Martin Sommer

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Martin Sommer (1935)

Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer (born February 8, 1915 in Schkölen , Weißenfels district ; † June 7, 1988 in Schwarzenbruck , Nürnberger Land district ), also known as the executioner of Buchenwald , was a German SS member and supervisor in the Sachsenburg and Buchenwald concentration camps .

Life

Martin Sommer was born the son of a farmer in Schkölen , he attended elementary school and was supposed to be a farmer like his father. In 1931 he joined the NSDAP and the SA . In 1933, Sommer switched to the SS and from May 15, 1934 to the death's head association "SS-Sonderkommando 3 / Sachsen" in the political readiness of Dresden under the command of Karl Otto Koch . From 1935 on, he temporarily performed guard duty in Sachsenburg concentration camp . After a motorcycle accident in 1936, from the end of June 1937, Sommer was transferred to the headquarters of the Buchenwald concentration camp, which was under construction, and was, again under Karl Otto Koch, initially as head of the demolition and clearing command and in the "Quarry Command" and as a block leader . At that time he had the rank of SS Rottenführer . In the meantime, he was promoted to SS-Scharführer , from autumn 1938 to spring 1943 he was administrator of the notorious detention cell building (bunker), on September 1, 1942 he was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer .

In the detention building, which was located to the left of the main gate, Sommer was the unrestricted ruler, he tortured and killed inmates with particularly agonizing methods: he starved inmates, hanged them in their cells, poisoned the little food or simply killed them with a piece of iron. He also injected prisoners with phenol , Evipan or air into the veins. Paul Schneider , Ernst Heilmann and countless other prisoners are said to have fallen victim to him. Some of the corpses he pushed under his bed at night in the office of the detention center, where they had to move the corpse carriers away the next morning. In one case, Sommer is said to have crushed the skull of a prisoner with a screw clamp, another time he chained a pastor to the outside of the detention building, poured cold water over him and let him freeze to death in the freezing cold. There are many testimonies about Sommer's atrocities, especially from former calists , i. H. Prisoners who had to work in the bunker. Sommer's deputy was Anton Bergmeier , his successor from 1943 Gustav Heigel .

Furthermore, Sommer was responsible for the official execution and punishment of convicted prisoners. He was the most feared executor of the caning on the cane . The bound delinquent received 25 blows with a stick on the bare buttocks, which he had to count out loud. Sommer struck so hard that he said he had blisters on his hands. He snatched the stick out of the hands of other SS men and kept hitting himself if, in his opinion, they didn't hit hard enough. Many a prisoner was taken to the infirmary or to the crematorium with broken kidneys. Sommer excused his brutality during the beatings in court in 1958, saying that his youth and his physical strength had been abused by the camp administration. No blow went wrong with him. According to the judicial opinion of his doctor in charge, Riemenschneider, Martin Sommer was “neither mentally ill nor mentally weak and he had never been that before. In the psychological sense, summer is a pronounced sadist, a merciless egoist in the most blatant form. Due to the harshness of his parents' upbringing and the environmental influences in the Buchenwald concentration camp, where the brutality was rehearsed daily for him, he was brought up to relentless cruelty. "

In the spring of 1943, Sommer was transferred to the Waffen SS . Here he served first with a tank replacement division and then until August 1943 with the 9th SS Panzer Regiment of the 9th SS Panzer Division "Hohenstaufen" . On August 28, 1943, the SS judge had Konrad Morgen Sommer ordered back to Buchenwald, arrested and taken to a remand prison in Weimar. Sommer should be tried for officially unauthorized executions in connection with the corruption affair of camp commandant Koch. He initially denied any guilt, but later admitted the secret killing of 40 to 50 prisoners by fatal injections. According to Sommer's own testimony in 1967, he was only charged with the unlawful killing of two prisoners and one attempted murder. The court denied him any statement about the killings on Koch's personal orders. It remains unclear whether a judgment was actually made against Sommer.

In any case, Sommer was given frontline probation, and so at the beginning of March 1945 he was deployed together with other SS remand prisoners in a tank unit in the Eisenach area. There he was seriously wounded on April 8, 1945 when an American plane with its entire bomb load hit Sommer's tank. He suffered severe injuries to his left arm, stomach and right leg, so that this had to be amputated up to 15 cm.

After the hospital stay, he was finally taken to the internment camp in Ludwigsburg in the summer of 1945 by the US Army under a false name . In June 1947 he was released to the disabled home in Possenhofen Castle , where he was recognized by a former prisoner and finally arrested on February 22, 1950. In 1955 there was an indictment, but the trial was broken off due to Sommer's certified incapacity to stand trial and detention. Sommer was released and married a 21-year-old nurse in June 1956. As a war disabled person, he also applied for an additional pension of DM 10,000 and a monthly pension of DM 300. In 1957, Sommer was arrested again and in the summer of 1958 there was a trial before the Bayreuth Regional Court , where the indictment was drastically reduced due to his state of health. The verdict was pronounced on July 3, 1958. Sommer was sentenced to life imprisonment and deprivation of civil rights for killing at least 25 inmates by injection .

As a result of the proceedings against Sommer - in addition to the public attention to the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial - Nazi criminal matters came into the focus of the nationwide public and caused a deep shock among visitors and journalists. For the first time in the West German press one could read precise descriptions of the boundless brutality of the concentration camp guards. The proceedings against Hans Eisele in connection with the trial against Sommer this year also turned into a scandal from the journalists' point of view. The trials made the public realize that the prosecution of Nazi crimes was by no means over with the first wave of trials in the post-war period.

Sommer served his imprisonment first in Bayreuth, and since summer 1959 in the infirmary of the Straubing prison . He was supported by the organization silent help for prisoners of war and internees .

In 1970 a medical report concluded that Sommer's war injuries required treatment that was not possible in prison. In 1971 he was transferred to the supply hospital in Bad Tölz for inpatient treatment . From there he made a pardon to the Bavarian Prime Minister Alfons Goppel , which the latter refused at the end of 1971. But in 1973 Goppel agreed that Sommer was moved to a nursing home of the Rummelsberger Anstalten , the Stephanusheim , where he lived from 1973 until his death. Sommer had the condition not to be allowed to leave Rummelsberg, which he violated regularly and without sanctions. Martin Sommer was buried under a false name in the Schwarzenbruck cemetery. The grave was disbanded in 2008.

literature

  • Thomas Greif: Martin Sommer (1915–1988) ... was the "hangman of Buchenwald". In: Thomas Greif (Ed.): Kaiser, Chancellor, Rummelsberger. 21 footnotes of German history. Accompanying volume for the exhibition in the Diakoniemuseum Rummelsberg. Kunstverlag Josef Fink, Lindenberg im Allgäu 2017, pp. 165–177, ISBN 978-3-95976-088-1 .
  • Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
  • Holm Kirsten, Wulf Kirsten : Voices from Buchenwald. A reading book ; Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2002; ISBN 3-89244-574-5 .
  • Harry Stein, Buchenwald Memorial (ed.): Buchenwald Concentration Camp 1937–1945. Accompanying volume for the permanent historical exhibition ; Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 1999; ISBN 978-3-89244-222-6 .
  • Beech forest. A concentration camp . Report by the former concentration camp inmates Emil Carlebach, Paul Grünewald, Helmut Röder, Willy Schmidt, Walter Vielhauer. Edited on behalf of the Buchenwald-Dora camp community of the Federal Republic of Germany. Röderberg in the Pahl-Rugenstein-Verlag, Cologne; 2nd edition, 1991; ISBN 978-3876827865

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Details of the proceedings with reference to the indictment written by Konrad Morgen in: Herlinde Pauer-Studer, J. David Velleman: “Because I'm a justice fanatic”. The case of SS judge Konrad Morgen. Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-518-42599-2 , pp. 155 ff, 249 ff.
  2. ↑ Summary of the verdict on justice and Nazi crimes. Volume 14. Universiteit van Amsterdam , archived from the original on July 7, 2003 ; accessed on June 25, 2019 .
  3. ↑ Marc von Miquel: Punish or amnesty? West German justice and politics of the past in the sixties (=  Norbert Frei [Hrsg.]: Contributions to the history of the 20th century . Volume 1 ). Wallstein-Verlag, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-89244-748-9 , p. 146–149 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  4. ↑ Thomas Greif: Martin Sommer (1915–1988) ... was the "hangman of Buchenwald". In: Thomas Greif (Ed.): Kaiser, Chancellor, Rummelsberger. 21 footnotes of German history. Accompanying volume for the exhibition in the Diakoniemuseum Rummelsberg. Lindenberg im Allgäu 2017, pp. 165–177, here: pp. 170–176.
personal data
SURNAME Summer, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Summer, Walter Gerhard Martin
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German overseer in Buchenwald concentration camp and SS-Hauptscharführer
DATE OF BIRTH February 8, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Schkölen
DATE OF DEATH June 7, 1988
Place of death Schwarzenbruck