On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered Auschwitz, the largest Nazi extermination center, located roughly 40 miles west of Krakow in German-occupied Poland. Between 1940 and 1945, at least 1.3 million people were deported there, and more than 1.1 million were murdered. When the soldiers arrived, they found more than 7,000 surviving inmates, most of them ill and dying.
Among the perpetrators responsible for the horrors at Auschwitz was Gerhard Palitzsch. Born on June 17, 1913, in the village of Groß Salbitz near Dresden, Palitzsch was a farmer by profession. He was married to a woman named Luise, and the couple had two children, a daughter named Helga and a son named Lothar.
In March 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, the 19-year-old Palitzsch joined the Nazi Party and the SS. That same year, he began working as a guard at concentration camps in Oranienburg and Lichtenburg. By 1936, he was transferred to Sachsenhausen, where he served as a block leader before being promoted to report leader, responsible for prisoner roll calls.
In the spring of 1940, Palitzsch was transferred to the newly established Auschwitz concentration camp. He arrived with 30 German prisoners marked with green badges, convicted criminals selected for Kapo duty. These Kapos were tasked with supervising other inmates in exchange for better conditions, and they were often as brutal as their SS overseers.
At Auschwitz, Palitzsch became a report leader and quickly established a reign of terror. He was active in selections on the arrival ramp, where Nazi officials separated those fit for forced labor from those sent directly to the gas chambers. While other officers sometimes deceived victims into thinking they would receive soup or coffee, Palitzsch greeted newcomers with open contempt, telling them they would die like dogs and be sent through the chimneys of the crematoria.
His cruelty was not limited to words. In August 1940, he shot several Polish officers who refused to kiss his boots. He frequently whipped prisoners and forced them to hop in a frog position for 500 meters to the bunker, where they would be harassed and tortured before execution. In November 1941, Palitzsch became the first to shoot prisoners individually in the neck with a small-caliber rifle at the death wall, also known as the black wall.
Palitzsch reportedly boasted that he had personally shot around 25,000 people in the back of the head. He was allegedly paid five marks for each execution. Witnesses described him carrying out killings without hesitation, sometimes whistling or chatting casually between shots to show how little he cared.
He was known for a particularly sadistic method of killing families. A former prisoner, Dr. Bolesław Bożeń, described an incident in which Palitzsch murdered a family of five. He shot the baby in the head first, then the child standing between the parents. After throwing the oldest child to the ground and shooting him in the neck, he shot the mother and then the father. On another occasion, he seized a child from its mother’s arms and smashed its head against a stone. He also shot young Jewish girls as they ran around a closed yard, then calmly smoked a cigarette with a smile.
In September 1941, Palitzsch took part in the first gassing experiment using Zyklon B. Around 600 Russian prisoners of war and 250 sick Polish prisoners were crammed into the basement of Block 11. The following day, not all were dead, so Palitzsch added more Zyklon B. Rudolf Höss, the first commandant of Auschwitz, later testified at Nuremberg that he felt relief at the gassing method, as it spared the SS the horror of shooting victims directly.
Despite his brutality at work, Palitzsch was described by those who knew him at home as a friendly and loving family man. A 19-year-old Polish woman forced to work in his household described him as a good-looking blond man with a strange look in his eyes. His wife Luise contracted typhus after lice infected with the disease were placed in SS clothing by prisoners. She died at age 26, shortly after giving birth to their son Lothar at Auschwitz.
After his wife’s death, Palitzsch became increasingly dependent on alcohol and pursued relationships with female prisoners, including Romani and Jewish inmates. When he was caught with a Romani woman named Vera, he was accused of race defilement. He was also charged with theft for plundering possessions of murdered Jews, which were considered property of the Nazi Party.
Palitzsch was arrested and briefly held in the bunker of Block 11 alongside prisoners. In custody, witnesses noted he behaved differently, even using the informal German “Du” with inmates. He was sentenced to several years in prison by an SS and police court but was later pardoned and expelled from the SS in June 1944.
In late October 1944, Palitzsch was among the 33,000 German soldiers defending Budapest against the Soviet and Romanian offensive. Adolf Hitler declared the city a fortress to be held to the last man and forbade any withdrawal. Gerhard Palitzsch was killed on December 7, 1944, near the village of Jurbarkas, around 70 kilometers from Budapest. He was 31 years old.
Rudolf Höss later wrote of him, “Palitzsch was the most cunning and slippery creature that I have ever gotten to know and experience in the many concentration camps. He literally walked over bodies to satisfy his hunger for power.” There were no tears shed for Gerhard Palitzsch.