Otto Moll
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Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll (4 March 1915 – 28 May 1946) was an SS non-commissioned officer who committed numerous atrocities at the
Auschwitz concentration camp Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. I ...
during the
Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposi ...
. The ''SS-
Hauptscharführer __NOTOC__ ''Hauptscharführer'' ( ) was a Nazi paramilitary rank which was used by the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) between the years of 1934 and 1945. The rank was the highest enlisted rank of the SS, with the exception of the special Waffen-SS ran ...
'', who held the rank of
Quartermaster Sergeant Quartermaster sergeant (QMS) is a class of rank or appointment in some armed forces, especially those of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth, and formerly also in the United States. Ireland Quartermaster sergeant () appointments in the Irish ...
, is said to have personally killed thousands of innocent victims (over 20 thousand according to some reports) during his time at
Birkenau Auschwitz concentration camp ( (); also or ) was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland (in a portion annexed into Germany in 1939) during World War II and the Holocaust. It con ...
.


Early life

Moll was born in the town of Hohen Schönberg in the German Empire, 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 ''SS-Totenkopfverbände'' (SS-TV; ) was the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany, among similar duties. While the ''Totenkopf'' was the univer ...
, the SS
Death's Head Death's Head is the name of several fictional characters appearing in British comics and American comic books both published by Marvel Comics. The original Death’s Head is a robotic bounty hunter (or rather, as he calls himself, a "freelance ...
Units responsible for administering the
Nazi concentration camps From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany operated more than a thousand concentration camps, (officially) or (more commonly). The Nazi concentration camps are distinguished from other types of Nazi camps such as forced-labor camps, as well as con ...
and
extermination camps Nazi Germany used six extermination camps (german: Vernichtungslager), also called death camps (), or killing centers (), in Central Europe during World War II to systematically murder over 2.7 million peoplemostly Jewsin the Holocaust. The v ...
for
Nazi Germany Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
. 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 Sachsenhausen () or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year. It mainly held political prisoner ...
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 ''Lagerführer'' (Camp Leader) was a paramilitary title of the SS, specific to the '' Totenkopfverbände'' (Concentration Camp Service). A ''Lagerführer'' was the head SS officer assigned to a particular concentration camp, serving as the comman ...
'' of the Fürstengrube subcamp in Wesola and the
Gleiwitz Gliwice (; german: Gleiwitz) is a city in Upper Silesia, in southern Poland. The city is located in the Silesian Highlands, on the Kłodnica river (a tributary of the Oder). It lies approximately 25 km west from Katowice, the regional capi ...
I sub-camp. According to Auschwitz Kommandant
Rudolf Höss Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höss (also Höß, Hoeß, or Hoess; 25 November 1901 – 16 April 1947) was a German SS officer during the Nazi era who, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, was convicted for war crimes. Höss was the longest-serving comm ...
, he and Moll were both decorated by
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (; 20 April 188930 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was dictator of Nazi Germany, Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his death in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the le ...
with the
War Merit Cross The War Merit Cross (german: Kriegsverdienstkreuz) was a state decoration of Nazi Germany during World War II. By the end of the conflict it was issued in four degrees and had an equivalent civil award. A " de-Nazified" version of the War Merit ...
, First Class with Swords. He appears several times in the
photo album A photographic album or photo album, is a series of photographic prints collected by an individual person or family in the form of a book. Some book-form photo albums have compartments which the photos may be slipped into; other albums have heavy ...
belonging to Auschwitz commandant Karl-Friedrich Höcker that showed SS camp staff on leave at a retreat. From 11 to 25 September 1943, the wife of one of Otto Moll's friends, Hans Anhalt stayed at a garrison near Auschwitz with his permission. 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 The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies of World War II, Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II. Between 1939 and 1945 ...
also cited as a defence.


Brutality

In 1944, after realizing that the crematoria were not sufficient to burn the number of Jewish people arriving at the camp, Moll forced prisoners to dig large open air pits to burn excess bodies. He also reopened a farmhouse which had been previously used as a makeshift gas chamber. Alter Feinsilber, a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau who worked for Moll, said at his war crimes trial:
At that time, on average around 18,000 Hungarians were murdered daily at Birkenau. Transports would come from dawn till dusk, one after another, and around 20% of those arriving were sent to the camp. They were recorded in series A and B. The rest were gassed and incinerated in the crematorium furnaces. In cases where there were not enough prisoners, they were executed by shooting and burned in pits. As a rule, a gas chamber was only utilized for groups bigger than 200 people because it was uneconomical to use it for smaller groups. It sometimes happened that during executions by shooting some prisoners put up a fight or children cried, and then Oberscharführer Moll would throw these people into the burning pits alive. I personally witnessed the following scenes. Moll ordered a naked woman to sit on the corpses near a pit, while he shot at prisoners and threw them to the burning pit, ordering the woman to jump and sing. Of course she did so, in hopes of saving her life. After executing everybody, Moll shot this woman and she was then incinerated. On another occasion, Moll found a few rings and a watch on a boy from our group. He halted him at the crematory, had him thrown him into a furnace, started a fire using paper, and then they got him out, hanged him by his arms, tortured and interrogated him to find out where he had gotten the items found on him. Of course, he told them everything, identified the prisoner who had given these items to him, and then he was set on fire from the waist down and was ordered to run toward the wires, where he was executed.
Another Sonderkommando prisoner named
Henryk Tauber ''Henryk (Tauber) Fuchsbrunner'' (8 July 1917 – 3 January 2000) was a Polish Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during the Holocaust, who gave detailed testimony at the end of World War II. Tauber was his mother's maiden name. His p ...
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.
Another Sonderkommando prisoner named
Filip Müller Filip Müller (3 January 1922 – 9 November 2013) was a Jewish Slovak Holocaust survivor and ''Sonderkommando'' at Auschwitz, the largest Nazi German concentration camp during World War II, where he witnessed the murders of tens of thousand ...
testified and later wrote about Moll:
The head of the crematoria, Moll, once took a child away from its mother, I saw it at Crematorium IV. There were two huge pits where the corpses were burned. He threw the child into the boiling corpse fat that had collected in ditches around the pit and then said to his assistant: "Now I'll eat till I'm satiated, now I have done my duty." Another way to satisfy his oll'sperverse murder lust was the killing of little children who he threw alive into the boiling human fat at the front sides of the pits. When the camp commandant or other SS commanders appeared at the site of the crematoria, however, Moll controlled himself and subdued his abnormal tendencies. Then the machinery of murder took its customary, factory-like course, without there being any special excesses.
In the book ''We Wept Without Tears'', which features testimony from camp survivors, including many who describe Moll, survivor Shlomo Dragon said "Once we found a baby who'd been stuffed into a pillow and was still alive. The baby's head was also buried in the pillow. After we removed the pillow, the baby opened his eyes. Meaning he was still alive. We took the bundle to Moll and told him he was alive. Moll took the kid to the edge of the pit, put him on the ground, stepped on his neck, and threw him into the fire." Another former prisoner said, "…Moll... was so zealous and crazy that he personally took part in the cremations. Once he was overheard saying that if
Eichmann Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ,"Eichmann"
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Moll would also place naked women at the edge of the pits, shoot them in the stomach so they would fall over, and watch them burn to death, beat people with clubs and iron bars, douse people with petrol and set them on fire, set dogs on them, throw them against electric fences, and smash children into concrete walls in front of their mothers. In February 1945, an execution unit headed by Moll murdered approximately 3000 prisoners deemed to be "dangerous".


Arrest, trial 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 , , commandant = List of commandants , known for = , location = Upper Bavaria, Southern Germany , built by = Germany , operated by = ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) , original use = Political prison , construction ...
. 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 A death march is a forced march of prisoners of war or other captives or deportees in which individuals are left to die along the way. It is distinguished in this way from simple prisoner transport via foot march. Article 19 of the Geneva Convent ...
. He had proposed bombing Auschwitz and killing the remaining prisoners, but his plan was not carried out. The next day he was taken into custody by the U.S. military. In November 1945, Moll was put on trial by a U.S. military court during the Dachau trials. He was only tried on one count, the death march. Moll was found guilty of fatally shooting prisoners who had collapsed from exhaustion and sentenced to death. According to Wilhelm Metzler, a
Kapo A kapo or prisoner functionary (german: Funktionshäftling) was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks. Also called "prisoner self-administrat ...
, Moll had shot 26 people. After Moll's conviction, Major Draper, a British military prosecutor, sent an urgent request for an interview to the American prison commandant of
Landsberg Prison Landsberg Prison is a penal facility in the town of Landsberg am Lech in the southwest of the German state of Bavaria, about west-southwest of Munich and south of Augsburg. It is best known as the prison where Adolf Hitler was held in 1924, af ...
, where Moll was awaiting execution. He requested an interview with Moll, saying the world needed to know what he had done in Auschwitz. It is not known if the interview took place. However, Moll was interviewed during the
Nuremberg trials The Nuremberg trials were held by the Allies of World War II, Allies against representatives of the defeated Nazi Germany, for plotting and carrying out invasions of other countries, and other crimes, in World War II. Between 1939 and 1945 ...
. After his case was reviewed, a panel recommended that Moll's sentence be carried out. He was executed by hanging in Landsberg on 28 May 1946.


References


Further reading

*


External links

* http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/m/index.php?option=com_ponygallery&Itemid=17&func=detail&id=497 * http://www.mazal.org/archive/documents/Tauber/Tauber07.htm {{DEFAULTSORT:Moll, Otto 1915 births 1946 deaths Auschwitz concentration camp personnel Holocaust perpetrators in Poland SS non-commissioned officers Sachsenhausen concentration camp personnel Dachau trials executions Executed mass murderers