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Tag: The VENGEFUL Execution Of Karl-Otto Koch – The Beast Of Buchenwald
At the end of the Second World War, a number of SS guards who worked at concentration camps went on the run to avoid war crimes trials. One man who tried to flee was Franz Ziereis who was the Commandant of Mauthausen, a camp which was known for being one of the most intense and brutal. Ziereis was a man who would encourage his SS guards to execute, beat and starve prisoners on a daily basis and he was responsible for at least 90,000 deaths. But inside of Mauthausen brutal torture such as the ‘Stairs of Death’ was used to brutalise inmates, but Ziereis was the man in charge of the whole site and the subcamps. He was located at the end of the war, but as he tried to flee he was shot by American soldiers. He was then taken to an American aid station, however after being interrogated for hours he died from his injuries. But after this his body was stolen by former Mauthausen prisoners, and it was then taken to Mauthausen, where it was displayed in a horrific scene and site. It was a posthumous execution.
Throughout the Second World War, there were many victims of Japanese war crimes. But some of the most shocking war crimes were executions of prisoners of war which were ordered by high ranking Japanese Generals. Leonard Siffleet was an Australian radio operator who was working in New Guinea undercover, and he was working deep behind enemy lines. He along with a number of other soldiers were captured by natives who handed him over to the Japanese Army, and he was tortured for a number of weeks. He was just a young man of 27 when he was taken to Aitape Beach. Leonard Siffleet’s execution was ordered and he was brought to the beach along with two other men who were condemned also. But the beach was littered with onlookers and civilians who would witness a medieval style execution by sword. The executioner that day, Chikao ordered a photographer to capture the moment before Siffleet was executed. He was stood over the Australian with his sword for some time. But it was an execution that came to the world’s attention and showed the horror of the Japanese army. Join us today as we look at, ‘The Execution Of Leonard Siffleet – The Sword On The Sand.’ To support our channel, please make sure to subscribe.
HORRIBLY Brutal Execution of Jenny-Wanda Barkmann – Sadistic Nazi Guard at Stutthof Camp during WW2. Jenny-Wanda Barkmann was born on the 30th of May 1922 in Hamburg then part of the Weimar Republic which was the government of Germany from 1918 to 1933. Barkmann was 10 years old when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933. Soon after she became a member of the League of German Girls, which was the female section of the Hitler Youth. These organizations, led by Baldur von Schirach, were the primary tools that the Nazis used to indoctrinate young people with Nazi ideology, thus shaping the beliefs, thinking and actions of German youth. While in January 1933, the Hitler Youth had approximately 100,000 members, by the end of the year this figure had increased to over 2 million. Jews were not allowed to join these organizations. Boys and girls were taught to be both racially conscious and physically fit in order to build a new future for Germany and were often present at Nazi Party rallies and marches. Jenny Wanda Barkmann was 17 years old when the Second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939. Nazi Germany possessed overwhelming military superiority over Poland. Germany launched the unprovoked attack at dawn on the 1st of September with an advance force consisting of more than 2,000 tanks supported by nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes. In all, Germany deployed 60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men in the invasion. In September 1939, the Germans established the Stutthof camp in a wooded area west of Stutthof, a town about 22 miles east of Danzig, today’s Gdańsk. The original camp, known as the old camp, was surrounded by barbed-wire fences and 8 barracks for the inmates built by prisoners in 1940. The camp was established in connection with the ethnic cleansing project that included the liquidation of Polish elites such as members of the intelligentsia as well as religious and political leaders. Even before the war, the Germans had created lists of people to be arrested, and the Nazi authorities were secretly reviewing suitable places to set up concentration camps in their area. Originally, Stutthof was a civilian internment camp under the Danzig police chief, before its subsequent massive expansion. In November 1941, it became a “labor education” camp for political prisoners and persons accused of violating labor discipline, administered by the SD – German Security Police. Finally, in January 1942, Stutthof became a regular concentration camp under the jurisdiction of the SS. In 1943, the camp was enlarged and a new camp was constructed alongside the earlier one. It contained 30 new barracks and was surrounded by electrified barbed-wire fences. A crematorium and gas chamber were added in 1943, just in time to start mass executions when Stutthof was included in the “Final Solution” in June 1944. The maximum capacity of the gas chamber was 150 people per execution. Eventually, the Stutthof camp system became a vast network of forced-labor camps. 105 Stutthof subcamps were established throughout northern and central German-occupied Poland.Tens of thousands of people, perhaps as many as 100,000, were deported to the Stutthof camp. The prisoners were mainly non-Jewish Poles. Conditions in the camp were brutal. Many prisoners died in typhus epidemics that swept the camp in the winter of 1942 and again in 1944. Those whom the SS guards judged too weak or sick to work were gassed in the gas chamber. Gassing with Zyklon B gas began in June 1944. 4,000 prisoners, including Jewish women and children, were killed in a gas chamber before the evacuation of the camp. Camp doctors also killed sick or injured prisoners in the infirmary with lethal injections of phenol. More than 60,000 people died in Stutthof concentration camp and its subcamps. Until 1942, nearly all of the prisoners were Polish. The number of inmates increased considerably in 1944, with Jews forming a significant proportion of the newcomers. The first contingent of 2,500 Jewish prisoners arrived from Auschwitz in July 1944. In total, 23,566 Jews including 21,817 women were transferred to Stutthof from Auschwitz. The camp staff consisted of SS guards and, after 1943, Ukrainian auxiliaries. Jenny Wanda Barkmann became a camp guard in January 1944.
Inside of Auschwitz, the largest concentration camp established by the SS during the Second World War there were many evil female guards that worked there. But the most senior throughout the camp’s operation was Maria Mandl, who was referred to as ‘The Beast of Auschwitz.’ She was responsible it’s believed for the deaths of around half a million people who were sent to the gas chambers. But Maria Mandl was a brute, and she had a very vicious side and she would carry out executions in front of the rest of the prisoners on a daily basis. Maria Mandl was only accountable to the commandant of the camp Rudolf Höss. But after the war she was sentenced to death in the Auschwitz trials for her role in the mass exterminations of the camp, and witnesses told of her cruelty and barbarism. She was executed inside of a prison in Krakow alongside many other guards that worked alongside her. Join us today as we look at, ‘The Execution Of The Female ‘Commandant Of Auschwitz.’
Bestial Crimes of Egon Zill – Sadistic Nazi Commandant of Natzweiler Struthof & Flossenbürg – WW2. Egon Zill was born on the 28th of March 1906 in Plauen, then part of the German Empire. After World War I ended, Germany experienced great political turmoil. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh terms on Germany, which had lost the war. In addition, the country saw the overthrow of its monarchy. In its place was the new Weimar Republic, a democratic government. Racist and antisemitic groups sprang up on the radical right and they blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in the war. These groups opposed the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. They were against democracy, human rights, capitalism, socialism, and communism. They advocated to exclude from German life anyone who did not belong to the German race. The Nazi Party, founded in 1920, sought to woo German workers away from socialism and communism and commit them to antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology. On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg. Immediately after Hitler came into power, Germany became a dictatorship, and the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”. One such camp was Hohnstein. In 1934 Egon Zill got married. His wife had been a member of various National Socialist organizations since the mid-1920s and the marriage produced three children. From the 12th of October 1934, Zill headed the guards at the Lichtenburg concentration camp. From the 1st of February 1938, Egon Zill became the commander’s adjutant in the Lichtenburg, which by then had become a women’s concentration camp. One of the camps female guards was Maria Mandl whose specialty at Lichtenburg was to strip the prisoners naked, tie them to wooden posts and beat them mercilessly until she could no longer lift her arm. On the 15th of May 1939, Egon Zill was sent with the other Lichtenburg guards to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp. Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished. At Ravensbrück Egon Zill held a position of commander’s adjutant. However, he was also a sexual deviant. Despite having his own wife, Zill was known for sexually harassing and brutally abusing the female prisoners. Once he even contracted a venereal disease. Zill, who due to his short stature was given the nickname “Little Zill”, remained in Ravensbrück until December 1939. He gradually climbed up the camp hierarchy, owing these promotions to the cruelty and sadism with which he treated the prisoners. His behavior in each subsequent camp was more and more brutal. Not only did he order many crimes to be committed, he often carried them out himself. The second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland. On the 1st of December 1939, Zill was deployed in Dachau concentration camp holding a position of Protective custody camp leader. Protective custody camp section oversaw the prisoner’s complex and was ruled by the infamous SS Death’s Head Units. Having received his Death’s Head unit training in Dachau, Zill was familiar with all the terrors the camp had to offer its inmates. In December 1941 Zill succeeded Hermann Pister as commander of the Hinzert concentration camp which remained mainly autonomous until the 21st of November 1944, when it was administratively linked to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Between 1939 and 1945, 13,600 political prisoners between the ages of 13 and 80 were imprisoned at Hinzert. In April 1942 Zill became the commandant of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp which was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France, about 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg In mid-September 1942 Egon Zill became a commandant of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. Flossenbürg’s original purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners for the production of granite for Nazi construction projects.
Bestial Nazi “Frankenstein” Heinrich Klaustermeyer & His Horrible Crimes in Warsaw Ghetto during WW2. Immediately after Hitler came to power, Germany became a dictatorship, and the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”. In the new Nazi Germany Heinrich Klaustermeyer, got a job as a messenger with the city of Bünde. In 1935, he joined the Wehrmacht – the German Armed Forces – but was discharged on health grounds 2 years later. He was then rehired as a caretaker in Bünde. On the 9th – 10th of November 1938, the Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories. The Nazi SA and German civilians not only ransacked 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses, homes, and schools, but also destroyed hundreds of synagogues. 91 Jews were murdered and the German SS and police sent almost 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps, primarily Dachau. This event came to be called Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass because of the shattered glass that littered the streets afterwards, but the euphemism does not convey the full brutality of the event. Immediately after the Kristallnacht, Nazi officials claimed that the Jews themselves were to blame for the riots, and a fine of one billion reichsmarks, about $400 million at 1938 rates, was imposed on the German Jewish community. Kristallnacht was a turning point in the history of the Third Reich, marking the shift from antisemitic rhetoric and legislation to the violent, aggressive anti-Jewish measures that would culminate with the Holocaust. Heinrich Klaustermeyer, a well-known “Jew hater”, played a leading role in the anti-Semitic riots in Bünde. In August 1939 he was hired by the Gestapo in Bielefeld with the rank of Oberscharführer. The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment and German troops entered the capital on 29th of September shortly after its surrender. The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country. On the 23rd of November 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw’s Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations. In November 1940, Klaustermeyer became an employee of the Gestapo in the Warsaw District which was one of the first four Nazi districts of the General Governorate region of German-occupied Poland during World War II, along with Lublin, Radom and Kraków Districts. In the autumn of 1941, Klaustermeyer was assigned the task of monitoring Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. German authorities had decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw on the 12th of October 1940. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. In December of the same year the Germans called for the death penalty for Jews who had left the ghetto without permission. The same penalty awaited any person who knowingly gave shelter to such Jews. The ghetto, which became the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room. Proper hygiene was almost impossible, as many homes did not have running water. Extreme overcrowding, minimal rations, and unsanitary conditions led to disease, starvation, and the death of thousands of Jews each month.
Execution of Emma Zimmer – Brutal Nazi Guard at Ravensbrück and Auschwitz Concentration Camps. Emma Zimmer, the eldest child of the pharmacist Oscar Mezel and his wife Maria was born on the 14th of August 1888 in Haßmersheim, then part of the German Empire. Zimmer was 44 years old when in 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in Germany. Women, such as Emma, were central to Adolf Hitler’s plan to create an ideal “Aryan” community. Hitler valued women for both their activism in the Nazi movement and their biological power as generators of the race. In Nazi thinking, a larger, racially purer population would enhance Germany’s military strength and provide settlers to colonize conquered territory in eastern Europe. The Third Reich’s aggressive population policy encouraged “racially pure” women to bear as many children as possible. Nazi population policy took a radical turn in 1936 when SS leaders created the state-directed program known as Lebensborn meaning Fount of Life. Lebensborn ordinance prescribed that every SS member should father four children, in or out of wedlock. Lebensborn homes sheltered single mothers with their children, provided birth documents and financial support, and recruited adoptive parents for the children. In the end, however, the Lebensborn program was never promoted aggressively and only around 7,000 children were born into the Lebensborn homes during the program’s nine-year-long existence. Instead, Nazi population policy concentrated on the family and marriage. The state encouraged matrimony through marriage loans, dispensed family income supplements for each new child, publicly honored “child-rich” families, bestowed the Cross of Honor of the German Mother on women bearing four or more babies, and increased punishments for abortion. Part of that camp system was Lichtenburg concentration camp where Emma Zimmer became a guard in 1937. One year later she was appointed assistant to the female superintendent of this camp Johanna Langefeld. Housed in a Renaissance castle, Lichtenburg was among the first concentration camps to be built by the Nazis and was operated by the SS from 1933 to 1939. From 1937 to 1939, it held only female prisoners. One of the camp’s most prominent prisoners was Olga Benário Prestes – a German Communist activist. In February 1938, after the birth of her child, she was first sent to the Lichtenburg concentration camp and, later when it was closed in May 1939, Benario Prestes as well as Emma Zimmer and the remaining Lichtenburg Nazi staff and prisoners were sent to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp. At Ravensbrück, which replaced Lichtenburg as the main camp for female prisoners, Benário Prestes was whipped, tortured, and placed in a punishment bunker while working as slave labor in a Siemens factory. At Ravensbrück, Zimmer became a guard in the Bunker – the punishment block – dealing with prisoner punishment and was known in the camp for being brutal and sadistic in her guard duties. After the war, Maria Wiedmaier, a Holocaust survivor, recalled how at Ravensbrück Zimmer became infamous for brutal treatment of prisoners whom she would beat with everything that was at hand without any reason until they lay still. According to Wiedmaier, on one occasion Zimmer grabbed a young Polish woman who was having hysterical fits one winter morning during roll call, and ‘threw her into the water repeatedly’. The Polish woman was then expected to work outside the camp without changing and died shortly after. At Auschwitz, Zimmer was notorious for her brutal and sadistic behavior towards the prisoners. After the war, one Holocaust Survivor remembered Emma Zimmer as follows: “Our supervisor was an old and mean SS-woman called Emma Zimmer. She was vicious and dangerous and frightening us constantly with threats, proclaiming in a sadistic voice, “I will report you and then you will go away, you know where? Just one way-up the chimney.” We hated her and were scared of her.” From May 1943 Zimmer headed the postal censorship office in the women’s camp of the Auschwitz concentration camp and in September 1943 she was awarded the War Merit Cross II Class without swords.
Throughout the Second World War, the Nazi Dictator of Germany Adolf Hitler was a constant source of hatred for the Allied soldiers and those living inside of occupied lands. But as the Second World War came to an end, he would never make it out of his Fuhrerbunker alive. His remains were taken out of the bunker unceremoniously and were burned inside of the Reich Chancellery Garden. There was a strange sort of funeral for Hitler as his Nazi colleagues and friends including Bormann and Goebbels saluted him as the flames rose higher. But despite there not being a coffin as Hitler was wrapped in a rug, there were two incredible coffins which were made showing Hitler inside of it. These two artefacts had different purposes. One was a brilliant piece of trench art, and the other was used actually to held his enemies fund their war effort. This is the story of the coffin of Adolf Hitler, and it is rather strange!
During the Second World War, the Nazi’s established a huge network of concentration camps across Germany and other occupied territory. Inside these camps, and behind the barbed wire the worst evils in the world would take place, with prisoners being treated horrifically. Following the Second World War there were many different war crimes trials that aimed to put on trial World War 2’s biggest war criminals. However one of the Commandants of one of the largest concentration camps was not placed on trial after.
Karl-Otto Koch was executed before the end of World War 2, and he was executed inside the walls of the camp that he oversaw. Inside Buchenwald he inflicted great suffering along with his wife Ilse Koch, and they oversaw a camp that claimed the lives of dozens of thousands of innocent people, many sent to the gas chambers or worked to death. He was an experienced Commandant inside of the camps, having also worked at Sachsenhausen, but he was a very corrupt man also. He was accused of bringing shame onto the evil SS, and he spent huge amounts of money on his living quarters, whilst people were starving next door. He was found guilty of bringing the SS into disrepute and bringing shame onto the organisation, and for this he was sentenced to death. In a twist of irony, he was brought back to Buchenwald and was executed within the walls of the camp he inflicted so much suffering within.
So join us today as we look at, ‘The VENGEFUL Execution Of Karl-Otto Koch – The Beast Of Buchenwald.’
During the Second World War, the Nazi’s established a huge network of concentration camps across Germany and other occupied territory. Inside these camps, and behind the barbed wire the worst evils in the world would take place, with prisoners being treated horrifically. Following the Second World War there were many different war crimes trials that aimed to put on trial World War 2’s biggest war criminals. However one of the Commandants of one of the largest concentration camps was not placed on trial after.
Karl-Otto Koch was executed before the end of World War 2, and he was executed inside the walls of the camp that he oversaw. Inside Buchenwald he inflicted great suffering along with his wife Ilse Koch, and they oversaw a camp that claimed the lives of dozens of thousands of innocent people, many sent to the gas chambers or worked to death. He was an experienced Commandant inside of the camps, having also worked at Sachsenhausen, but he was a very corrupt man also. He was accused of bringing shame onto the evil SS, and he spent huge amounts of money on his living quarters, whilst people were starving next door. He was found guilty of bringing the SS into disrepute and bringing shame onto the organisation, and for this he was sentenced to death. In a twist of irony, he was brought back to Buchenwald and was executed within the walls of the camp he inflicted so much suffering within.
So join us today as we look at, ‘The VENGEFUL Execution Of Karl-Otto Koch – The Beast Of Buchenwald.’
Bernd Pulch 