Fritz Bracht, the “Beast of Auschwitz”

Fritz Bracht, nicknamed the Beast of Auschwitz, was born in Heiden on the 18th January 1899. After school he trained to become a gardener and when World War I broke out he joined the military, only to be captured by the British and held as a prisoner of war until 1919.
After the war he worked as a handy-man and joined the Nazi Party
on 1st April 1927. He rapidly rose through the ranks and by the time that Hitler took over as leader of the party, Bracht was promoted to the position of deputy to the Reichstag.
Bracht was elected, in 1932, to the Prussian Landtag and he was appointed by Hitler as acting Gauleiter (District Governor) of Silesia on the 1st May 1935. He worked under Gauleiter Josef Wagner
but when Wagner fell out of grace with Hitler, Bracht rose in the ranks to replace him.
Josef Wagner, suspected of involvement in the attempt on Hitler’s life at the Wolf’s Lair 20 July 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo
after its failure. His name had appeared in a document prepared by the conspirators. It referred to “upright and capable” individuals who should be approached to be “convinced of the necessity of such a step and to support it. e.g. Gauleiter Wagner.” The circumstances of his death in 1945 are unclear. Either he was put to death by the SS in Berlin, or he was shot by a Soviet soldier, age 46..

Bracht began to show his immoral character by enforcing a ‘Germanisation’ program within Silesia resulting in mass deportation of all those deemed inhuman by the German High command. He became extremely unpopular with the locals who dubbed him ‘kokot’ (a derogatory Silesian expression ).
In February 1941, Bracht was given the rank of High President (Oberpräsident) of the Province of Upper Silesia and in the following month he played host to SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, one of his personal idols, on a visit to the region. Himmler and Bracht toured Auschwitz, which held around 11,000 people at the time. Himmler then ordered that Auschwitz be expanded; the new section of the camp was eventually named Auschwitz II-Birkenau.
In July 1942, Himmler here with Bracht returned and he and Bracht visited Auschwitz II-Birkenau in the company of Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz. Four months later Bracht was appointed Reich Defence Commissar in his Gau.
Rudolf Höss
was sentenced to death by hanging on 2 April 1947, age 46. The sentence was carried out on 16 April next to the crematorium of the former Auschwitz I concentration camp. He was hanged on a short drop gallows constructed specifically for that purpose, at the location of the camp’s Gestapo.
In 1944 Bracht was promoted to SA Obergruppenfuhrer
. Up to this point most of Bracht’s time was taken up with the extermination camps, but Silesia came under the Allies’ spotlight and the oil refineries located there were bombed. Bracht started looking for a new safe command post and his attention was drawn to the convent, Sisters’ Servants of Silesia, that was situated close to the centre of Katowice. He concluded that the basement would make a perfect command post as it was located behind high walls, could only be accessed via a trap door and was not a target for the Allied bombers.
Bracht created his command post and expanded the basement. This new command post, built 30 feet underground, was the star of a newspaper article written in August 1944, entitled ‘In the command post of the Gauleiter’. The article was designed to boost the morale of the people of Silesia and described the daily life of the 200 staff members in the bunker along with all the special features that were built in, such as escape routes, a bomb proof three foot thick ceiling and cell doors.


The local people did not know what was inside the bunker, nor the insidious work done by the staff. They did recognise that it was heavily guarded and many important visitors entered and left the convent so they nicknamed it the Gau-Haus (Gauleiter Haus).

Toward the end of 1944, the Soviet forces were pushing across Poland towards Auschwitz. Knowing that the horrific scenes from Auschwitz would be exposed, senior German staff made the decision to abandon the camps and force the inmates to march across Poland into Germany. Bracht’s instructions to his guards were very simple; execute anyone who tried to escape and not to march at night. Anyone not fit enough to walk a minimum of 12 miles a day and be competent to work when they arrived in Germany was to be killed before they left.
On the 17th January 1945 the first of 50,000 prisoners were marched 40 miles to Wodzislaw Slaski on the Czech border but due to the utterly appalling frigid conditions thousands died during the march. The remaining survivors were loaded onto trains and sent to the extermination camps at Mauthausen and Buchenwald.
As the Soviets made further inroads, Bracht, age 46, and his wife fled from Katowice to Kudowa-Zdrój, situated at the bottom of the Stołowe Mountains. On the 9th May 1945 they both committed suicide, taking cyanide.
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