Otto Moll
Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll (4 March 1915 – 28 May 1946) was a sadistic SS non-commissioned officer who was executed for atrocities he committed while working at Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. The SS-Hauptscharführer, who held the rank of Quartermaster Sergeant, is said to have personally killed thousands of innocent victims (over 20 thousand according to some reports) during his time at Birkenau.[1]
Otto Moll | |
|---|---|
| Born | 4 March 1915 Hohen Schonberg, Germany |
| Died | 28 May 1946 (aged 31) Landsberg am Lech, Germany |
| Cause of death | hanging |
| Years active | 1935–1945 |
| Organization | SS |
| Allegiance | Nazi Germany |
| Criminal charge | war crimes |
| Penalty | death sentence |
| Details | |
| Killed | several thousand |
Date apprehended | Dachau Concentration Camp |
Early life
Moll was born in Hohen Schönberg, Germany, on 4 March 1915. He trained as a gardener before joining the SS on 1 May 1935 (serial number 277670).
SS career
Moll joined the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the SS Death's Head Units responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany. One of his earliest jobs was a Kommandoführer in charge of a camp's gardeners' work detail. In May 1941, Otto Moll was transferred from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to Auschwitz where he was put in charge of digging the mass graves. Over the next three and half years, Moll served in several staff roles at the camp. He soon became the director of employment services at the men's camp in Auschwitz II. In 1944, Moll oversaw all the crematoria in Birkenau. He also was a Lagerführer of the Fürstengrube subcamp in Wesola and the Gleiwitz I sub-camp. According to Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss, he and Moll were both decorated by Adolf Hitler with the War Merit Cross, First Class with Swords.[2] He appears several times in the photo album belonging to Auschwitz commandant Karl-Friedrich Höcker that showed SS camp staff on leave at a retreat.
Moll would say to his personnel: "Befehl ist Befehl!" ("An order is an order!") to justify his actions. An attitude that other defendants at the Nuremberg Trials also cited as a defence.[3]
Brutality
Alter Feinsilber, a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau who worked for Moll, said at his war crimes trial:
It happened that some prisoners offered resistance when about to be shot at the pit or that children would cry and then SS Quartermaster Sergeant Moll would throw them alive into the flames of the pit.[4]
Another Sonderkommando prisoner named Henryk Tauber testified:
Hauptscharführer Moll was the most degenerate of the lot. Before his arrival at the camp, he was in charge of the work at the Bunkers, where they incinerated the gassed victims in pits. Then he was transferred for a while to another section. In view of the preparation necessary for the "reception" of convoys from Hungary in 1944, he was put in charge of all the crematoria. It is he who organized the large-scale extermination of the people arriving in these convoys. Just before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, he ordered pits to be dug alongside crematoria V and restarted the activity of Bunker 2, which had been lying idle, and its pits. In the yard of the crematory, there were notices on posts, with inscriptions telling the new arrivals from the transports that they were to go to the camp where work was waiting for them, but that first they had to take a bath and undergo disinfestation. For that, it was necessary for them to undress and put all their valuables in baskets specially placed for this purpose in the yard. Moll repeated the same thing in his speeches to the new arrivals. There were so many convoys that sometimes it happened that the gas chambers were incapable of containing all the new arrivals. The excess people were generally shot, one at a time and often by Moll himself. On several occasions, Moll threw people into the flaming pits alive. He also practised shooting people from a distance. He ill-treated and beat Sonderkommando prisoners, treating them like animals. Those who were in his personal service told us that he used a piece of wire to fish out gold objects from the box containing the jewels taken from new arrivals, and took them off in a briefcase. Among the objects left by the people who came to be gassed, he took furs and different types of food, in particular fat. When he took food, he said smilingly to the SS around him that one had to take advantage before the lean years came. Under his direction, the Sonderkommando was strengthened and increased to about 1000 prisoners.[5]
Arrest and execution
After Auschwitz-Birkenau was abandoned by the SS on 18 January 1945, Moll was transferred to a sub-camp of Dachau concentration camp. On 28 April 1945, a day before the Dachau camp was liberated by American troops, Moll arrived at the main camp with a group of prisoners he had forced on a death march. The next day he was captured and arrested.
In November 1945, Moll was put on trial by an American Military Tribunal during the Dachau trials. Although the trial heard testimony from victims of The Holocaust about his brutality, Moll was only charged with one count of forcing prisoners on a death march in April 1945.
He was found guilty and executed by hanging at Landsberg am Lech prison on 28 May 1946.
References
- Kadar, Gabor; Zoltan, Vagi (2004). Self-Financing Genocide: The Gold Train, the Becher Case and the Wealth of Hungarian Jews. Budapest: Central European University Press. pp. 258. ISBN 9639241539.
- Höss, Rudolf (1992). Death Dealer: The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. p. 350. ISBN 0-87975-714-0.
- Heller, Kevin Jon (2011). The Nuremberg Military Tribunals and the Origins of International Criminal Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-199-23233-8..
- Gilbert, Martin (2014). The Holocaust: The Human Tragedy. Rosetta Books. p. 109. ISBN 9780795337192.
- Pressac, Jean-Claude (1989). AUSCHWITZ: Technique and Operation of the Gas Chambers. Beate Klarsfeld Foundation. p. 496.
Further reading
- Müller, Filip (1999) [1979]. 'Eyewitness Auschwitz - Three Years in the Gas Chambers. trans. Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd. and Susanne Flatauer. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee & in association with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. p. 180. ISBN 1-56663-271-4.
