Dörr, Wilhelm.

Wilhelm Dörr, Wilhelm, born 09-02-1921 in the town of Merenberg, Hesse and raised in Emmenrichenhain, Rennrod where he worked primarily as a farmhand.  Fanatic soccer player Dörr became a member of the the Hitler Youth   from 1932 to 1939 and volunteered for the Waffen SS  in December, 1940 after being rejected for service by the Wehrmacht . While training to become a combat engineer in Dresden in October, 1941 he became seriously ill with rheumatism and was confined to a hospital for several months. Following his recovery, Dörr was reassigned to the SS Totenkopfverbände  in the summer of 1942. He went on to serve as a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp  until December, 1943. In January, 1944 Dörr, a SS Oberscharführer,  was transferred to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp  where he initially functioned as Blockführer (Block Leader) in the central camp complex before being appointed as deputy to Hauptscharführer  Xaver Stärfel, alias Franz Xaver Stöfel, , commander of the sub-camp of Kleinbodungen, in September, 1944. After the war, despite his Court plea of “not guilty”, Stärfel was convicted on 17-11-1945 and sentenced to death by hanging. British hangman Albert Pierrepoint enforced the judgment on 13-12-1945, age 30, in Hameln prison

At Kleinbodungen, Dörr helped manage roughly 620 camp inmates used as slave-laborers in Mittelwerk, the armaments production facility used to manufacture Germany’s V-2 ballistic missiles. When US troops appeared poised to capture Mittelbau-Dora and its environs in April, 1945, the evacuation of the camp was ordered. Dörr was one of 45 SS men who led a brutal death march of hundreds of Kleinbodungen inmates to the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony. During the journey the SS conducted numerous summary executions of prisoners who attempted to escape or otherwise slowed the progress of the march.

Death and burial ground of Dörr, Wilhelm.

     Four days after Dörr and his group arrived at Bergen Belsen the camp, where Anne Frank and her sister Margot.

     also died weeks for the end, was liberated by British troops. He was arrested, Dörr on the right and in the middle

  and indicted for the atrocities which had occurred during the death march, ordered by SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger,   from Mittelbau-Dora. Dörr was tried along with 45 other alleged war criminals before a British military court in Lunenburg as part of the so-called Bergen Trial. Dörr’s head right behind Irma Grese, nr 9.  He pleaded not guilty to the charges but was nevertheless convicted and sentenced to death. Dörr was executed by hanging in Hameln Prison on 13-12-1945. His executioner was also Albert Pierremont, aided by an assistant.

Albert Pierrepoint (Bradford, 30-03-1905 – Southport, 10-07-1992) was an English executioner. Albert was the most famous member of a family of professional executioners. He followed in his father Henry’s footsteps by serving as his uncle Tom’s assistant from 1932. In 1940 he succeeded his uncle. On 17-10-1941, he carried out his first execution as an executioner on the gangster Antonio Mancini. In 1943 he married Annie Fletcher. Albert resigned in 1956, after a disagreement over his pay. His successors were Harry Allen and Robert Leslie Stewart. In his 1974 autobiography, he stated that he was against the death penalty because it did not provide a deterrent. But later he took that back. He died in a retirement home in 1992, four years after his wife. His life was made into a film under the title The Last Hangman. Albert was one of the last official executioners in the United Kingdom and is considered the “most prolific executioner” of the twentieth century. He carried out 450 hangings between 1932 and 1956 (433 men and 17 women). He did this in the United Kingdom, Ireland and Egypt. In Germany, Pierrepoint carried out the hangings of more than 200 war criminals from 1945 to 1948. Known executions: Six American soldiers stationed in the United Kingdom during World War II who were found guilty by court-martial of murdering British civilians.Eleven German war criminals sentenced to death at the first Bergen-Belsen trial (including Josef Kramer,  Fritz Klein   Elisabeth Volkenrath and William Joyce “Lord Haw Haw). The British jud ge, Major General Horatio Pettus Mackintosh Berney-Ficklin  who feared German martyrdom, ordered that Dorothea and the other hanged were buried in the Hamelin prison yard.   Berney-Ficklin died age 68 on 17-02-1961 in Cape Town. In 1954 The bodies are then reburied in holy ground at Am Wehl Cemetery. The graveyard had graves with crosses but after many discussions about the Neo Nazi visits, on 05-03-1986 all 200 Iron Crosses were removed and the graveside is now a grass field.