Cogs in the Killing Machine #2

 

Cogs in the Killing Machine #2

 

Dr Leonardo Conti (1900-1945)

Leonardo Conti was an early supporter of Hitler.  German on his mother's side, who studied medicine. He became a member of the Sturmabteilung (the SA) in 1923, and later enrolled within the Schutzstaffel (SS).  He helped to set up the ‘National Socialist German Doctors League’.  He was heavily involved in the T4 ‘Euthanasia Programme’ and was more than happy to use concentration camp inmates as human guinea pigs in Nazi experiments.  Hitler appointed him 'Reich Health Leader'.  Captured by the Allies and imprisoned.  Committed suicide on 6th October 1945 whilst awaiting trial.

Dr Karl Franz Gerhard (1897-1948)

SS-Gruppenführer Gerhard was a medical officer within the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Himmler's private physician.  Was primarily based at the Hohenlychen Sanatorium.  Gerhard carried out numerous experiments on concentration camp inmates.   He was hanged at Landsberg prison, Bavaria on 2nd June 1948 for crimes he committed during the war.

 

Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz (1899-1945)

SS-Obergruppenführer Grawitz was a medical doctor and member of the T4 Euthanasia Programme.  His area of interest was trying to find ways of curing homosexuals of their homosexuality.  He carried out numerous barbaric experiments on concentration camp inmates in an effort to achieve his aim.  He spent his last days cowering within Hitler's bunker in Berlin in 1945.  After requesting permission to leave the ‘Führer bunker’ was turned down, Grawitz committed suicide on 24 April 1945, with a hand grenade killing his wife and children at the same time. 

 

Franz Stangl (1908-1971)

Franz Stangl was born in Austria and became a police officer in later life. He became a member of the Austrian Nazi party, and joined the SS reaching the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain). Stangl was heavily involved in the Nazis ‘T4 Euthanasia Programme’ and then later sent to Poland as first Commandant of the Sobibor death camp. At this time the first Commandant at the Treblinka death camp, Irmfried Erbel, was making such a mess of the killing process, Stangl was therefore transferred to replace him and run the camp in a more efficient way. His next assignment saw him in Yugoslavia helping to eradicate partisans and Jews, but later was back in the Reich due to health issues by the beginning of 1945. Later he was captured by American troops and imprisoned whilst his background was being investigated (because of his link to the euthanasia programme) he managed to escape in 1948. In Italy, Bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathiser helped him escape justice by using the Vatican ‘Rat-Line’ which had been set up to help war criminals avoid arrest and therefore justice. He ended up in Syria then from Syria he went to Brazil. An arrest warrant was issued for him in 1961, and he was finally apprehended in February 1967 and extradited to West Germany for trial. In December 1970, a Düsseldorf court sentenced Stangl to life imprisonment. He died of a heart attack on 28 June 1971 whilst in custody.

 

 

 

Irmfried Eberl (1910-1948)

SS-Obersturmführer (Lieutenant) Irmfried Eberl was born in Austria on 8th September 1910 and became a psychiatrist by trade. He became the medical director in the Brandenburg Institute that became a nerve centre for the ‘T4 Euthanasia programme’. He helped establish the death camp at Treblinka in Poland and became its first commandant on 11 July 1942. Due to immense problems at the camp, he was removed as its commandant on 26 August 1942. Eberl was arrested after the war, but he chose to commit suicide on 16 February 1948 rather than face trial.

 

Kurt Hubert Franz (1914-98)

Untersturmführer (2nd Lieutenant) originally served within the Belzec death camp in Poland before being transferred to Treblinka.  There he served as Deputy Commandant, before finally taken over as Commandant. After the war he worked in a couple of jobs before finally being arrested on 2nd December 1959.  At the Treblinka Trials he was found guilty of being complicit in the murder of some 300,000 men, women and children and for personally murdering over 100 others.  He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in 1993 due to ill health.  He died on 4th July 1998.

 

Hermine Braunsteiner (1919-1999)

Born in Vienna, Austria.   Braunsteiner was a notorious female guard, first in the women’s camp at Ravensbrück, and then in the extermination camp of Majdanek in Poland, where inmates referred to her as the “Stomping Mare".  In 1949, she was found guilty of murder, including infanticide in an Austrian court and sentenced to only three years imprisonment.  In 1959, she married an American by the name, Russell Ryan and immigrated to the US, and became an American citizen in 1963.  She was detained after some survivors of the holocaust identified her as one of their tormentors and a deportation hearing was conveyed. She was accused of murder, torture and assisting in the selection process for which women and children were condemned to the gas chambers. One allegation stated how she attacked a female prisoner who died the next day of her injuries. She was also accused of whipping women to death; that she grabbed children by their hair and threw them into the gas chambers, and that she had "stomped" the life out of an old female prisoner.   She was stripped of her US citizenship in 1971 on the grounds that she had failed to disclose her activities during the war.  On 14 March, 1973, a Dusseldorf court issued an extradition warrant, and at the same time as this warrant was issued, the US also received a request from the Polish government who also requested extradition. She was taken into custody and sent to West Germany to stand trial for her war crimes.

In June, 1981, she was sentenced to life imprisonment after the court case which had been held in Dusseldorf (This trial was known as 'The Third Majdanek Trial), but was released from prison on 19 April, 1996 on health reasons (she suffered from diabetes and had a leg amputated).  She died in 1999.

 

 

 

Heinrich Müller (1900-1945)

Muller was born in Munich, Bavaria in 1900.  Where, when or how he died is not known, but he may have been killed whilst trying to flee Berlin in 1945.

As an SS-Gruppenführer (Lieutenant-General) within the SS, Muller was chief of the Gestapo and was heavily involved in the round up of Jews and other 'undesirables' who were sent to their deaths within the east.

He was present at the ‘Wannsee Conference’ in January 1942, which had been set up by Reinhardt Heydrich to formulate a nationwide plan and support base for the total and final solution to the Jewish question, i.e., the mass extermination of all Europe’s Jews.

In 1943, he was dispatched to Rome to find out why so many of Italy's Jews were managing to avoid being rounded-up for deportation to the east. 

In the last days of the Reich, Muller was in Berlin and when Hermann Fegelein, Himmler's adjutant to the Fuhrer, was arrested, it was Muller who interrogated him in an effort to find out what he knew about Himmler's betrayal. After Berlin fell to the Russians at the beginning of May 1945, Muller was nowhere to be found and the search was on to find him.  Reports claimed that he was hiding in and around in Argentina but nothing was confirmed. 

Kurt Eimann (1899-1980)

Kurt Eimann was born in Görlitz, Germany.  After the First World War, he became a member for a Freikorps unit and in 1932 he joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei [NSDAP] and enrolled into the Sturmabteilung [SA] and then into the Schutzstaffel [SS].

SS-Sturmbannführer Kurt Eimann, was an officer in charge of a unit which had been formed in Danzig either a few months before the invasion of Poland or soon after the Polish surrender in October 1939. Eimann was responsible for the murder of some 13,000 patients from clinics and asylums within the eastern region of Poland. At his trial in Hanover in 1968, he was accused of leading by example as he personally shot victims in the back of their heads.

As the Red Army poured into Austria, were Eimann and many other retreating Germans fled, he was captured but managed to escape his Soviet captures, but was later recaptured, this time by the Americans, and again he managed to escape.  He eventually surrendered himself to the British. In 1946, he was released from his term as a Prisoner of War.  In 1967, he faced a court in Hanover for his war crimes, and found guilt.  He was given a four-year prison sentence but only did two years of that sentence before being released. He died in 1980.

 

Michel Hermann (b.1906)

Born in Hegermühle near Brandenburg, Germany and began his trade in murder when he took part within the euthanasia programme [T4] that was taking place within Grafeneck Castle, near Tübingen in Germany and Hartheim Castle, located near Linz, Austria institutes.

Later he was dispatched to Sobibor in Poland and after Sobibor, he went to Treblinka to carry on his career in death.  An SS-Technical Sergeant at the Sobibor death camp in Poland. He is best known as the officer whose job was to reassure new arrivals [prisoners] that they had just arrived a transit camp. He became known simply as the 'Preacher' due to the lies he kept telling those new arrivals.

It has been claimed that he managed to escape to Egypt after the war.   

 

Leopold Von Mildenstein (1902-1968)

Leopold Itz, Edler von Mildenstein Born in Prague, Austria. Joined the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei [NSDAP] in 1929 and the Schutzstaffel [SS] in 1932.

Mildenstein had a keen interest in 'Zionism' and had travelled to Palestine during the early 1930s as well as attending Zionist conferences in an effort to fully understand it's concepts, later he studied Hebrew. He was an active supporter of allowing Germany's Jews to emigrate to Palestine as a way to rid Germany of its Jews. When Reinhardt Heydrich decided to open a ‘Jewish Desk’ within the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), he appointed Mildenstein to establish and run it, this desk. Section II/112 was geared up to keep an eye on all things Jewish, and to help coordinate the removal of Jews from German society and he was answerable to Heydrich himself. Mildenstein recruited Adolf Eichmann into Section II/112 in 1934. At this stage of his career, Mildenstein was an SS-Untersturmführer (Second Lieutenant). In 1936 he was sacked from his post after a conflict with Heydrich and was transferred to the Foreign Ministry's press department. Kuno Schroeder became the new head of Section. After the war, Mildenstein lived for a period in West Germany and then went to work in Egypt for a local radio station. He died in November 1968.

 

Stefan Baretzki (1919-1988)

SS-Rottenführer (Lance Corporal) and became a Blockführer (block chief) within the Auschwitz concentration camp system from 1942-1945. He Took part in selecting prisoners for the gas chambers and was also known for the indiscriminate beating of prisoners and numerous killings at his own hands. He was sentenced to Life (plus 8 years) imprisonment. He died on 21 June 1988, in Bad Nauheim, Germany.

 

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski (1899-1972)

Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski would become an SS-Obergruppenführer (lieutenant General) and Police leader who was involved in anti-partisan activities on the Eastern Front. 

Bach-Zelewski joined the NSDAP in 1930 and a year later, the SS. 

From 1932-44, he was a member of Germany's Reichstag. 

He helped suppress the Warsaw rebellion in 1944. 

In 1951 he was sentenced to house arrest by a de-Nazification court but was rearrested for crimes that he had committed during the, Blood Purge, against Röhm (Night of the Long Knives) and sentenced to just over 4 years imprisonment. He rearrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment for the murders of six German Communists in 1933.  He was never charged with war crimes that he had committed whilst serving on the Eastern Front.  He died in 1972.

* Preifi (or Preie): was an SS guard at the Treblinka death camp.  Described as looking like a skinny gypsy and was known as 'The Old One' who was regarded as 'sullen and taciturn', and as a personal tonic he used to hang around the camp's refuse dump and wait for a starving inmate who would venture into the dump in an attempt to find food.  Those whom he caught, he would force them to open their mouth, he would then place the barrel of his pistol into their mouth and pull the trigger (see Treblinka page).

* Stumpfe: SS guard at Treblinka who it was said used to break into uncontrollable laughter when he witnessed an inmate being slaughtered. He was given the nickname 'Laughing Death' (see Treblinka page).

* Svidersky: Treblinka guard who it was said to have had only one eye.  He was from Odessa and known infamously as the 'Master Hammer' who loved to kill inmates with a hammer.  It has been said that he murdered 15 children from the ages of 8-13 who had been declared 'unfit for work duties'. (see Treblinka page)

The Notorious Hermine Braunseiner (below), who was known as the "Stomper" by Majdanek prisoners.