The Most Brutal Nazi Executions Ever Recorded (*ACTUAL FOOTAGE*) JJ

They had promised the world a thousand-year Reich. Instead, many of the Nazi officers ended their  lives on a wooden platform in a small town, hanged one after another while American  soldiers filmed every second of it. The footage became some of the most brutal  Nazi executions ever recorded on camera.

It starts in May 1945, when Nazi Germany  surrendered. The war in Europe was over. As Allied forces swept through Germany that  spring, they liberated concentration camps. One of these camps was Dachau. It was liberated  on April 29, 1945, by soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Army’s 45th Infantry Division. What they found  inside the camp stopped them in their tracks.

On the camp’s nearby railway spur, they  discovered boxcars still filled with the bodies of prisoners who had died during a transport  from another concentration camp days earlier. Inside Dachau itself, the surviving  prisoners were skeletal and extremely weak. Many could barely stand, and some were so  exhausted and sick that they could hardly understand what was happening around  them, even after they had been freed.

The anger among the American soldiers  was immediate. For some of them, what they had just seen was almost impossible to  process, and in the confusion of that first day, a number of captured SS guards were  summarily shot without any trial. The incident later became the subject  of a U.S. military investigation.

Military commanders quickly stepped in to  stop further killings and restore order. From that point on, the authorities insisted  that the men responsible for crimes at Dachau would be dealt with through a legal process  rather than simply being killed on the spot. That decision was not made without precedent.

  The Allies had already made their position clear in the Moscow Declaration of 1943. They  had promised that major Nazi war criminals would be sent back to the places where they had  committed their crimes and brought to justice. Dachau, almost fittingly,  became one of those places. By October 1945, American authorities had  converted part of the former Dachau camp into a functioning courtroom.

 The trials were conducted  under the Judge Advocate General’s Department of the U.S. Third Army, the Army’s legal branch  responsible for handling military justice. The first man to go through  that process, Franz Strasser, was not actually a Dachau  concentration camp guard. He was an Austrian Nazi Party district leader,  known by the title Kreisleiter. He had been involved in organizing the killing of captured  American airmen near Kladno in December 1944.

These men were Allied pilots  whose aircraft had been shot down. They had survived the crashes and were already  unarmed prisoners of war when they were killed. Strasser’s case became part of what  investigators called the “flyer lynching” cases, a wider pattern in which Nazi officials  encouraged soldiers or civilians to attack and kill Allied airmen who had been forced  to bail out over German-controlled territory.

Strasser was arrested in June 1945, only  a few weeks after Germany’s surrender. In August, he was brought before an  American military court at Dachau. Because the proceedings were conducted by an  American military tribunal, a translator was provided so that Strasser could understand  the charges and proceedings against him.

He was found guilty and sentenced to death.  On December 10, 1945, Strasser was hanged. He became the first person executed as  a direct result of the Dachau trials. His execution established a pattern that would  be repeated many times over the following years. While Strasser’s case had moved through the system  on its own, a much larger and more important trial was already underway.

 This case would eventually  produce most of the death sentences connected to the story that followed. Its official name was  United States versus Martin Gottfried Weiss et al. It brought many of the men who had  actually operated and administered the Dachau concentration camp system before the court  together, rather than trying them one at a time. Forty-two men connected to the running of Dachau  were placed on trial when the proceedings opened on November 15, 1945.

 An eight-member American  military tribunal presided over the case, led by Brigadier General John Lenz. The chief prosecutor was Lieutenant Colonel  William Denson, a young Army lawyer who would become one of the most active American prosecutors  of Nazi war crimes in the years after the war. He would later lead several other cases connected  to the Dachau camp system.

 The defense was headed by Lieutenant Colonel Douglas Bates. During the  trial, prosecutors called seventy witnesses, including many former prisoners who described  the treatment they had personally experienced inside the camp. The defense responded  by calling fifty witnesses of its own. The trial lasted almost a month. On December  13, 1945, the tribunal delivered its verdicts.

All forty-two defendants were found guilty  of violating the laws and customs of war. The charges covered the deliberate mistreatment,  torture, medical experimentation, and killing of prisoners. Thirty-eight of the forty-two men were  sentenced to death that day. Their sentences then went through the required review process, during  which some of the punishments were changed.

In the end, twenty-eight death sentences remained  approved for execution at the Landsberg prison. Landsberg am Lech is a town about  forty miles southwest of Munich, and its prison already had a  dark place in German history. This was the same prison where Adolf Hitler was  held in 1924 after his failed Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted takeover of the Bavarian government.

  While he was imprisoned there, Hitler dictated much of Mein Kampf , the book in which he laid  out many of his political and racial ideas. After the war, the Americans renamed the  facility War Criminal Prison Number One. From 1945 to 1958, it held more than  a thousand convicted war criminals. By late May 1946, the review of the sentences  from the Weiss trial had finally been completed.

The U.S. Army had gone through the verdicts and  decided which death sentences would actually be carried out. Now there was nothing left but to  execute them. Over the next two days, twenty-three of the twenty-eight men condemned to death in  that single trial would be taken to the gallows. The morning of May 28 began with Otto F rschner, a forty-three-year-old SS-Sturmbannf hrer, an SS  rank roughly equivalent to major.

 F rschner had commanded the Kaufering complex and had also  been connected to the Mittelbau-Dora camp, both of which were part of the larger network  of Nazi concentration camps. Kaufering was made up of eleven satellite camps built to house  prisoners who were forced to perform slave labor, much of it connected to the production of aircraft  parts in underground facilities.

 Conditions were extremely harsh, and the death rate was among  the highest in the Dachau camp system. F rschner was responsible for the administration of the  complex during this period, and he was hanged that morning for his role in the system that  caused the deaths of thousands of prisoners. Wilhelm Ruppert was executed the  same day.

 He was forty-one years old and held the SS rank of Obersturmbannf hrer,  roughly equivalent to lieutenant colonel. Ruppert had been at Dachau almost from the  beginning. He joined the camp staff in April 1933, shortly after Dachau opened as the first  regular Nazi concentration camp in Germany. At first, the camp was mainly used to imprison  political opponents of the Nazi government.

Over the following years, however, Dachau expanded  into a much larger system where prisoners were subjected to forced labor, torture, starvation,  medical experiments, and systematic killing. Ruppert originally worked as an electrician  but eventually became responsible for execution details inside the camp, meaning he was directly  involved in organizing and overseeing killings.

He was also connected to the deaths of four  female Allied agents who had worked undercover in occupied France for Britain’s Special Operations  Executive, or SOE, a British organization that sent agents behind enemy lines to carry out  espionage and sabotage. After being captured, the women were eventually brought to Dachau  and killed under Ruppert’s authority.

Claus Schilling was hanged that same morning,  and his case was different from almost everyone else executed at Landsberg. He was not a soldier  or a concentration camp guard. He was a doctor and a specialist in tropical medicine who  had spent decades researching malaria. The Nazis brought him to Dachau so  he could continue his research there, but instead of studying the disease through  normal medical methods, Schilling deliberately infected prisoners with malaria. These were  unwilling prisoners who had no meaningful way to

refuse or escape the experiments. Hundreds  became seriously ill or died as a result. At seventy-four, Schilling was by far the  oldest man executed in this wave of hangings. When asked for his final words, he continued  to deny responsibility and simply asked that the execution be carried out quickly. His  execution was filmed by U.S. military cameramen.

The surviving footage later showed his coffin  after the execution, with his name written on it. Engelbert Valentin Niedermeyer  was also executed on May 28. He was thirty-four years old and an SS operative  connected to the crematorium at Dachau. The crematorium was used to dispose of the  bodies of prisoners who had died from starvation, disease, executions, and other causes  inside the camp.

 Niedermeyer’s execution is one of the Landsberg hangings for which footage  has frequently been discussed and circulated. The surviving film shows him being taken  toward the gallows and the execution itself. Josef Seuss, who was also hanged on the same day,  was an SS-Hauptscharf hrer, a non-commissioned SS rank roughly comparable to a senior sergeant,  and had served at Dachau from 1933 through 1942.

That made him one of the camp’s longest-serving  staff members. He had been there during the early years when Dachau was mainly used against  political prisoners and remained there as the camp expanded into a much larger system  of persecution, forced labor, and mass death. Another one was Otto Moll. His  story went far beyond Dachau itself.

Moll was thirty-one years old and had  previously worked at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and extermination  camp complex. There, he became responsible for the crematoria and developed a reputation among  prisoners and survivors for extreme brutality. Witnesses later described him personally  throwing victims, including children, into open burning pits  while they were still alive.

He was also associated with especially brutal  methods of killing and earned a grim reputation among prisoners because of the way he used tools  such as a shovel during the killing operations. During the deportation of Hungarian  Jews in the summer of 1944, hundreds of thousands of people were sent to  Auschwitz in a period of roughly eight weeks.

Moll was involved in the killing operations at  the crematoria complex and supervised prisoner units that had been forced to handle the  bodies of people who had been murdered. As Soviet forces approached Auschwitz, Moll  left the camp shortly before it was liberated in January 1945.

 He eventually ended up at  a Kaufering sub-camp and later at Dachau, where American troops arrested him  on the day the camp was liberated. Moll had never been put on trial  for his crimes at Auschwitz. Instead, the Dachau tribunal convicted him for  a more limited offense connected to his role in overseeing a forced death march of prisoners  during the final days of the camp system.

In other words, the conviction covered only  part of what he had done during the war. But that conviction was enough to sentence him to  death, and on May 28, he was hanged at Landsberg. The next morning brought an execution that carried  particular weight because of the man’s position. Martin Gottfried Weiss had served as  commandant of Dachau during part of the war.

The commandant was the highest-ranking official  running the camp, meaning Weiss was responsible for the overall operation rather than  just one department or group of guards. Prisoners who survived his period  in command later gave him a nickname that became attached to his name in  historical accounts: the Demon of Dachau.

As American forces approached Dachau in the  final days of the war, Weiss tried to escape. He did not get far. He was captured in the Munich  area within a day or two by a U.S. Army corporal from the 292nd Field Artillery Observation  Battalion. Weiss then became the main defendant in the trial that carries his name in the  historical record, United States versus Martin Gottfried Weiss et al. The tribunal found him  guilty of violating the laws and customs of war.

On May 29, 1946, at forty years old, Weiss was  taken to the gallows at Landsberg and hanged. Johann Kick was also hanged that day. Kick had  been in charge of Dachau’s political department, an office that dealt with prisoners  considered political or security threats by the Nazi authorities.

 Its work included  interrogations, maintaining prisoner records, and dealing with decisions about  punishment and further detention. This was not simply paperwork.  Inside the concentration camp system, these administrative decisions could  determine what happened to a prisoner next, including whether someone was subjected to  further punishment or sent toward execution.

Kick’s position therefore gave him a direct role  in the system that controlled prisoners’ lives. By the time May 29 ended, twenty-three  men connected to the Weiss trial had been executed over the course of just two  days. It was one of the largest concentrated waves of war-crimes executions carried out by  the United States during the twentieth century.

The executions at Landsberg followed a  set procedure. The same basic sequence was repeated again and again for the men whose  executions were filmed by the U.S. Army. The condemned man was brought out of his prison  cell and taken toward the execution area. If he wanted one, a military chaplain could accompany  him and offer religious support before his death.

He was then walked across the prison yard  toward a wooden gallows that had been built and checked before the execution. Armed guards  stood around the platform in fixed positions, while two official U.S. Army photographers  were there to document each execution and the individual prisoner  being led to the gallows.

The prisoner climbed a short set of stairs onto  the platform, with his hands already tied or restrained. The executioner placed a noose  around his neck and adjusted it before the trap was opened. Some prisoners were given  an opportunity to make a final statement. Most had little to say.

 Some  continued to deny their guilt, while others simply wanted the execution  to be over as quickly as possible. The trapdoor was then released, and  the execution was over within seconds. A military doctor examined the body afterward and  officially confirmed that the prisoner was dead. The body was then placed inside a plain wooden  coffin.

 The man’s name was written on the side, sometimes simply in chalk. Surviving footage  from Landsberg shows rows of these coffins gathered together in the prison yard after  the executions. They remained there until they could be claimed by relatives or buried in  a nearby cemetery if nobody claimed the body. It might seem strange that the U.S. Army  would go to the trouble of filming executions.

But the reason becomes clearer when you  look at what American military cameramen had already been doing since the concentration  camps were liberated the previous year. Military photographers and cameramen documented  the Nazi camps almost immediately after Allied troops entered them.

 At places such as  Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, they filmed the mass graves, the  surviving prisoners, the bodies, and the physical evidence left behind by years  of systematic persecution and murder. Senior American commanders, including General Dwight D.  Eisenhower, strongly supported this documentation. They understood that the evidence needed to be  preserved because they feared that, in the future, people might deny the crimes or claim that the  scale of the Nazi atrocities had been exaggerated.

That same idea continued into the trials  and executions. Once the U.S. military began prosecuting Nazi personnel for war  crimes, the authorities wanted a clear official record of what happened afterward. If  a man had been convicted and sentenced to death, the Army needed to be able to show that  the sentence had actually been carried out.

The films therefore became the  final part of a much larger record. The May 1946 hangings were the largest single  group of executions connected to the Weiss trial, but they did not mark the end of executions  at Landsberg. The prison continued to serve as a place where condemned war criminals  were executed for several more years.

More trials were taking place, and  some of those trials continued to produce death sentences even after  the main Dachau proceedings had ended. Georg Schallermair was an example of how  long these cases could take. He was an SS sergeant who had worked as a roll-call leader at  a Dachau sub-camp.

 He was accused of personally beating inmates to death. Yet he was not executed  until June 7, 1951, making him one of the last men hanged at Landsberg. His case, like several  others, had been delayed by years of legal review. The final group of executions carried out by  the U.S. government that year also included Oswald Pohl, an SS-Obergruppenf hrer, one of the  highest-ranking SS officers.

 Pohl had been in charge of the SS economic and administrative  system that supported the entire Nazi concentration camp network. His responsibilities  covered the bureaucracy and resources behind camps such as Dachau and Auschwitz, as well  as many others across Nazi-occupied Europe. By the time Landsberg finally stopped being  used as a U.S.

 war-crimes execution site, close to 300 condemned men had been put to  death there over roughly five and a half years. The final recorded total was 259 men hanged  and another 29 executed by firing squad. In 1958, the Americans formally ended the  prison’s role as a war-crimes facility and handed control of it back to  the Federal Republic of Germany, the West German state that had been established  in 1949.

 The executions were over, but the footage that remained from them would survive long  after the prison stopped serving that purpose.