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Emil Erwin Mahl (born 9 November 1899 in Karlsruhe; died 1 April 1967 in Heidelberg) [1] [2] was a Kapo (prisoner functionary) in the crematorium of the Nazi Dachau concentration camp. Known as "the Hangman of Dachau", he was sentenced to death after the war, but this was commuted to a 10-year prison sentence.
Mahl, divorced and father of one child, was a mechanic by profession. From 1940 to the end of April 1945 he was a prisoner in the Dachau concentration camp as a so-called professional criminal. He was initially deployed there in various work detachments, including a construction detachment and for rubble removal. In addition, he was also a block elder of the penal block in Dachau for a time. From 1943 he worked in the camp crematorium and served there from July 1944 as Kapo under Theodor Heinrich Bongartz until the liberation of the camp at the end of April 1945.
His duties in the crematorium included transporting the corpses to the crematorium and burning them. After the end of the war, Mahl reported that the Jewish prisoners of the crematorium detachment were exchanged from time to time and eliminated as potential witnesses after their work in the crematorium. Two months after his work in the crematorium command, Mahl was also called upon to participate and assist in 800 to 1000 hangings. This earned him the title "Executioner of Dachau". After the end of the war, Mahl testified that Wilhelm Ruppert, Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop, Josef Jarolin, Franz Xaver Trenkle, Wilhelm Wagner, Franz Böttger, Alfred Kramer, Josef Seuss, Johann Viktor Kirsch and Theodor Heinrich Bongartz were present at executions in different compositions.
Of the camp doctors, he named Fritz Hintermayer, Fridolin Karl Puhr and Hans Eisele. Johann Kick is said to have brought the prisoners to the crematorium and Leonhard Anselm Eichberger is said to have been the reporter present. According to him, the executions were carried out by hanging, shooting or poison injections. According to his own statements, Mahl himself was partially kicked by the SS officers present in order to carry out the executions more quickly. He also stated that Trenkle once knocked out his teeth. In the early 1950s, Mahl testified as follows about the execution of the Hitler would-be assassin Georg Elser on April 9, 1945:
" One evening in April [...] the administrator of the crematorium, SS-Oberscharführer Bongartz, came to me in my living room in the New Crematorium. He told me that we (prisoners from the crematorium) were not allowed to go out of the crematorium that evening, but that if we heard gunshots, we should come out immediately with a stretcher. [...] Around 11:00 p.m., Geiger told me that he had heard shooting. I, too, had heard this, and therefore asked Geiger and Ziegler to go out with me on a stretcher. In front of the crematorium, the two hesitated because they were afraid, but then slowly walked with me to a place where an electric flashlight was shining. [...] At the crime scene, I saw a man lying dead on the ground, facing the ground. Next to him stood the administrator Bongartz. [...] At the same time, I saw three men walking away from the small iron door that led into the crematorium grounds. There were, as I am sure I recognized, three SS officers. [...] Elser had a single shot, a shot in the neck, and was already dead when we arrived. In my view, the shot had been fired at close range. We had to carry the Elser immediately to the New Crematorium and then immediately burn it in the oven." [3]
Before the liberation of the camp, Mahl fled to Munich, where he was tracked down and arrested by Michel Thomas, who worked for the Counter Intelligence Corps, at the beginning of May 1945. [4] On November 15, 1945, Mahl was tried by an American military tribunal on charges of war crimes in the Dachau trial, which took place as part of the Dachau Trials. During the trial, Mahl wore the striped concentration camp prisoner clothing. On December 13, 1945, Mahl and 35 other co-defendants were sentenced to death by hanging. In the verdict, participation in executions was taken into account as individual excesses at Mahl. [5] In his defence, Mahl argued that he had been forced to take part in the executions out of fear for his life and that he had only actively taken care of the post in the crematorium for fear of being transferred to another concentration camp. Later, the death sentence was reduced to ten years in prison and then further reduced. Mahl was imprisoned in the Landsberg prison for war criminals and released from prison in February 1952.
Buchenwald was a Nazi concentration camp established on Ettersberg hill near Weimar, Germany, in July 1937. It was one of the first and the largest of the concentration camps within the Altreich. Many actual or suspected communists were among the first internees.
Natzweiler-Struthof was a Nazi concentration camp located in the Vosges Mountains close to the villages of Natzweiler and Struthof in the Gau Baden-Alsace of Germany, on territory annexed from France on a de facto basis in 1940. It operated from 21 May 1941 to September 1944, and was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France. The camp was located in a heavily forested and isolated area at an elevation of 800 metres (2,600 ft).
Flossenbürg was a Nazi concentration camp built in May 1938 by the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office. Unlike other concentration camps, it was located in a remote area, in the Fichtel Mountains of Bavaria, adjacent to the town of Flossenbürg and near the German border with Czechoslovakia. The camp's initial purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners for the production of granite for Nazi architecture. In 1943, the bulk of prisoners switched to producing Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter planes and other armaments for Germany's war effort. Although originally intended for "criminal" and "asocial" prisoners, after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, the camp's numbers swelled with political prisoners from outside Germany. It also developed an extensive subcamp system that eventually outgrew the main camp.
Dachau was one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany and the longest running one, opening on 22 March 1933. The camp was initially intended to intern Hitler's political opponents, which consisted of communists, social democrats, and other dissidents. It is located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria, in southern Germany. After its opening by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, German and Austrian criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were mostly work camps or Arbeitskommandos, and were located throughout southern Germany and Austria. The main camp was liberated by U.S. forces on 29 April 1945.
Johann Georg Elser was a German worker who planned and carried out an elaborate assassination attempt on Adolf Hitler and other high-ranking Nazi leaders on 8 November 1939 at the Bürgerbräukeller in Munich. Elser constructed and placed a bomb near the platform from which Hitler was to deliver a speech. It did not kill Hitler, who left earlier than expected, but it did kill 8 people and injured 62 others. Elser was held as a prisoner for more than five years until he was executed at Dachau concentration camp less than a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.
Maria Mandl was an Austrian SS-Helferin and a war criminal known for her role in the Holocaust as a top-ranking official at the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where she is believed to have been directly complicit in the deaths of over 500,000 prisoners. She was executed for war crimes.
During the Dachau liberation reprisals, German SS troops were killed by U.S. soldiers and concentration camp prisoners at the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, during World War II. It is unclear how many SS guards were killed in the incident, but most estimates place the number killed at around 35–50. In the days before the camp's liberation, SS guards at the camp had forced 7,000 inmates on a death march that resulted in the death of many from exposure and shooting. When Allied soldiers liberated Dachau, they were variously shocked, horrified, disturbed, and angered at finding the massed corpses of prisoners, and by the combativeness of some of the remaining guards who allegedly fired on them.
The Auschwitz trial began on November 24, 1947, in Kraków, when Poland's Supreme National Tribunal tried forty former staff of the Auschwitz concentration camps. The trials ended on December 22, 1947.
The Dachau trials, also known as the Dachau Military Tribunal, handled the prosecution of almost every war criminal captured in the U.S. military zones in Allied-occupied Germany and in Allied-occupied Austria, and the prosecutions of military personnel and civilian persons who committed war crimes against the American military and American citizens. The war-crime trials were held within the compound of the former Dachau concentration camp by military tribunals authorized by the Judge Advocate General of the U.S. Third Army.
Martin Gottfried Weiss, alternatively spelled Weiß, was the commandant of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 at the time of his arrest. He also served from April 1940 until September 1942 as the commandant of Neuengamme concentration camp, and later, from November 1943 until May 1944, as the fourth commandant of Majdanek concentration camp. He was executed for war crimes.
A kapo or prisoner functionary was a prisoner in a Nazi camp who was assigned by the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks.
The Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials were a set of trials of SS concentration camp personnel following World War II, heard by an American military government court at Dachau. Between March 29 and May 13, 1946, and then from August 6 to August 21, 1947, a total of 69 former camp personnel were tried. Among them were some of the former guards at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp system and August Eigruber, a former Gauleiter of Upper Austria.
Franz Hößler, also Franz Hössler was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer and Schutzhaftlagerführer at the Auschwitz-Birkenau, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps during World War II. Captured by the Allies at the end of the war, Hößler was charged with war crimes in the First Bergen-Belsen Trial, found guilty, and sentenced to death. He was executed by hanging at Hameln Prison in 1945.
Hans Stark was an SS-Untersturmführer and head of the admissions detail at Auschwitz-II Birkenau of Auschwitz concentration camp.
Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll was an SS non-commissioned officer who committed numerous atrocities at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. Moll held the rank of SS-Hauptscharführer "Head Section Leader", the equivalent to a US Military Master Sergeant and or British Military Warrant Officer. He was known as "Cyclops", due to having a glass eye, and as the "Butcher of Birkenau".
The Dora Trial, also the "Dora"-Nordhausen or Dachau Dora Proceeding was a war crimes trial conducted by the United States Army in the aftermath of the collapse of the Third Reich. It took place between August 7 and December 30, 1947, on the site of the former Dachau concentration camp, Germany.
Johann Schwarzhuber was a Nazi German SS-Obersturmführer, who was in charge of various concentration subcamps during World War II. His positions included the Schutzhaftlagerführer of the Auschwitz-Birkenau men's camp, where he oversaw the selection process for the gassing of thousands of detainees. He was later transferred to the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where he held the post of the Lagerdirektor, second only to the overall camp commander Fritz Suhren. With Suhren on the run, Schwarzhuber was the highest-ranking defendant during the first Ravensbrück trial. In front of the British military tribunal he was indicted for war crimes for his role in the Holocaust, sentenced to death and subsequently executed in 1947.
Gusen was a subcamp of Mauthausen concentration camp operated by the SS between the villages of Sankt Georgen an der Gusen and Langestein in the Reichsgau Ostmark. Primarily populated by Polish prisoners, there were also large numbers of Spanish Republicans, Soviet citizens, and Italians. Initially, prisoners worked in nearby quarries, producing granite which was sold by the SS company DEST.
Hebertshausen shooting range was a shooting range at Dachau concentration camp, located two kilometres north of the Dachau main camp for SS guards that used Soviet live prisoners of war as targets. It was built in 1937-38 as an expansion to Dachau concentration camp. Between 1941 and 1942, more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners were murdered on the site. These were mainly officers, communist officials, and Jews. The victims were “singled out” according to ideological and racist criteria by Gestapo Einsatzkommandos in the POW camps of the military districts of Munich, Nuremberg, Stuttgart, Wiesbaden and Salzburg. After World War II, American troops assumed control of the site and continued to use it as a firing range. It is now a memorial to Nazi victims.
The Dachau camp trial was the first mass trial of the Dachau trials, a series of trials against war criminals held by the United States Army on the premises of the Dachau concentration camp. The main trial took place from 15 November to 13 December 1945. Forty people were charged with war crimes in connection with the Dachau concentration camp and its subcamps. The trial ended with 40 convictions, including 36 death sentences, of which 28 were carried out. The official name of the case was United States of America vs. Martin Gottfried Weiss et al. - Case 000-50-2. The main trial served as a "parent case" for 123 subsequent cases. In the subsequent trials, all crimes that were established in the main trial were taken as proven, significantly shortening their duration relative to the parent case. The Dachau trials consisted of 6 total parent trials, each with their own subcases, and were held between 1945 and 1948. In total, there were 489 Dachau trials, of which 394 were held within the confines of the camp itself.
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