Otto Moll

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Otto Moll (* 4. March 1915 in Hohen Schönberg at Kalkhorst , Nordwestmecklenburg , † 28. May 1946 in Landsberg am Lech ) was a German hauptscharführer and perpetrators of the Holocaust , of the Auschwitz concentration camp as head of the gas chambers and crematoria functioned . He was executed as a war criminal after the end of World War II .

Life

Otto Moll joined the voluntary labor service in Velten in 1933 after completing his vocational training as a gardening assistant . In May 1935 he was drafted as a candidate for the SS-Totenkopfstandarte "Brandenburg" in Oranienburg north of Berlin and finally accepted into the SS on November 16, 1936 (SS no. 267.670). Moll was musically active and a member of the SS marching band. During a trip with this minstrel train from Bernau to Oranienburg, the SS truck collided with a car; an SS man was killed, Moll was critically injured. He was in the Bernau hospital for several months, cured a fractured skull and had lost an eye. Hans Schmid, who has dealt extensively with Moll, believes it is possible that he has suffered from frontal lobe syndrome since the accident ( post- traumatic organic psychosyndrome , ICD-10 F07.2). An American forensic scientist investigated u. a. Witness statements about Moll's deeds and his typeface and came to this diagnosis. Frontal lobe syndrome is an organic damage that can be expressed in psychotic or psychopathic behavior. A dulling of feelings, excessive enterprising spirit, general disinhibition and a particular lack of pity are characteristic. Schmid discusses Moll's criminal career with a strong focus on this clinical picture and comes to the conclusion that he was a physically and mentally ill person who was deliberately instrumentalized as a murderer by a criminal regime. In this respect, Moll does not meet the criteria of the "normal German" who became the perpetrator.

After his recovery, Moll worked from 1938 to 1941 in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as the command manager of the nursery. Here he was already sponsored by the camp's adjutant, Rudolf Höss . After Höss had become the commandant of the Auschwitz camp , he brought Moll there on May 2, 1941 to carry out agricultural work. Favored by his thirst for action and his harshness, Moll became leader of the notorious penal company in June 1942 . As a result of the expansion of Auschwitz into an extermination camp ordered by Heinrich Himmler , Moll henceforth primarily devoted himself to killing people. Before the large crematoria and gas chambers were set up in Auschwitz-Birkenau , he and Franz Hössler led the mass killings in the so-called bunkers I and II Gas chambers had been established; mass graves were dug in their immediate vicinity, in which several hundred thousand corpses were buried. After several deaths among SS men and relatives as a result of contaminated groundwater, the pits were opened and the corpses burned. Moll was responsible for overseeing the so-called Sonderkommando responsible for this , whose members mostly consisted of Jews who had been selected from transports. The work they had to do included a. the evacuation of the gas chambers and the transfer of the dead to the fire pits or the crematorium ovens. Many of the changes that perfected the extermination process can be traced back to Moll's manic involvement.

On April 30, 1943 Otto Moll was awarded the War Merit Cross, 1st Class with Swords. This fact throws a significant light on its importance for the extermination of the Jews. Besides him, only Commander Höss and Josef Klehr received this medal in the camp . As head of the disinfection command, Klehr was responsible for throwing the Zyklon B into the gas chambers and, as a so-called medical service grade, allegedly killed over 10,000 prisoners himself by injecting phenol into the heart. - Basically, there is little information about Moll's activities for 1943. His work in the extermination facilities was probably ended for the time being at the turn of the year 1942/43; Hans Schmid suspects that Moll was ill; there is no other explanation for his absence at the time the large gas chambers were put into operation. In September 1943 Moll was appointed camp leader of the Fürstengrube sub-camp , and from March 1944 he was camp manager of Gleiwitz I for two months . Here, too, he was feared as particularly brutal and cruel. During all of his time in Auschwitz, Moll lived there with his wife and two daughters born during those years; his first wife, Elli Unruh, who also worked in the concentration camp, had died of blood poisoning in 1940. Only a few weeks later he had remarried.

Moll's criminal career peaked with the extermination of the Hungarian Jews in the summer of 1944. Four large crematoria had existed in Auschwitz-Birkenau as early as the spring of 1943 , and he was then entrusted with managing them from May to September 1944. During this time, around 400,000 people were killed in the gas chambers under his command. Moll's importance in this crime was again due to Rudolf Höss, who had vacated his commanding post in December 1943, but returned to the camp as the site elder specifically to coordinate the extermination. As the head of all gas chambers and crematoria, he incorporated Moll in a central position in the work and provided him with general authority. This also included the reactivation of Bunker II as a new Bunker V in order to be able to carry out the mass murder more quickly. Moll was aware of the fact that the planned ten to fifteen thousand corpses would overwhelm the ovens of the crematoria every day. He therefore set up cremation pits next to crematorium IV and at bunker V, which he equipped with a system of gutters he had designed himself. The fat from the burning corpses could thus be collected, picked up by inmates with buckets and thrown into the flames to be fired. Moll showed great joy and commitment in his grueling activity. Sometimes he himself took the dead out of the gas chambers in order to show new prisoners to the Sonderkommando how quickly they could and should work.

Moll's oversight of the crematoria earned him the nickname "Executioner of Auschwitz" throughout the camp. The prisoners of the Sonderkommando called him "Malahamoves", that is, Hebrew for the angel of death. There is a barely manageable number of testimonies that give an inkling of the cruelty of his deeds. Countless handwritten murders have been vouched for by witnesses. Moll excelled in killing women and small children. According to Filip Müller, he often led attractive Jewish women to the edge of the fire pits in order to enjoy their fear. He said lascivious words in their ears, then shot them in the back of the head and dropped them into the fire. Small groups of victims of up to 200 people each were shot dead or thrown alive into the fire by Moll and his closest colleagues, command leaders Josef Eckhardt and Ewald Kelm , as the use of poison gas was assessed as wasteful. The sick, the elderly and the disabled were also delegated by truck to the fire pits by Moll or appropriately instructed colleagues and dumped alive into the flames. This approach played a major role in the court hearing against SS man Willi Sawatzki in 1978.

Almost all testimonies make it clear that Moll had a pathological urge to torture and kill constantly. He killed small groups of people with clubs and iron bars, doused people with gasoline and set them on fire, threw prisoners convicted of theft into the crematorium oven as a punishment, he set dogs on his victims, drove them against electrically charged fences, and killed children in front of their parents and tormented the doomed on their way into the gas chamber. He also had the reputation of a master marksman who could always hit the target with a small-bore rifle or carbine, even at great distances. Moll was considered the pathologist Miklos Nyiszli , who had to carry out experiments and anatomical work on behalf of the SS doctor Josef Mengele in the rooms of the crematoria, as the "most insane murderer of the world war". His crimes were often referred to as part of the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trial . The survivor of the Sonderkommando Filip Müller describes Moll's atrocities in the most detailed way in his book. He explains, for example, that he often strolled through the mass of newcomers intended to be gassed, watched them undress and lured toddlers away from their mothers with sweets to throw them outside into the boiling fat of the fire pits. Moll is said to have kicked babies to death several times. Abraham Shuls stated as early as 1946 that Moll was called "a pork butcher because he was not a human but a butcher who threw children alive into the fire". Even among SS men he was notorious for his cruelty: Bernhard Walter , who allegedly shot many of the famous recordings from the Auschwitz album , called Moll a notorious and, even for Auschwitz standards, conspicuous Jew hater.

After the end of the Hungarian action, Moll was replaced by Erich Mußfeldt and, at the latest, when the mass extermination ceased in autumn 1944, he was again camp manager of Gleiwitz I. When the Soviet army approached in January 1945, he supervised a death march west. According to witness statements, Moll was said to have briefly commuted between the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and the Ravensbrück concentration camp in January and February with a group of specialists to carry out gassings and executions. Stefan Hördler devoted himself to this matter and succeeded in showing that Moll's expertise as a mass murderer was also used after Auschwitz. Again on behalf of Rudolf Höss, whose office was in Ravensbrück, Moll and his employees killed at least 4,252 people within three weeks. Since February 25, 1945 he was camp and / or labor service leader of one or more Kauferinger subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp . Here, too, Moll mistreated and killed prisoners and deliberately neglected their care. According to unanimous statements from former prisoners and forced laborers , at the end of April 1945 he was involved in the shooting of at least 120 Russian forced laborers near Buchberg on the death march from Dachau to Tyrol . Kapo Wilhelm Metzler , who was last imprisoned in Kaufering II , stated that Moll had personally shot 26 Russian slave laborers.

Moll was arrested at the beginning of May 1945 and indicted as a war criminal by an American military court on November 15, 1945 in the main Dachau trial as part of the Dachau trials , and sentenced to death by hanging with 35 other defendants on December 13, 1945. His individual acts of excess, including the mistreatment of prisoners and the shooting of prisoners on the evacuation march starting from Kaufering, were taken into account in the judgment. His crimes at Auschwitz were not part of the indictment and were never prosecuted. Half a year after his death sentence, he was confronted with his former superior Höss on the sidelines of the Nuremberg trial . While the latter admitted his own crimes and also clearly described the area of ​​activity of his subordinate, Moll largely denied involvement in the killing of Jews.

Otto Moll was executed on May 28, 1946 in the courtyard of the Landsberg War Crimes Prison .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons. Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 282 f.
  2. ↑ Hans Schmid: Otto Moll - the "executioner of Auschwitz". In: Journal of History . No. 2 , 2006, p. 123 .
  3. ↑ Hans Schmid: Otto Moll - the "executioner of Auschwitz". In: Journal of History . No. 2 , 2006, p. 138 .
  4. ↑ Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert, Andreas Kilian: Witnesses from the death zone. The Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. Munich 2005, p. 184 f .
  5. ↑ State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS , Oswiecim 1998, p. 238, appendix: Short biographies of Nazi criminals
  6. ^ A b Hans Schmid: Otto Moll - the "executioner of Auschwitz". In: Journal of History . No. 2 , 2006, p. 128 .
  7. ↑ Hans Schmid: Otto Moll - the "executioner of Auschwitz". In: Journal of History . No. 2 , 2006, p. 124 .
  8. ^ Stefan Hördler: Order and Inferno. The concentration camp system in the last year of the war. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1404-7 , p. 170 .
  9. ↑ Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert, Andreas Kilian: Witnesses from the death zone. The Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. Munich 2005, p. 182 f .
  10. ↑ Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert, Andreas Kilian: Witnesses from the death zone. The Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. Munich 2005, p. 184 .
  11. ↑ Eric Friedler, Barbara Siebert, Andreas Kilian: Witnesses from the death zone. The Jewish Sonderkommando in Auschwitz. Munich 2005, p. 185 f .
  12. ↑ Filip Müller: special treatment. Three years in the crematoria and gas chambers of Auschwitz. Munich 1979, p. 209 f .
  13. ↑ Filip Müller: special treatment. Three years in the crematoria and gas chambers of Auschwitz. Munich 1979, p. 199 f .
  14. ↑ Filip Müller: special treatment. Three years in the crematoria and gas chambers of Auschwitz. Munich 1979, p. 226 f .
  15. ↑ Myklos Nyiszli: In the Beyond Humanity. A coroner in Auschwitz . Berlin 2005, p. 62 f .
  16. ↑ In the name of the people - acquittal . In: The time . November 17, 1978, ISSN  0044-2070 ( zeit.de [accessed October 31, 2019]).
  17. ↑ Myklos Nyiszli: In the Beyond Humanity. A coroner in Auschwitz . Berlin 2005, p. 62 .
  18. ↑ Myklos Nyiszli: In the Beyond Humanity. A coroner in Auschwitz . Berlin 2005, p. 61 f .
  19. ↑ Filip Müller: special treatment. Three years in the crematoria and gas chambers of Auschwitz. Munich 1979, p. 229 .
  20. ^ Archive of the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, 34.890.
  21. ^ Fritz Bauer Institute: Recordings of process protocols. In: mikroh.de. January 5, 2011, accessed October 31, 2019 .
  22. ^ Stefan Hördler: Order and Inferno. The concentration camp system in the last year of the war . Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2015, ISBN 978-3-8353-1404-7 , p. 448 .
  23. ↑ BayHStA: Dachau Trial, microfilm 89: Wilhelm Metzler: Letter to the Red Cross in Landsberg in connection with his war criminals trial in 1947 , without date.
  24. ^ Holger Lessing: The first Dachau trial (1945/46) . Baden-Baden 1993, p. 322 .
  25. ↑ Richard Overy: Interrogation. The Nazi elite in the hands of the Allies in 1945 . Ullstein, Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-548-36781-1 , pp. 392-406 .
personal data
SURNAME Minor, Otto
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Hauptscharführer and chief of the crematoria in Auschwitz-Birkenau
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Hohen Schönberg near Kalkhorst
DATE OF DEATH May 28, 1946
Place of death Landsberg am Lech