Josef Kramer ( November 10, 1906 , Munich - December 13, 1945 , Hameln ) - commandant of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen . Nicknamed the prisoners of the camp "Belsen Beast", he was one of the Nazi war criminals, personally responsible for the death of thousands of people. After the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp and the end of World War II, he was charged with war crimes and hanged in the Hameln prison.
| Joseph Kramer | |
|---|---|
| Josef Kramer | |
 | |
| Date of Birth | November 10, 1906 |
| Place of Birth | near Munich , Bavaria , German Empire |
| Date of death | December 13, 1945 (aged 39) |
| Place of death | Hameln , Lower Saxony , British occupation zone of Germany |
| A country | |
| Occupation | concentration camp commandant |
Biography
Kramer was born in Munich , joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( NSDAP ) in 1931 and joined the SS in 1932 , worked in prison guards, and after the outbreak of World War II - in the protection of concentration camps.
Over the course of his eleven-year career, Kramer has replaced many concentration camps. In 1934, he was assigned to guard the Dachau concentration camp. Then, due to rapid career growth, he received high posts in the concentration camps of Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen . In 1940, he served for several months as an assistant to Rudolf Höss , commandant of the concentration camp Auschwitz ( Auschwitz , Auschwitz-Birkenau ), and in April 1941, commandant of the concentration camp Natsweiler-Strutgof . After the war, Kramer was charged with the murder of 80 prisoners brought to the Nazweiler-Strutthof from Auschwitz; the bodies of these prisoners were later used in the research of Dr. Augustus Hierz from the University of Strasbourg. The title of Hauptsturmfuhrer Kramer received in 1942 .
In May 1944, Kramer led the work of gas chambers in Auschwitz, and held this position until December 1944. Then he was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen camp, where on December 2 he became his commandant. Most of the female guards (including Irma Grese ) from Auschwitz moved with him to Bergen-Belsen.
After the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen camp by the British military, Kramer remained in the camp, despite obvious evidence of brutal treatment of the camp guards with prisoners, as well as a huge number of unburied decaying corpses of prisoners.
Kramer and the remaining 44 guards remaining in the camp were charged with war crimes by a British military court in the city of Luneburg . The trial lasted several weeks, from September to November 1945 . On November 17, Kramer was sentenced to death and hanged in Hamelin Prison on December 13 .