Seeing this photo made me think “Man, execution by hanging is still pretty harsh”
“Rudolf Heinrich Suttrop, SS-Obersturmführer, Adjutant of the camp commander, Dachau”
Oh.
The best place ever for Nazis.
From the US Holocaust Memorial Museum:
The Dachau concentration camp trial opened on November 2, 1945 in Dachau, Germany. Forty individuals who had participated in the operation of the Dachau concentration camp were charged with the murder and mistreatment of foreign nationals imprisoned there. Among those charged were Martin Gottfried Weiss, the camp commandant from 1942-1943; Dr. Klaus Karl Schilling, an SS physician who was brought to Dachau to find a method of immunizing people against malaria; and three former prisoners. The trial lasted from November 15 to December 13, 1945, with seventy witnesses called for the prosecution and fifty witnesses called for the defense. All forty defendants were found guilty, with thirty-six being sentenced to death by hanging (including Weiss and Schilling), one sentenced to hard labor for life, and three sentenced to hard labor for ten years. A few of the sentences were reduced after a review board determined the defendants were involved to a lesser degree than originally believed, but most were upheld. Weiss was executed on May 29, 1946 and Schilling on May 28, 1946, both in Landsberg Prison.
Anyone know anything about the 3 former prisoners and what they were charged with?
Here are the charges and testimonies of all tried of everyone tried, if you want to deep dive. I skimmed very briefly and only found 1 of the prisoners on 118-119. Didn’t have time to look for the other 2.
The very brief overview from Wikipedia is “Two of the three prisoner functionaries were accused of mistreating and killing prisoners. The other was accused of participating in executions.”
I imagine they were “kapos,” a term which I first came across in Spiegelman’s legendary Maus. It was an upper position (often filled by non Jews) amongst prisoners who oversaw other prisoners, and my sense is that it was pretty ordinary for them to lord their petty little bit of power over Jews at these concentration camps.
Some examples:
https://www.google.com/search?q="maus"+"kapo"&udm=2
@Infernal_pizza@lemmy.world @lemmy.world
Thanks for the source, if you’re interested the relevant entries are Christof Ludwig Knoll on pages 47 and 107, Fritz M K Becher on pages 63 and 118, and Emil Erwin Mahl on pages 71 and 123. Looks like Mahl was sentenced to 10 years hard labour and the other 2 received the death sentence, but I don’t know if that’s what actually happened or if that’s just what the court recommended. That’s at the top of page 166.
Too quick and too kind but at least it gets the job done.
Penalties should not be cruel just for the sake of it, no matter the crime