Famous Nazis in the War
Llse Koch, known as the “Bitch of Buchenwald”, was married to another wicked Nazi SS, Karl Otto Koch, but outshone him in the depraved, inhumane, disregard for life which was her trademark (3). She used her cruelty by using her sexual prowess by wandering around the camps naked with a whip (33). If any man glanced at her she would have them shot on the spot (33). Llse Koch would also choose inmates with interesting tattoos to be killed so their skin could be used as lampshades for her home (3). After the war she was arrested and spent her time in prison. She was found after hanging herself in 1967 after being consumed of guilt (3).
Franz Stangl was born in Austria, and was a commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps where mentally and physically disabled people were sent to be killed (34). He accepted the job, and grew to the idea of killing Jews, looking at prisoners not as humans but as trash (34). He is quoted as saying, “I remember standing there, next to the pits full of black-blue corpses…. somebody said "What shall we do with rotting garbage?" that started me thinking of them as cargo (3). Stangl escaped Germany after the war and was eventually arrested in Brazil, in 1967 (34). He was sentenced for the deaths of around 900,000 people( 3). He admitted to these killings and died of heart failure in 1971, while serving a life sentence (3).
Josef Kramer was the Commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and was known as “The Beast of Belsen” by the camp prisoners. He alone was responsible for the deaths of thousands of people (3). Josef adopted his own policies at the camps and terrorized the prisoners without remorse (35). After the war he was convicted of war crimes and hanged in Hameln prison (3).
Dr. Oskar Dirlewanger was a World War 1 veteran and led the infamous SS Dirlewanger Brigade (36). Dirlwanger raped two 13 year old girls in the 1930s, and lost his Dr. title after being imprisoned (3). He volunteered for the SS at the start of World War 2 (36). He and his soldiers believed to have tortured, raped, murdered people and even children. He even fed female hostages strychnine to entertain his soldiers (3). Oskar was captured by the French after being injured as he led his soldiers into battle (36). The French handed him over to the Polish, who locked him up and beat and tortured him over the next few days (3). He died from injuries inflicted by the Polish guards around June 5, 1945 (3).
Joseph Mengele initially gained popularity for supervising the selection of incoming prisoners, determining who was to be killed and who was to become a forced laborer (37). He was most famous for performing grizzly human experiments on camp inmates (3). He was known as the “Angel of Death” (3). When one of the hospital blocks was infested with lice, He gassed all 750 women assigned to it (37). He also used Auschwitz as an opportunity to continue his research on heredity, using inmates for human experimentation (3). He was especially interested in identical twins. His experiments included attempts to take one twin’s eyeballs and attach them to the back of the other twin’s head, changing eye color by injecting chemicals into children’s eyes, various amputations of limbs, and other brutal surgeries (3). He survived the war and fled to South America, where he was capture for the rest of his life (37).
Hildegard Lächert developed a reputation for brutality during her service at Ravensbruck, Majdanek and Auschwitz in the year of 1942 (3). After the war, she was sentenced to fifteen years for her service at Auschwitz (3). She was let out in 1956 having served only nine years (38). Her freedom got the best of her though because in 1975 she was charged for participation in the selection process, which was releasing her dog on inmates (38). After this she was sentenced to an additional twelve years (3).
Hermann Goring was born in Rosenheim, Germany on January 12, 1893 (19). Once Hermann had hit the adult age he was trained for a career in military, and met Carin von Kantzow, who divorced her husband so she could married Hermann in 1923 (39). Eventually he became the leader of the Nazi Party (19). He played a huge role in organizing the Nazi police state in Germany, and organized concentration camps for the "corrective treatment" of individuals (19). After being caught by the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg in 1946, Hermann was kept to be hanged as a war criminal, but he took cyanide the night he was to be executed (19).
Heinrich Himmler was born on October 7, 1900 into a middle-class, and very conservative Catholic family in Munich, Germany (20). Heinrich Himmler's family moved to Landshut, which was a town located about 40 miles northeast of Munich (40). This happened after Heinrich’s father senior took a job of assistant principal of the Gymnasium in Landshut(40). Heinrich graduated from high school in Landshut in July 1919 (20). He studied agriculture at the Technical University in Munich and there he joined a German-nationalist student fraternity. (40) He began to reading deeply in the racist-nationalist literature. "In August 1923, he joined the Nazi party. On November 9, 1923, Himmler marched with Hitler, Röhm, Hermann Göring, and other Nazi leaders in the Beer Hall Putsch against the German government" (20). He married to Margarete Boden in 1928, and they had daughter named Gudrun, in 1929 (40). Heinrich died in 1945 known as the second most powerful man during World War 2 (20).
Joseph Goebbels was born in Rhineland and when he was adult age he attended the Heidelberg University where he was awarded a doctorate of philosophy in 1920 (4). He couldn’t serve in the German Army during the First World War because he had a clubbed foot which made the ability to walk hard for him (4). Years later he joined the Nazi Party and to keep his parents happy, he got a job in a bank to hold his spot of being middle class. Joseph Goebbels was given the task to build up Nazi support in Berlin. He did this between the years of 1926 and 1930 (4). In 1929, he had been given overall charge of the party’s propaganda machine. In 1933, Joseph was given Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda. He held this post until 1945 (4).
Rudolf Hess was born in Alexandria, Egypt, April 26, 1894, and was the son of an exporter (21). When he was fourteen years old, he moved to Germany and volunteered for the German Army in 1914 when World War One broke out (21). During World War One Rudolf was hurt twice, and soon after became an airplane pilot. He eventually made it into the University of Munich, and studied political science (21). When Rudolf heard Hitler's speech he decided to join the Nazi Party in the year of 1920 (21).
Adolf Eichmann was born on March 19th, 1906 in Solingen (22). His father moved the family to Linz in Austria in the year of 1914. After serving in the Austrian World War One, his father moved them back to Germany in the year of 1920 (22). In 1925 Adolf dropped out of college and worked as a salesman who travelled for a Vacuum Oil Company. In 1932 Adolf was 26 years old and moved to Austria where he joined the Nazi Party (22).