish prisoner testified about how Palitzsch executed a family of five.
The youngest baby, held tight to its mother's chest, was killed first with a shot to the head. He then shot the child standing between the parents. While the parents stood motionless and numbed by shock, Palitzsch threw the eldest child to the ground.
As the child fought for his life, Palitzsch stood on his back and shot him at the base of the neck without remorse. Finally, he shot the mother and then the father.
Shooting was not his only method of killing. On one occasion, after killing a child's parents, he grasped the little boy by the legs and smashed his head against a wall with all his strength.
Palitzsch hated Poles and killed them without reason. Once he shot several Polish officers who arrived at the camp in a transport in August 1940, reportedly because they refused to kiss his boots.
At Auschwitz, Palitzsch was one of the main participants in the first mass killing of prisoners using Zyklon B. On September 3, 1941, he took part in the first tentative mass gassing in block 11 of the main camp, in which around 600 Soviet commissars and 250 sick Polish prisoners were killed.
He was also active in selections on the ramp. While other SS men told arriving victims they would receive hot soup and tea or coffee, Palitzsch greeted newcomers differently.
According to the source material, he told them that Germans had no sympathy for enemies of the Third Reich, that they would be hounded through the chimneys of the crematoria, and that they would forget their wives, children, and families because they would die there like dogs.
Palitzsch lived in the town of Auschwitz with his wife and their children. In the summer of 1942, his wife Luise fell ill during a typhoid epidemic and died a few months later.
After her death, Palitzsch became increasingly addicted to alcohol. In June 1943 he was sent to the Gypsy family camp, part of Auschwitz, where Romani families were held together rather than separated as was typical at the camp.
His passions after his wife's death were not only alcohol but also women, including female Romani and Jewish prisoners. When he was caught with a Romani female inmate, it marked the beginning of his end.
It was deemed unacceptable for a member of the so-called superior Aryan race to have a sexual relationship with someone considered inferior, and Palitzsch was accused of race defilement. He was also accused of theft, having enriched himself considerably by plundering the possessions of murdered Jews, which the Nazi Party considered its own property.
For his crimes, Gerhard Palitzsch was sentenced to several years in prison by the SS and police court. He was subsequently pardoned and expelled from the SS in June 1944.
In the end, justice caught up with him. When the Soviet and Romanian armies began their offensive against Budapest in late October 1944, Palitzsch was among the 33,000 German soldiers defending the city alongside Hungarian troops.
On December 1, 1944, Adolf Hitler declared Budapest a fortress city to be defended to the last man. There was no escape for Palitzsch, as the Führer also forbade any withdrawal attempt.
Gerhard Palitzsch was 31 years old when he was killed in Budapest on December 7, 1944. The man who walked over bodies to satisfy his hunger for power was finally dead, and no tears were shed for him.