Wilhelm Ruppert was born on February 2, 1905, in Frankental, then part of the German Empire. He was married, had one child, and worked as an electrical engineer.
His path to becoming a perpetrator of Nazi atrocities began amid the economic collapse of the Great Depression, which started in 1929. Widespread unemployment, poverty, and rising crime left many Germans vulnerable to extreme political arguments. Ruppert joined both the Nazi Party and the SS in 1933, immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power.
Hitler had been appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933, by President Paul von Hindenburg. Germany quickly became a dictatorship, and the Nazi regime began restricting the civil and human rights of Jews while establishing the first concentration camps for political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others classified as dangerous. Unlike regular prisons, these camps operated independently of any judicial review.
Dachau, the first regular concentration camp, was established in March 1933, less than two months after Hitler became chancellor. Starting on April 11, 1933, Ruppert was one of the first guards at Dachau, where he initially worked as a camp electrician.
In its first year, Dachau had a capacity of 5,000 prisoners. The initial internees were primarily German Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and other political opponents of the Nazi regime. Over time, other groups were also interned, including Jehovah's Witnesses, Romani people, homosexuals, repeat criminal offenders, and so-called asocials whom the regime incarcerated because they could not or would not find gainful employment.
During the early years, relatively few Jews were interned at Dachau, usually only because they belonged to one of those groups or had completed prison sentences for violating the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which put Nazi ideas about race into law. In early 1937, the SS began using prisoner labor to construct a large complex of buildings on the grounds of the original camp. Prisoners were forced to do this work, starting with the destruction of the old munitions factory, under terrible conditions. Construction was officially completed in mid-August 1938.
The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland. On September 18, 1942, Ruppert was transferred to the Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, where he served as technical director of the camp administration.
Throughout its existence, the Majdanek camp was under construction. It also contained storage facilities for clothing and personal items stolen from Jews before their deaths at the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers. In those storage facilities, female prisoners sorted and repaired clothes.
In the winter of 1941 to 1942, camp authorities began to use Zyklon B gas to murder prisoners too weak to work in a makeshift gas chamber. Mass murder operations using poison gas began at Majdanek in October 1942 and continued until the end of 1943. There appear to have been three gas chambers at Majdanek, at least two of which were shower rooms reconfigured for the use of Zyklon B gas. At least one of these was used to kill human beings.
The SS killed tens of thousands of Jews at Majdanek. Most arrived in the camp as forced laborers and either died as a result of brutally inhumane living conditions or were killed in the gas chambers after the Germans determined they could no longer work.
In November 1943, Ruppert witnessed Operation Harvest Festival at Majdanek. This was the code name for the German action aimed at murdering all remaining Jews in the Lublin District of German-occupied Poland. Nazi officials initiated the operation in response to several insurgencies conducted by surviving Jews in the German-occupied east in the spring and summer of 1943.
German occupiers had encountered armed resistance in the ghettos of Warsaw and Bialystok. On August 2, 1943, Jewish prisoners rebelled at the Treblinka killing center. An insurgency at the Sobibor killing center on October 14, 1943, facilitated the escape of over 300 prisoners, 58 of whom survived the war.
The Operation Reinhardt killing centers were liquidated in the autumn of 1943 in the wake of prisoner uprisings at Sobibor and Treblinka. Fearing further insurrections in the General Government, the administrative division of Nazi-occupied Poland, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the murder of the remaining 45,000 Jewish prisoners engaged in forced labor in the Lublin District. Most of these were deployed as forced laborers in Majdanek and other camps.
Harvest Festival began at dawn on November 3, 1943. SS and police units surrounded the Trawniki and Poniatowa labor camps, and Jews were removed from the camps in groups and shot in nearby pits dug for that purpose. At Majdanek, Nazi officials first separated Jews from the other prisoners, then marched them to nearby trenches and shot them. Jews from other labor camps in the Lublin area were also transferred to Majdanek for shooting.
Music played through loudspeakers at both the Majdanek and Trawniki camps to drown out the noise of the mass shootings and mask the screams of the victims. At Majdanek and Trawniki, the killing operation was completed in a single day. At Poniatowa, the shootings concluded on November 4, lasting two days. Approximately 42,000 Jews were killed during Harvest Festival, the largest German perpetrator massacre of the Holocaust.
In May 1944, Ruppert served as a warehouse manager in the Warsaw concentration camp until its evacuation in August of the same year. The camp was located in the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto. Although it first functioned as a camp in its own right, it was later demoted to a branch of the Majdanek concentration camp in May 1944.
On August 6, 1944, Ruppert returned to Dachau and served there under camp commandant Eduard Weiter. Ruppert was responsible for the operation of the camp. On April 23, 1945, he was replaced by Martin Schobert.
On September 13, 1944, Ruppert killed a British resistance agent in France named Noor Inayat Khan, who was labeled by the Nazis as highly dangerous. In 1943, Khan had been sent to Nazi-occupied Paris under the code name Madeleine to work as a wireless operator for the French Resistance. She was the first female radio operator sent to occupied France by the SOE, the British Special Operations Executive.
Despite the constant danger of discovery by the Gestapo, Khan transmitted crucial information to London, aiding the Allied forces. In October 1943, she was betrayed, captured by the Gestapo, imprisoned, and eventually sent to Dachau. Despite severe torture and interrogation, she did not reveal any information that could compromise her network.
The night before the execution, Khan was kicked and beaten. When her frail body had slumped to the floor, Ruppert asked her to kneel and then shot her point blank in the back of the head.
During the second half of April 1945, only a few days before the surrender of Nazi Germany, Ruppert accompanied the death march of prisoners from Dachau to the high Alps of Tyrol. On April 27, 1945, approximately 7,000 prisoners, mostly Jews, were forced to begin a death march from Dachau to Tegernsee in the south. During the six-day death march, anyone who could not keep up or continue was shot. Many others died of exposure, hunger, or exhaustion.
American forces liberated the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945. Soldiers of the U.S. 7th Army's 45th Infantry Division smelled not only human excrement but also decaying bodies, causing many of them to cry or vomit. They found piles of impossibly malnourished corpses, more than 30 railroad cars filled with thousands of dead bodies, and 30,000 survivors, most of them severely emaciated and looking like walking skeletons. Thousands were sick and would die from typhus epidemics and starvation during the months following the camp's liberation.
In early May 1945, American troops liberated the surviving prisoners from the death march to Tegernsee. It was at Tegernsee that Ruppert was arrested and then kept for several months in American custody. World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945.
Wilhelm Ruppert was tried at the Dachau trial, the first mass trial of the Dachau trials held by the United States Army on the premises of the Dachau concentration camp. The main trial took place from November 15 to December 13, 1945. Forty people were charged with war crimes in connection with the Dachau concentration camp and its subcamps. The trial ended with 40 convictions, including 36 death sentences, of which 28 were carried out.
Apart from the execution of the British spy Noor Inayat Khan, multiple witnesses before the court said Ruppert selected prisoners for execution. Ruppert was called a man who had no empathy for his victims, whom he frequently whipped. Further evidence showed that he had presided over the executions of at least 90 Russian prisoners. He led the Russians from their compound and rushed them down to the crematorium, and when they were shot in the neck, their gold teeth were taken.
In August 1944, a transport of Jews arrived from Warsaw. According to some witnesses, Ruppert ordered that the bodies in the carts be taken to the crematorium. Some of these prisoners were still alive, but they were taken to the crematorium anyway.
Though Ruppert denied most of the accusations, his lies did not help him escape justice. On December 13, 1945, the U.S. Military Tribunal found Wilhelm Ruppert guilty of the mistreatment of prisoners and participating in executions, and sentenced him to death by hanging. Ruppert was 41 years old when he was executed on May 28, 1946.