The Worst Nazi Perverts You’ve Never Heard of (*ACTUAL FOOTAGE*) JJ

Many people remember the Holocaust through the names of Hitler, Himmler, and a few other senior Nazis. But behind every order stood countless others whose names almost disappeared from history. Step by step, they helped transform discrimination into mass murder, creating a system so vast and brutal that its scars can still be seen across Europe to this day.

Long before Awitz became the most infamous Nazi death camp, the Nazi government was already deciding who they believed deserved to have children and who didn’t. One of the key people behind this idea was Jugan Fiser. He was a highly respected professor, the director of the Kaiser Vilhelm Institute of Anthropology in Berlin, and one of Germany’s most well-known scientists studying race.

Years earlier during Germany’s colonial rule in German southwest Africa, now known as Namibia, Fischer had studied prisoners taken during the Herrerero and Nama genocide. One of the first large-scale attempts at systematic racial extermination in the 20th century. The racist theories he developed from [music] that so-called research became the foundation for much of the Nazi racial policy that followed.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Fischer turned his attention to a new group much closer to home. After World War I ended, French occupation forces, including many soldiers from France’s colonies in North and West Africa, were stationed in Germany’s Rhineland region as part of the postwar [music] settlement.

Some of those soldiers had children with German women. Many Germans cruy referred to these [music] mixed race children as the Rhineland bastards. By the middle of the 1930s, historians estimate that between 600 [music] and 800 of these children were living in Germany, and the Nazi government viewed their very existence as [music] a threat to what it called racial purity.

In 1937, the Nazi regime secretly created a task force called Zonto Commission 3 or Special Commission number three and placed Fischer [music] in charge. His mission was to find these mixed race children, examine them, and make sure they could never have children of their own. Fischer and his team searched through local government records, tracked down families, measured the children’s skulls, photographed their faces, and created detailed files on around 600 children.

Most of them were then forcibly sterilized, [music] some when they were only 12 or 13 years old. Their parents were often never given real consent and many of the procedures were reportedly carried out without anesthesia. Despite everything he had done, Fischer was never put on trial after the war. He continued working as a [music] scientist, kept publishing his research, and died of natural causes in Germany in 1967 in his 90s.

Fast forward 7 years. World War II is now at its deadliest stage, and the concentration camp system [music] that people like Fiser had helped justify was killing tens of thousands of people. At Ravensbrook, the largest concentration camp built specifically for women. A 19-year-old woman from Lipig named Alfred Linaro began working as a guard in June 1944.

Her main job was simple, but terrifying. She controlled an SS trained attack dog and used it to intimidate and control prisoners. During the war, around 130,000 women and children were imprisoned at Ravensbrook. About 90,000 of them died from starvation, disease, executions, and brutal [music] medical experiments. Survivors later testified that some of the female guards who handled the cat dogs were even more [music] violent than many of the male guards.

They deliberately ordered their dogs to attack exhausted prisoners as punishment or sometimes simply for their own amusement. Rinkle remained at Ravensbrook until April 1945 [music] when the camp was evacuated as Allied forces closed in and Nazi Germany was collapsing. What happened after the war sounds almost unbelievable.

In 1959, Rinko left Germany and immigrated to the United States where she settled in San Francisco. When she filled out her immigration paperwork, she completely left out the fact that she had worked as a concentration camp guard, and no one discovered the lie. It wasn’t until 2006 [music] that investigators from the US Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations finally uncovered her past.

By then, Rinkl was already 84 years old. Instead of facing a criminal trial, she agreed to be deported back to Germany. German prosecutors later decided not to charge her, saying she was too old and that there wasn’t enough evidence connecting her directly to a specific murder. She lived another 12 years in Germany and reportedly never showed any remorse for what she’d [music] done. She died in 2018.

Prinkle escaped almost all consequences for her actions. The next man [music] on our list, Eloise Bruner, was just as responsible for terrible crimes, but his story unfolded very differently. If Adolf Ikeman is remembered as the main organizer of the Holocaust’s mass deportations, then Eloise Bruner was the man who made those deportations happen on the ground.

Born in a small town in Austria in 1912, Bruner joined the Nazi party when he was still young and eventually became one of Ikeman’s closest and most [music] trusted assistants. By the late 1930s, he was helping run the Central Office for Jewish immigration in Vienna, an office that forced [music] Jews to leave their homes while stripping them of their money and property.

What [music] made Bruner so valuable to the Nazi leadership wasn’t simply his belief in Nazi ideology. It was his ability to organize mass deportations with ruthless efficiency. He removed every obstacle between a Jewish community and a train headed for a concentration or death camp. In October 1939, he organized some of the [music] first large-scale deportations from Austria to occupied Poland.

These operations became [music] an early test run for the even larger deportation system that followed. By the time almost the entire Jewish population of Vienna had been deported, Ikeman personally [music] praised Bruner for how efficiently he carried out the job. Bruner’s most devastating operation took place in Greece.

In 1943, [music] he was sent to the city of Thesaloniki, home of the Sephardic Jewish community that had existed for around [music] 500 years after their ancestors fled the Spanish Inquisition. In only 6 weeks, Bruner oversaw the deportation of roughly 43,000 [music] Jews. Around 2,000 people were packed into each sealed cattle car and forced to endure a journey of about 10 days to Awitz with almost no food or water.

Survivors who encountered Bruner during the war later described him [music] as one of the crulest Nazi officers they had ever met. Bruner also never truly faced justice and he knew it. France tried him in absentia, meaning he wasn’t present in court, and sentenced him to death in 1954. But by then, he was already living safely in Damascus, Syria, under a false identity and working as a security adviser for the Syrian government.

During the following years, he survived [music] two letter bomb attacks that were widely believed to have been carried out by Israeli intelligence. The explosions cost him one eye and several fingers, but they did not kill him. For decades, Bruner was considered one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals still alive. Investigators later concluded that he most likely died in Syria sometime between 2001 and 2010.

He remained a free man until the end of his life and never spent a single day answering [music] for the deaths of more than 100,000 people. at the same Ravensbrook concentration camp where Alfred Rinkl later worked with attack dogs. Another woman had already been carrying out horrific crimes for years. Her name was Hera Oberhoer.

Born in 1911, she joined the camp’s medical staff in 1940 and soon became the only female doctor working directly under SS surgeon Carl Gibbart, who was not only one of the senior Nazi doctors, but also Hinrich Himmler’s personal physician. Between 1942 and 1943, Ghart’s medical team with Oberoer playing an important role carried out a series of surgical experiments on around 86 women.

Most of them were young Polish political prisoners and some were only 16 years old. The prisoners began calling themselves the [music] rabbits because they were treated like laboratory animals rather than human beings. The experiments were meant to recreate the kind of battlefield injuries German soldiers suffered so the doctors could test whether newly developed sulfa antibiotics could treat infected wounds.

To do this, surgeons cut open the prisoner’s legs, deliberately filled the wounds with broken glass, dirt, wood splinters, and dangerous bacteria that cause diseases like gas gangrine and tetanus. Some prisoners were then given the drug while others were left untreated so the doctors could compare the results.

Many women died in terrible pain. Others survived but were left with permanently damaged legs and some could never walk normally again. Oberoer also carried out crimes on her own. After the war, investigators discovered that she had killed healthy children at the camp by giving them deadly injections. She then removed their arms, legs, and internal organs for medical study.

Evidence also showed that many of these children remained conscious during much of the process. In addition to this, Oberoer personally sterilized several prisoners as part of the Nazis wider program to prevent people they considered undesirable from having children. After World War II ended, Oberoer was put on trial during what is now known as the Doctor’s Trial in Notenberg.

Out of the 23 people on trial, she was the only woman. She was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to 20 years in prison. But in 1952, after serving only 5 years, she was released early for what was officially called good behavior. She never returned to prison and died in 1978. The man above Oberhoiser in the Nazi chain of command was someone who had helped build the entire concentration camp system years earlier.

His name was Theodore Aika, an SS officer. In March 1933, only a few weeks after Adolf Hitler became Germany’s chancellor, Aika became involved in a political [music] dispute with another Nazi official. During the argument, that official publicly called Aika a dangerous lunatic and had him committed [music] to a psychiatric hospital in the German city of Wsburg.

Doctors examined Aika and concluded that he was not mentally ill. Just a few months later in June 1933, Hinrich Himmler personally arranged for his release. Almost immediately afterward, Himmler gave him one of the most important jobs in the entire Nazi system, making him commandant of the newly opened Dhao concentration camp.

Aika didn’t simply manage Dhao. He transformed it into the model that every future concentration camp would follow. He wrote the rules covering everything from punishments and daily routines to how guards were expected to behave. One of his most important rules was also one of the crulest.

Any guard who showed even the slightest sympathy or kindness toward a prisoner would be punished as well. More than almost anything else, this rule explains why guards across Nazi Germany behaved with such relentless brutality. Aika trained them to believe that showing basic human compassion was itself a crime. In 1934, Himmler promoted Aika to inspector of concentration camps, putting him in charge of the rapidly expanding camp system across Germany.

At the same time, he was also given command of a new SS unit called the SS Toten Conferanda or Death’s Head units named after the skull system worn on their uniforms. These were the men responsible for guarding and operating the concentration camps. When World War II began in 1939, Aika left camp administration and became a battlefield commander, leading the Vafen SS Totenov Division, a military unit made up largely of former concentration camp guards on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union.

In February 1943, [music] his aircraft crashed near the front lines, killing him two years before the concentration camp system he’d built was finally liberated and exposed to the world. While all of this was happening, another group of Nazi doctors at Ravensbrook was continuing the horrifying medical experiments. Fritz Anst Fischer trained as a surgeon in the German cities of Berlin, Bourne, and Lipig before joining the SS in 1934.

By 1942, he’d become the closest surgical assistant to Carl Ghart, the same senior SS doctor who supervised Hera Oberoer at Ravensbrook. Fischer carried out the same operations that Hera Oberoer did repeatedly between July 1942 and September 1943. At the doctor’s trial in 1947, Fischer was found guilty on several counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

He was originally sentenced to life in prison. However, after an appeal, his sentence was reduced to 15 years. Like Hera, he ultimately served only a small portion of that sentence before being released. The broken bones, the infected wounds, and the constant cruelty inside the Ravensbrook were only one part of the Nazi camp system.

Farther east stood an even larger complex where an SS overseer named Maria Mandal controlled one of the most feared sections of all the Nazi concentration camps. Mandal joined the SS women’s auxiliary in the late 1930s and quickly climbed through the ranks of the concentration camp system. By October 1942, she’d become the head of the entire women’s camp at Awitz Berkinau.

Mandle was known for standing at the selection ramp herself where trains carrying new prisoners arrived. As [music] people stepped off the trains, she would decide within seconds who would be sent to forced labor and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers. She sometimes beat prisoners [music] herself over the smallest mistakes.

She was also known for a particularly cruel form [music] of psychological torture. At times she would choose a favorite prisoner, giving her extra food, better clothing, or improved living conditions. But later, she would have that same prisoner killed, seemingly to remind everyone that no act of kindness inside Awitz could ever be trusted or last.

One of Mandle’s most infamous [music] projects was creating the Women’s Orchestra of Awitz in 1943. She personally selected talented musicians from among the prisoners, many of whom had been professional performers [music] before the war and forced them to play music as new groups of prisoners walked toward the gas chambers.

The orchestra also had to play every morning as exhausted [music] prisoners marched out to perform forced labor. The music gave the camp a disturbing and almost unreal atmosphere. It helped cover the sounds of the camp while making mass murder appear more orderly. As Nazi Germany collapsed, Mandal fled west, but American [music] forces captured her in 1945.

She was later handed over to Polish authorities where she stood trial in Krakov in 1947 alongside other Ashwit staff [music] members. She was found guilty of war crimes and sentenced to death. In January 1948, she was executed by hanging, making her one of the few people on this list who actually received a punishment that matched [music] the scale of her crimes.

While Maria Mandal decided who lived and who died inside the fences of Awitz, another senior Nazi official was carrying out a different kind of horror across occupied Poland. Friedrich Wilhelm Krueger was involved in some of the very first mass killings carried out during the war. In November 1939, only weeks after the invasion of Poland, police units under his direct command rounded up the Jewish residents of the town of Ostrov Mazovvesca.

They marched hundreds of men, women, and children to prepared execution sites outside the town and shot them. It was one of the earliest mass shootings of Jewish civilians during World War II, taking place months before the Nazis began their large-scale extermination campaigns. As the war continued, Krueger’s power only increased.

When systematic mass murder expanded across occupied Poland in 1942, he was given direct control over what the Nazi government called Jewish affairs. This placed him within the chain of command connecting Himmler’s orders to extermination camps such as Soibbor, [music] Trebinka, and Belk. These camps were built or expanded specifically to murder people from the territory under Krueger’s control.

Historians estimate that well over 1 million civilians died across the region while it was under his security authority. Krueger also oversaw one of the war’s least known but most disturbing programs, the mass kidnapping of Polish children. Himmler had ordered that any Polish [music] child who appeared sufficiently Aryan, usually judged by physical features such as blonde hair and blue eyes, should be taken away from their parents.

These children were given new German names and identities and raised in German families or state institutions. Every connection to their real families was deliberately erased. As Germany’s defeat became unavoidable in May 1945, Kuruger took his own life in Latvia rather than decaptured. He never stood trial for the massacres he ordered, the death camps that operated under his authority, or the hundreds of thousands of children whose lives were destroyed by his policies.

All of these crimes became part of a much larger system that by the final years of the war was controlled by the man who closes our list. Every crime from forced sterilizations and deportation trains to concentration camps and the kidnapping of children eventually led back to one central organization. That organization was the Reich security main office better known by its German abbreviation RSHA.

Beginning in January 1943, it was led by an Austrian lawyer named Eritst Colton Bruner. Colton Bruner took over after Reinhard Heddrich, one of the main architects of the Holocaust, was assassinated by resistance fighters in 1942. By taking Heddrich’s place, Colton Bruner became one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany.

Even though many people today have never heard his name, the RSHA controlled the Gestapo, Germany’s secret police, the criminal police, and the Nazi intelligence services. Together, these organizations formed the heart of the Nazi security system and played a central role in carrying out the Holocaust during the war’s final and deadliest years.

By the time Colton Bruner took command, every major figure from Aloise Bruner’s deportation operations to Friedrich Wilhelm Krueger’s administration in occupied Poland and the concentration camp network created by Theodore Aika ultimately answered either directly or indirectly through his chain of command. After Germany surrendered, he tried to avoid capture by hiding in the Austrian Alps while dressed in civilian clothes.

American troops found and arrested him in May 1945. He became one of the highest ranking defendants at the main Nutberg trials in 1945 1946 standing alongside some of the best known Nazi leaders including Herman Guring and Rudolph Hess. He was found guilty of war crimes and crimes [music] against humanity and was executed by hanging at Nuremberg prison on October 16th, 1946.

He became the highest ranking SS officer to be executed after the Second World War.