On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. In May of the following year, the Germans established the Auschwitz concentration camp, located roughly 60 kilometers west of Krakow. The camp was created because mass arrests of Poles were overwhelming the capacity of existing local prisons.
In October 1941, the Nazis began construction on Birkenau, which would become the largest of more than 40 camps and sub-camps making up the Auschwitz complex. From March 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau played a central role in the German effort to kill the Jews of Europe. Approximately 1 million people died there, with about 90 percent of the camp’s victims losing their lives on site.
When the Red Army entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, Soviet soldiers liberated more than 7,000 surviving inmates, most of whom were ill and dying. The conditions they confronted revealed the full scale of Nazi atrocities. One of the perpetrators responsible for these horrors was Oswald Kaduk.
Kaduk was born on August 26, 1906, in the city of Königshütte, then part of the German Empire. He was the son of a blacksmith and trained as a butcher after elementary school, later finding work at a slaughterhouse. After a period of unemployment in 1927, he joined the local fire department in his hometown.
In 1939, the same year Germany invaded Poland, Kaduk joined the General SS, the administrative and non-combat branch of the SS. In 1940, he was drafted into the Waffen SS, the military branch. After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Kaduk was sent to the Eastern Front, but repeated illnesses and hospital stays led to his transfer to Auschwitz in July 1941.
At first, Kaduk was assigned to guard tower duty in 1942. He later became a block leader responsible for overseeing prisoner barracks and was eventually promoted to report leader, a role that involved conducting roll calls and enforcing discipline. In these positions, Kaduk quickly gained a reputation for brutality.
Holocaust survivor Mika Kula described Kaduk as a tall, slightly hunched man in his mid-30s who spoke Polish fluently. Kula recalled that Kaduk was often drunk and instilled fear throughout the camp. He would burst into prisoner barracks without warning, conduct aggressive searches, and beat inmates without provocation.
Kaduk also patrolled areas where working prisoners had contact with civilians, actively looking for illegal food exchanges. When he caught such activity, he had civilians detained while the prisoners involved were sent to the penal company. Witnesses recalled that Kaduk often roamed the camp drunk, firing shots into the air above prisoners’ heads simply to frighten them.
Former inmate August Jarnitzki said Kaduk once gave him six lashes after a spare item of clothing was found in his bed. Holocaust survivor Max Malberg testified that on one occasion, two prisoners were being punished for stealing meat. Kaduk forced them to do knee bends until they fell over and spiked themselves on bayonets he had planted in front of them.
Kaduk was especially cruel toward children. Historian Andrew Roberts, in his book *The Storm of War*, recounted Kaduk’s practice of handing Jewish children balloons just before they were murdered with phenol injections to the heart, at a rate of ten children per minute.
Auschwitz survivor Ludvík Vébr testified how a dozen little Jewish girls, ages 3 to 11, begged him to save them from the gas chamber. They said they were strong and could work and did not want to die. But Kaduk, gun in hand, drove them away to the gas chamber.
Another survivor, Adam Chahanowiecki, gave testimony about an incident that left him permanently injured. During an evening roll call, Kaduk noticed someone out of line and ordered collective punishment for the entire block. When Chahanowiecki failed to respond quickly enough, Kaduk ran toward him, violently kicked his right leg, and stomped on it with full force. The assault left him with a fractured shin, and even after the war, he could not walk properly.
Survivor Naris O’itzky testified to witnessing countless acts of inhumanity carried out or overseen by Kaduk. These included hours-long penal exercises that pushed inmates to the brink of collapse, as well as public floggings for minor infractions like pausing during forced labor.
O’itzky recalled one particularly brutal episode in winter when prisoners were ordered to strip naked, perform physical exercises in freezing temperatures, then marched through a hot shower only to be sent back into the cold, sometimes after being sprayed with icy water. He also remembered being woken in the middle of the night and forced to run past Kaduk on the way to the bath house. That night, Kaduk selected approximately 1,200 prisoners, most of them Jews, to be sent to the gas chambers.
Kaduk also took part in organized selections during delousing procedures, particularly in the women’s camp at Birkenau, where overcrowding and unsanitary conditions had led to mass infestations. Women had their hair cut, their bodies shaved, and were bathed before being forced to pass naked before a panel. Each woman was inspected, and if she appeared healthy, she was allowed to stay. Many others were selected for death.
The final selection conducted in the camp was often carried out by Kaduk inside the washroom. Reportedly drunk, Kaduk sat on a small chair with a cane in one hand and half a liter of vodka beside him. He examined each prisoner and decided their fate on the spot. Those who pleased him were sent to the right and allowed to live; those who did not were sent to the left. As he made his choices, Kaduk would sometimes tell those he had condemned, “You’ll go to heaven. It’s good there.”
One of the most chilling accounts came from Stefan Malachewski, who witnessed mass executions in the summer of 1942. After two prisoners escaped from the punitive unit at Birkenau, over 200 inmates from that unit were rounded up and forced to squat in the courtyard for hours. Malachewski described how the prisoners were pulled out in pairs and executed on the spot. Kaduk, alongside SS commander Hans Aumeier, personally shot the prisoners in the back of the head. By the end of the day, all 200 were dead.
Malachewski also testified about another horrifying scene in September 1943. While working on the roof of block 10, he and his fellow workers observed the courtyard of block 11. A group of civilian prisoners, mostly Polish women with young children from the town of Bielsko, were brought into the courtyard and executed. Kaduk and SS officer Gerhard Palitzsch carried out the shootings using compressed air guns.
One of the victims was a Polish mother with a 5-year-old child. After her child was shot in front of her, she knelt and began to pray aloud. Kaduk, Aumeier, and the others laughed, and Kaduk, who spoke Polish, mocked her by saying, “Pray to your God. I will wait. Let him come.” Aumeier then kicked the woman in the back while she prayed, and Kaduk shot her dead.
Additional testimony from Naris O’itzky described another act of cruelty. After an escape incident in which a guard had reportedly been given poisoned vodka, 25 prisoners were arrested. Thirteen were executed in the bunker of block 11, and the remaining 12 were hanged publicly after roll call. O’itzky recalled that Kaduk stood nearby during the execution and entertained himself by swinging the bodies of the hanged prisoners.
O’itzky also shared a disturbing story he heard from a fellow inmate, Professor Yakubc. Yakubc had been approached by an SS man who handed him a severed woman’s breast taken during the gassing of Jews. The SS man claimed he brought human body parts back to feed his dog. It is believed that the SS man was Oswald Kaduk.
The Second World War in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. In the chaotic aftermath, Kaduk avoided immediate capture by assuming a false identity. He found work at a sugar factory in the small German town of Lobau, living quietly under the radar. However, in December 1946, a former inmate recognized him, and he was arrested by a Soviet military patrol.
During his detention, Kaduk reportedly confessed to personally shooting over 1,600 prisoners in the neck during the evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945. He allegedly went so far as to claim he had killed his own family because they had become an obstacle to his escape.
In August 1947, a Soviet military tribunal sentenced him to 25 years of forced labor, but he served less than half of his sentence. He was pardoned in April 1956 and released early. Afterward, he moved to West Berlin and found employment as a nurse at Tegel Hospital, where he became known among patients and staff as “Papa Kaduk” due to his outwardly kind demeanor.
Kaduk’s past caught up with him once more in July 1959 when he was rearrested. Between December 1963 and August 1965, Kaduk faced justice in the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, also known as the second Auschwitz trial. He was among 24 defendants facing murder charges.
During the proceedings, witness Ludvík Vébr described Kaduk as a butcher and testified that Kaduk had driven 12 children into the gas chamber, a revelation that caused outrage in the courtroom. One observer shouted, “This pig should be beaten to death.” Kaduk attempted to discredit the witness by calling him a liar.
In August 1965, the Frankfurt jury sentenced Kaduk to life imprisonment for ten counts of murder and two counts of joint murder involving at least 1,020 victims. He was also stripped of his civil rights for life, and multiple requests for clemency were denied.
While serving his sentence, Kaduk participated in a televised documentary about SS men stationed at Auschwitz. When asked about Holocaust denial, he said, “I have to say, I do not consider these people normal. We have to stick to the truth. There are people denying it, but what happened happened and it is not up for dispute.”
In 1984, Kaduk was transferred to an open prison and released in 1989 for health reasons. Oswald Kaduk was 90 years old when he died on May 31, 1997, in the town of Langelsheim, Germany. There were no tears shed for Oswald Kaduk.