During World War II, the Nazi concentration camp system became a landscape of extreme cruelty, where guards and officers carried out systematic abuse against prisoners. Among the most notorious figures to emerge from this dark chapter was Martin Sommer, a man whose sadistic behavior earned him the chilling nickname "The Hangman of Buchenwald."
Sommer, born Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer in February 1915, joined the SS shortly after Hitler rose to power. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a Hauptscharführer, or senior squad leader, and began his career in the camp system at Dachau, the first concentration camp established under Nazi rule.
From the very beginning, Sommer was known as a guard who treated prisoners with exceptional brutality and contempt. He later transferred to Buchenwald, where he would commit some of his most horrific crimes.
At Buchenwald, Sommer's reputation preceded him. Prisoners understood that if Sommer looked at them, there was a strong chance they would be tortured or killed within minutes. His terrifying actions became routine within the camp, where approximately 8,000 Soviet prisoners of war were eliminated in a secret medical facility built specifically for that purpose.
In 1943, SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered a judge named Georg Konrad Morgen to investigate corruption at Buchenwald. The investigation uncovered that camp commander Karl Otto Koch and his wife Ilse had been stealing money taken from prisoners. But the inquiry also examined Sommer's behavior, and witness testimony revealed a horrifying secret.
Sommer had a hidden chamber beneath the floor of his office, where he kept a collection of torture instruments. These included needles he used to execute prisoners by injecting carbolic acid directly into their hearts. This was his final move after prolonged torture sessions conducted inside his office.
He was also known for injecting air into his victims' veins, causing vascular blockage and death. Witnesses claimed Sommer would torture prisoners in the evening, hide their bodies under his bed, and transport them to the crematorium the next morning.
Sommer regularly whipped prisoners at poles in public view of other inmates. At the flogging platform, he forced prisoners to count each lash out loud. If a prisoner made a mistake in counting, Sommer would start the punishment over from the beginning. Twenty-five lashes were often enough to be fatal, turning prisoners into a mass of blood.
According to testimony, Sommer gave one man 60 lashes, killing him instantly. When later brought to trial, Sommer strangely constructed a wooden model of the whipping post and explained what he did. He claimed, "I cannot claim that I struck the last blows with the force of the first ones. You always get a little tired."
Some of the most disturbing allegations against Sommer involved his treatment of priests and religious figures. He was seen beating a pastor from Weimar into a bloody heap on the ground. He then allegedly hanged the man outside and poured buckets of cold water over him, leaving him to freeze to death.
Sommer earned his nickname "The Hangman" for even more horrifying reasons. Evidence revealed that he killed Austrian priests in the forest near the camp. Buchenwald literally means "beech forest" in German, and vast woodlands surrounded the site. Many gallows were erected there, and prisoners called the forest "the singing forest" because screams could be heard throughout the night.
Otto Neururer and Matthias Spangler were two well-known priests imprisoned by the Nazis at Buchenwald for their resistance activities. Neururer had been arrested for advising a woman not to marry a high-ranking Nazi official with questionable morals. He was sent to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, where he became one of Sommer's preferred targets for torture.
Neururer was tortured by Sommer after being caught performing a forbidden baptism ceremony. The hangman took Neururer and Spangler into the forest and hung both men upside down from a tree. The two were stripped of their clothes in a final act of humiliation. Over 34 hours, Neururer was beaten severely until his body finally gave out and he died.
Spangler was killed the same way. One witness claimed the two men did not complain about their deaths.
Sommer's attacks on clergy continued. He allegedly beat a Catholic priest to death for performing another religious act inside Buchenwald for a prisoner. He carried out numerous hangings in the adjacent forest, where large groups were led daily by Sommer and never returned.
Once in the forest, Sommer would bind prisoners' hands behind their backs and hang them one by one from trees. The method caused the full weight of their bodies to rest on their shoulders, leading to painful joint dislocations. For hours, prisoners screamed and cried, their cries heard throughout the camp.
Sommer even claimed to be an envoy from Dante's hell, saying he was the devil himself. Prisoners said he used a skull of one of his victims with a candle inside to light his office. He killed many through fatal injections and once placed a prisoner's head in an iron vise, turning it until the prisoner's skull shattered.
Eventually, Sommer's own organization turned against him. Himmler himself heard of Sommer's brutality and determined that Sommer was too sadistic even for 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 during the most dangerous conditions and used as frontline soldiers.
Sommer was wounded on the Eastern Front, losing his right leg and left arm. He was captured as a prisoner of war by the Red Army. The Soviets released him in 1955, and he returned to West Germany, attempting to live a normal life. He married, had a child, and even received a pension as a wounded war veteran.
However, Sommer was later tried for causing the deaths of at least 101 camp prisoners and was convicted of responsibility for 25 of those deaths. The Hangman of Buchenwald was sentenced to life in prison and spent the rest of his life either in prison or in a care facility he was not allowed to leave.
Sommer died in 1988 at the age of 73, known throughout Germany as one of the worst war criminals of World War II. Despite his grave crimes, he was never sentenced to death and no execution was ever carried out against him. He was tried at a time when prison sentences were preferred over making a Nazi taste the same fate he had given others on the gallows.
Sommer was a disturbed and sadistic individual, notorious within Buchenwald for his treatment of prisoners. The crimes of the Hangman of Buchenwald were countless, and many remain unrevealed to this day.