Execution of Otto Moll
- The Most Sadistic Nazi at Auschwitz Concentration Camp - Holocaust - WW2

9 August 2022

Category: High Ranking Nazi Representatives

Otto Moll was born on the 4th of March 1915 and he was 17 years old when on the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg. In 1936, three years after Hitler and the Nazi party came into power, Otto Moll joined the SS after having graduated from the professional gardening school.

Moll was musically active and became a member of the SS marching band. From 1938 to 1941, Moll was employed at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was located north of Berlin. After Rudolf Höss became the commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he brought Moll there on the 2nd of May 1941. Many former Auschwitz prisoners described Otto Moll as the worst SS-man in the entire camp. He distinguished himself with the particular sadism towards the prisoners and because he had a glass eye, he had a nickname “Cyclops “.

The Leader at Auschwitz

At Auschwitz, Moll became the leader of the notorious penal company to which the prisoners were assigned for various reasons, including escape attempts, contact with civilians or the illegal possession of food, money and additional clothing. Assignment to the penal company, situated in infamous Block 11, lasted from one month to one year and the prisoners were not only completely isolated from other prisoners but had to perform the hardest labor and were continually beaten by the SS men and prisoner functionaries.

After the expansion of Auschwitz into an extermination camp ordered by the head of the SS Heinrich Himmler, Moll devoted himself primarily to the killing of people. From September 1943 to May 1944, Moll was the first commandant of the Fürstengrube and Gleiwitz I which were Auschwitz sub-camps. In May 1944 he returned to the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where he was appointed the head of all crematoria by the camp’s commandant Rudolf Höss.

Even among the SS men, Moll was notorious for his cruelty and hatred towards the Jews, especially women and children. When he did not throw the children into the fire alive, he would kick them to death with a smile on his face. The prisoners did not consider him a human and would call him “ Schweinemetzger” which meant “pig butcher”. During 8 weeks from May 15 to July 9, 1944, Hungarian gendarmerie officials, under the guidance of German SS officials, deported around 424,000 Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection, SS functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.

The head of all crematoria

As the head of all crematoria, Moll also directed the work of the Jewish Sonderkommando which was a unit of camp’s prisoners forced to help with the disposal of gas chamber victims. Those who refused to do the terrible work of the Sonderkommando, Moll would personally throw alive into burning furnaces. In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. Prisoners suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure on these marches. Otto Moll let one such death march and in February 1945 he arrived in Kaufering which was the common name of a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp system.

Arrested and finally to face justice

On the 28th of April 1945, Otto Moll arrived at Dachau. When the camp was liberated on the following day by The U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division, Otto Moll was arrested and finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. In November 1945 he was tried at the first Dachau trial which was held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp. In the end, some justice was served. On the 28th of May 1946, Otto Moll, then 31 years old, was executed in Landsberg prison. There were no tears shed for Otto Moll.

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