Josef Kramer was born on November 10, 1906, in Munich, then part of the German Empire. He joined the Nazi Party in December 1931 and the SS in 1932. From 1934 until the end of the war, he worked in various concentration camps, including Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and Mauthausen.
When the Nazis established Auschwitz in 1940, Kramer was sent to the newly created camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. He became the assistant to Rudolf Höss, the camp's commandant, and remained there for five months.
In April 1941, Kramer left Auschwitz to become commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. There he became one of those responsible for the murder of male and female Auschwitz Jewish prisoners for the so-called "Jewish skeleton collection."
The plan was to house the collection at the Reich University of Strasbourg after the victims were photographed and their anthropological measurements taken. Its purpose was to prove the alleged racial inferiority of the so-called "Jewish race" and to emphasize that Jews were "subhumans" and Germans were "superhumans."
It is believed that 86 inmates, 57 men and 29 women, were gassed for this project personally by Josef Kramer. The project was never completed. When the Allies discovered the corpses, some of them had been beheaded and preserved in formalin.
After the war, Kramer admitted he had forced the Jewish victims into the gas chamber and gassed them on the orders of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. He added that he could not disobey such orders and that he did not consider killing these innocent people a crime.
In May 1944, Kramer was sent back to Auschwitz. Rudolf Höss was commandant of the whole camp, and Kramer became commandant of the Auschwitz Birkenau subcamp, the main center used to kill prisoners.
In the summer of 1944, transports carrying hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews arrived day and night, and the crematoria could not keep up with burning the bodies. Ditches had to be dug. All of this took place while Kramer was the camp's commandant.
Kramer also took an active part in the selections, making the selections himself and helping to load people onto lorries that would bring them to the gas chambers. At Auschwitz, one of his favorite habits was making women do punitive sport exercises, forcing them to march, run, or do frog jumps until exhaustion.
On one occasion he was seen shooting at a prisoner. He did not kill the inmate, but the bullet went through the prisoner's hand. After the war, this inmate testified about the incident.
Kramer arrived at Bergen-Belsen, a camp for sick people, on December 1, 1944. Sanitary conditions were terrible, with no water for washing and hardly enough water for cooking.
Between January and March 1945, when prisoners were sent on death marches from other concentration camps, about one-third of those who arrived in the transports were already dead. Almost 80 percent of the rest had to be fetched by truck from the station because they were too weak and sick to walk. On one occasion, out of a transport of 1,900 inmates, over 500 arrived dead.
The prisoners received almost no food during these death marches, and there was no food when they arrived at the camp. The camp was so overcrowded that prisoners had to sleep in a sitting position on the floor. During the freezing winter months, there were 200 blankets in the whole camp for tens of thousands of prisoners.
In March 1945, due to starvation, thirst, and the outbreak of typhus epidemics, the average daily mortality rate of prisoners was between 250 and 300. At Bergen-Belsen, Kramer showed no mercy to sick and starving prisoners and applied what he had learned at Auschwitz. His rule was so brutal that he became known as the "Beast of Belsen."
Morning roll calls were introduced, and even sick prisoners had to attend them. After the war, Kramer explained that these prisoners were lazy about leaving the barracks and that attending the hours-long roll calls allowed the inmates to let out the very bad air in their huts for a while.
When one female inmate tried to escape and was caught, Kramer brutally beat her with a stick on her head, face, and all over her body. As a result, the girl gave the names of two girls she said had helped her. When the two girls refused to confess, Kramer gave instructions for them to receive five strokes on the bare behind to make them confess.
After the war, he admitted only to having slapped the face of the girl who wanted to escape and claimed he knew nothing about the two other girls.
One of the favorite sport activities of the SS at Bergen-Belsen was shooting at starving prisoners who went near the kitchen. Kramer and his cooks, such as Karl Francioh, were seen taking part in this.
When Kramer realized the end of the war was inevitable and the Allies were approaching, he turned around completely and even tried to find food for hungry and typhoid-ridden prisoners. Because of this, he probably expected not to be arrested after the war ended.
When British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen, Kramer remained in the camp and did not flee as many of the camp's guards had done. He showed the Allies the camp and was soon arrested.
On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen, one of the worst Nazi concentration camps. The British forces found 13,000 unburied bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. Thousands more inmates died of diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis during the months following the camp's liberation.
The British captured male and female Nazi personnel responsible for these horrors and forced them to help bury the dead in mass graves. One of them was Josef Kramer, the commandant of Bergen-Belsen.
Kramer was tried at the Belsen trial, which began on September 17, 1945. At his trial he refused to confess to the charges brought against him, claiming only to have been present during selections but never to have taken an active part in them. At the beginning he even claimed there had been no gas chambers.
He also said that if any SS personnel who found pleasure in torturing inmates carried sticks or unauthorized weapons, they did so against his orders. When asked about Irma Grese, the infamous "Hyena of Auschwitz" who used to kick prisoners with her heavy boots or whip them with her woven leather whip covered with cellophane so that human blood could be easily washed from it, he said he could only say the very best about Grese. He added that she took her duties very seriously.
When he heard Grese's statement read in which she said she had carried a whip and used it consistently, he said it was exaggerated. Herta Ehlert, one of the camp's guards who was sentenced to 15 years in prison, testified that on one occasion when she complained of the increasing death rate to Kramer, he replied, "Let them die, why should you care?"
This attitude explains why there were thousands of thirsty prisoners in the camp even though Bergen-Belsen was only 400 meters from the river. When asked why he had not pumped water from the river, he claimed he lacked the necessary materials. It was another lie, as the British troops pumped water from the river with material they found in the camp.
He did not even let the prisoners drink water directly from the river, saying it was not fit for drinking. However, the river water was fit for drinking, and the British troops found filth in the concrete tanks from which the camp had been using water.
When the tribunal asked him if he preferred to be a party to wholesale murder rather than be arrested himself, he replied without hesitation, "yes."
The British Military Tribunal found Josef Kramer guilty of crimes committed at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was 39 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on December 13, 1945. There were no tears shed for Josef Kramer.