On April 15, 1945, the British 11th Armored Division liberated Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony, southwest of Bergen in Nazi Germany. The camp would come to epitomize the true bestiality and horror of the Nazi regime and its death camps.
British forces found 13,000 unburied dead bodies and almost 60,000 prisoners who were sick and starved. More than 13,000 former prisoners, too ill to recover, would die of diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis in 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 Wilhelm Dörr.
Wilhelm Dörr was born on February 9, 1921, in Meiningen, then part of the Weimar Republic, the name given to the German government from 1918 to 1933. He was only 11 years old when Adolf Hitler, leader of the Nazi Party, was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, by German president Paul von Hindenburg.
Like millions of other German boys of the Nazi era, Dörr joined the Hitler Youth and was a member of the organization from 1932 to 1939. The Hitler Youth became the primary tool the Nazis used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology, shaping the beliefs, thinking, and actions of German youth.
In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members. By the end of that year, the figure had increased to over 2 million. Jews were not allowed to join.
The Hitler Youth was a paramilitary organization designed to train boys as future fighters and soldiers for war. As an official organization of the Nazi state, it had a military structure at the local, regional, and national levels.
Boys practiced military drills and learned how to handle weapons. They also worked on farms in the summer and participated in competitive sports.
While some boys enjoyed the physical challenge, competition, and camaraderie, others found the constant focus on preparing for war and sacrificing themselves for the Fatherland overwhelming and alienating.
In 1936, a law declared the Hitler Youth to be the only legally permitted youth organization in Germany and stated that all German youth were to be organized within it. Compliance, however, was not universal. Members had to be ethnic Germans, German citizens, and free of hereditary diseases.
By December 1936, Hitler Youth membership had reached over 5 million. In March 1939, a new decree required all youth aged between 10 and 18 to join, even if parents objected. Parents who refused to allow their children to join were subject to investigation by the authorities.
The Hitler Youth and its female section, the League of German Girls, even encouraged members to report to their leaders about what was happening in their schools or churches, as well as whether their parents or neighbors were acting in line with the regime.
Schools also played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas to German youth. From their first days at school, German children were imbued with a cult of Adolf Hitler, and his portrait was a standard fixture in all classrooms. Educators introduced new textbooks that taught students love for Hitler, obedience to state authority, militarism, racism, and anti-Semitism.
World War II began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Before the war, Dörr worked on his father's farm. He got married and had one child.
After being rejected for service by the Wehrmacht, the German armed forces, in December 1940, he volunteered for the Waffen-SS, the military branch of the SS. During his training as a combat engineer in Dresden in October 1941, he fell seriously ill with rheumatism, which led to his hospitalization for several months.
When he recovered, Dörr was reassigned to the SS Totenkopf, or Death's Head, units in the summer of 1942. He then served as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp until December 1943.
The Death's Head units were an independent unit within the SS responsible for administering the Nazi concentration and extermination camps throughout Germany and later occupied Europe. The units were trained to conduct themselves with strict discipline and cruelty and to view the prisoners under their guard as enemies of the state who should be destroyed if possible.
They were responsible for facilitating what the Nazis called the Final Solution, known since the war as the Holocaust, the genocide of Jews in Europe. In 1938, Hitler announced that they were to become military units. Some groups were then discharged from guarding the camps for combat duty, serving in Poland and the Soviet Union.
As the units were trained to be barbaric in their treatment of camp prisoners, so too did they act on the field of combat. Death's Head units were known to be cruel and ferocious warriors. At the beginning of World War II they had 24,000 members, including reservists. By January 1945, that number had increased to 40,000.
In January 1944, Dörr was transferred to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp, where he served as a block leader. In September 1944, he was transferred to its satellite camp Kleinbodungen, where he served as a deputy commander.
Kleinbodungen served as a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp until it became independent in 1944. The slave laborers from Kleinbodungen were used not only to produce V weapons, such as the V1 flying bomb and V2 rockets aimed primarily at London, but also to extend the nearby tunnels in Kohnstein, a hill that served as natural protection against Allied bombing.
The underground factory named Mittelwerk, in which the V weapons were produced, was built inside the hill. The so-called weapons of retaliation, as the Germans called them, were constructed and stored in the underground facilities and bomb-proof shafts.
The inmates of Mittelbau-Dora were treated in a brutal and inhumane manner, working 14-hour days and being denied access to basic hygiene, beds, and adequate rations. Prisoners too weak or ill to work were sent to Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, or Mauthausen to be killed.
The inmates were subject to extreme cruelty and often suffered injuries including permanent disability, disfigurement, and death. Severe beatings were routine, as were deliberate starvation, torture, and summary executions. In many cases, prisoners were compelled to hang other prisoners under penalty of execution if they failed to cooperate.
The death toll at Mittelbau-Dora was high, with estimates suggesting that around 20,000 prisoners died as a result of the camp's conditions, including malnutrition, exhaustion, and disease.
While at Kleinbodungen, Dörr managed around 620 camp inmates used as slave laborers in the underground factory. On one occasion, Dörr found two prisoners hiding in a potato cellar. As a punishment, he ordered three prisoners to beat them, which they did until the two prisoners died.
Near the end of the war, when Germany's military force was collapsing, the Allied armies closed in on the Nazi concentration camps. The Soviets approached from the east and the British, French, and American forces from the west.
The Germans began frantically to move prisoners out of the camps near the front and take them to be used as forced laborers in camps inside Germany. Prisoners were first taken by train and then by foot on death marches. They were forced to march long distances in bitter cold with little or no food, water, or rest. Those who could not keep up were shot.
When U.S. troops appeared poised to capture Mittelbau-Dora and its surrounding areas in April 1945, the evacuation of the camp was ordered. Dörr was one of the 45 SS men who led a brutal death march of hundreds of Kleinbodungen inmates to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony.
The march started on April 5, 1945, when 610 prisoners were forced to march for days until they reached Bergen-Belsen on April 11. During the journey, the SS conducted numerous summary executions of prisoners who attempted to escape or otherwise slow the progress of the march.
One group of prisoners was forced to march toward the town of Gardelegen in northeastern Germany, where a large barn and several nearby buildings were prepared as a makeshift prison. On April 13, 1945, there were some 4,000 prisoners in the Gardelegen area who had arrived a few days earlier from Mittelbau-Dora, its satellite camps, and from the Neuengamme subcamp Hannover-Stöcken.
There they had to disembark from freight cars because the trains could not advance any further due to air-raid damage to the rail lines. More than a thousand prisoners, many of them sick and too weak to march any further, were taken from the town of Gardelegen to a large barn on one of the local estates and forced inside.
They were locked inside the barn, which was then doused in gasoline and set on fire. A total of 1,016 inmates were burnt alive, suffocated, or shot by the SS as they tried in desperation to escape by digging under the barn's walls.
When the U.S. Army entered Gardelegen the following day, they were horrified. Dead bodies were everywhere while the barn was still smoldering. According to several witnesses, Wilhelm Dörr was one of the SS officers who participated in atrocities against the marching prisoners.
Ernst Poppner was one of the 610 prisoners forced to march from Mittelbau-Dora to Bergen-Belsen. According to his testimony, the first day they marched from 7 a.m. until dusk and covered 51 kilometers. They received no food from the SS, and most inmates wore only clogs.
On the first day of the march, two men collapsed, and some fellow prisoners put them on a handcart which they then pulled along. The prisoners and SS guards took a break overnight in a field next to a barn about three kilometers from the town of Osterode.
On the following day, April 6, 1945, Wilhelm Dörr took the two men who had collapsed the previous day and another man who had also been in a distressed condition into the barn. He made these three men kneel down and shot two of them in the back of the head, firing two shots at each of them. The third prisoner tried to escape, but Dörr shot him as well.
Dörr then ordered some prisoners to dig a shallow grave near the barn and bury the inmates he had just murdered. After this incident, Dörr would shoot anyone who was not able to keep pace.
According to another witness, Dörr began to shoot all stragglers or anyone who had been given lifts in hand-drawn carts by other inmates. After shooting the victims, he would just leave them off the road or in the forest. According to Poppner, Dörr shot at least 46 prisoners in total.
On April 15, 1945, four days after Dörr and his group had arrived at Bergen-Belsen, the camp was liberated by British troops. The British found around 60,000 starving prisoners in the camp, most of them seriously ill.
Shortly after liberation, Wilhelm Dörr was captured by British forces together with fellow Nazi criminals such as Josef Kramer, the commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau and the last commandant of Bergen-Belsen. After evacuating Bergen-Belsen, British forces burned down the whole camp to prevent the spread of typhus.
During its existence, approximately 50,000 persons died in the Bergen-Belsen camp, and more than 13,000 former prisoners, too ill to recover, died after liberation.
Justice finally caught up with Dörr when he was tried at the Belsen trial, which began on September 17, 1945. He was indicted for the atrocities that had occurred during the death march from Mittelbau-Dora.
At the trial, Dörr refused to confess to any of the charges brought against him and claimed that neither at the concentration camps where he served nor during the death march did he kill anyone. His lies did not help him escape justice.
On November 17, the British Military Tribunal sentenced Wilhelm Dörr to death by hanging. He was 24 years old when the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint carried out the sentence on December 13, 1945. There were no tears shed for the killer.