Inside the Nazi concentration camp system during World War II, many men and women became monsters who unleashed terror on the prisoners they were assigned to guard and torture. Camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Dachau employed a variety of torture methods carried out by guards. Many guards received orders to sow fear in the hearts of detainees behind the barbed wire.
At Buchenwald in particular, one man stood out under a notoriously dark nickname: "The Hangman." Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer, also known as Martin Sommer, was one of the most sadistic Nazis to serve inside the concentration camps, and his reputation preceded him. Prisoners understood that if Sommer looked at them, there was a strong chance they would be tortured or even killed five minutes later.
He was a professional Nazi and a member of the SS, and inside Buchenwald his horrifying actions became routine. Within the camp, 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were eliminated and executed inside a secret medical facility built specifically for that purpose. It was precisely in this environment that men like Sommer thrived.
So why was he known specifically as "The Hangman"? And how did executions at the hands of Martin Sommer unfold?
Martin Sommer was born in February 1915 and joined the SS quickly after Hitler's rise to power, as Heinrich Himmler, head of the organization, sought to expand its reach. The SS began as a personal guard detail protecting Hitler and other senior Nazi officials. Within its ranks, Sommer rose to the rank of Hauptscharführer, or senior sergeant, and worked specifically within the concentration camp system, starting his service at Dachau.
Dachau was the first camp established after Hitler came to power, and from the beginning Sommer was known as a guard who treated prisoners with brutality and contempt. After a period at Dachau, he moved to Buchenwald, and it was there that many of his crimes took place.
Despite his reputation, in 1943 Heinrich Himmler, the SS chief, ordered an SS judge named Georg Konrad Morgen to investigate corruption crimes occurring at Buchenwald. During the investigation, it was discovered that commandant Karl Otto Koch and his wife Ilse were stealing and embezzling money taken from prisoners. The funds confiscated from prisoners were said to belong to the SS, but alongside the Kochs, Sommer's conduct also came under scrutiny.
From witness testimony, the judge discovered that Sommer kept a secret chamber beneath the floor of his office, where he hid numerous torture instruments. These tools included a number of needles he used to execute prisoners by injecting them with carbolic acid into the heart. This was his finishing move after lengthy torture sessions conducted inside his office. He was also said to be known for injecting air into his victims' veins, causing an embolism and then death.
It was also alleged that Martin Sommer tortured prisoners in the evening, then hid their bodies under his bed, and in the morning transferred them to the crematoria to be burned. It is worth remembering that these were the SS, the same body and organization that carried out the genocide of millions, and even they viewed Sommer as excessively cruel and murderous. A maddening distinction.
He was also said to regularly flog prisoners at the posts publicly in front of many other inmates. At the whipping platform, he forced his prisoners to count the lashes aloud, and if a prisoner miscounted, Sommer restarted the strokes from the beginning. Twenty-five lashes could be fatal, turning inmates into a mass of blood. Sommer allegedly gave one man 60 lashes, killing him on the spot.
When he was later brought to trial, he strangely built a wooden model of the whipping post and explained what he used to do. He claimed, and I quote: "I cannot claim that I struck the final blows with the same force as the first. You always get a little tired."
But even more disturbing allegations emerged against him. There was a particular group of people who were subjected to torture and brutality at Sommer's hands inside Buchenwald: priests and religious figures. He was seen inside the camp beating a pastor from Weimar into a heap of blood on the ground. It was later alleged that he hanged this man outside and poured buckets of cold water over him, leaving him to freeze to death in the cold.
But the worst was yet to come. He became known by the title "The Executioner" for horrifying reasons. Evidence was uncovered that Sommer killed two Austrian priests in the forest near the camp. The word Buchenwald specifically means "beech forest" in German, and vast forests surrounded the site. Numerous gallows were known to have been erected there, and prisoners called the forest "the singing forest" because the screams of inmates could be heard long into the night, many of them victims of Sommer. Many died from frost in winter after being left hanging in the forest.
Otto Neururer and Matthias Spangler were well-known priests imprisoned by the Nazis inside Buchenwald. They were jailed for their actions, which were said to fall within resistance to the Nazis and Hitler. Nazi officials arrested Neururer because he advised a woman not to marry a high-ranking Nazi official whose morals were alleged to be questionable, after which he was sent to Dachau and then to Buchenwald. But Neururer became one of Sommer's favorite targets for torture and abuse. He was systematically broken and killed by the SS guard.
Inside the camp, Neururer was tortured by Sommer because he was allegedly caught performing a forbidden baptism, and for this Martin Sommer prepared a brutal punishment for him. The Hangman took Neururer and Matthias Spangler into the forest and suspended both of them upside down from a tree, crucifying them. The two were stripped of their clothes in a final act of humiliation, and over the course of 34 hours, Neururer was severely beaten until his body finally gave out and he died from his ordeal at the hands of the Buchenwald hangman. Spangler was killed in the same manner, and one witness claimed the two did not complain about their deaths.
His attacks on priests continued, and Sommer allegedly beat a Catholic priest to death because he performed another religious act inside Buchenwald for one of the prisoners. He continued carrying out numerous hangings inside the adjacent forest. Large groups were led into the forest daily by Sommer, and they never returned.
Once they arrived there, he tied their hands behind their backs and then hanged them one by one from the trees. They were suspended in a way that left their hands behind their backs, with the full weight of their bodies falling on their shoulders. This caused agonizing dislocation of the joints, and for hours the prisoners screamed and wept, their cries heard throughout Buchenwald.
Sommer even claimed he was an envoy from Dante's hell, and that he was the devil himself. Prisoners also said he used the skull of one of his victims, with a candle inside it, to light his office. As mentioned, he took many lives by lethal injection, and he even placed a prisoner's head inside an iron vise and turned it until the prisoner's skull was crushed.
But as noted, this man, Martin Sommer, was investigated by the SS and specifically by Heinrich Himmler, the head of the paramilitary group, who heard firsthand about Sommer's brutality. Sommer was said to be so sadistic that he was unfit even to be a member of the SS. He was stripped of his rank and sent to the Eastern Front to fight in a penal battalion. These units were often rushed into battle when things were extremely tough, and they were used as frontline soldiers.
Martin Sommer was wounded on the Eastern Front and lost his right leg and left arm. He was in fact taken as a prisoner of war by the Red Army. The Soviets released him in 1955, and he returned to West Germany trying to live a normal life. He married and had a child, and even received a pension as a wounded veteran.
But he was later tried on charges of causing the deaths of at least 101 camp prisoners, and he was convicted of responsibility for the deaths of 25 of them. The "Hangman of Buchenwald" was sentenced to life in prison, and he spent the rest of his life either inside prison or in a care home he was not allowed to leave. The Hangman of Buchenwald died in 1988 at the age of 73, and he was known throughout Germany as one of the worst war criminals of World War II.
Remarkably, despite his grave crimes, he was not sentenced to death and no execution was carried out against him. But he was tried at a time when prison sentences were favored over letting a Nazi taste the same cup he had given others on the gallows. He was a disturbed and sadistic person, notorious inside Buchenwald for the way he treated prisoners. But the crimes of the Hangman of Buchenwald were countless, and many of them remain undisclosed to this day.