Moll, Otto Hermann Wilhelm.

Moll, Otto Hermann Wilhelm, born 04-03-1915 in Hohenschonberg ,was a SS-Hauptscharführer and part of the staff at Auschwitz. He joined the SS on 01-05-1935, number 267670. He held various posts during his tenure at Auschwitz, from May 1941, until January 1945. Moll was Kommando Fuhrer of the gardeners work detail, director of the employment service in the men’s camp, head of the crematoria in Auschwitz Birkenau, lagerfuhrer, of the Furstengrube subcamp in Wesola near Myslowice and of the Gleiwitz 1 sub-camp in Gliwice. SS Hauptsturmführer, Josef Mengele “Angel of Death”

  infamous for performing human experiments on camp inmates in Auschwitz, including children, for which Dr. Mengele was called the “Angel of Death”.  In May 1941, Otto Moll was transferred from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to Birkenau where he was put in charge of digging the mass graves. From 1943 to the evacuation of the camp, Moll was chief of the crematoria. A member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau who worked under Otto Moll’s supervision, mentioned Moll in his testimony for the prosecution in a Krakow court: “It happened that some prisoners offered resistance when about to be shot at the pit or that children would cry and then SS Quartermaster Hauptscharführer  Moll would throw them alive into the flames of the pit”. According to the former Sonderkommando : “Hauptscharführer Moll was the most degenerate of the lot. Before by arrival at the camp, he was in charge of the work at the Bunkers, where they incinerated the gassed victims in pits. Then he was transferred for a while to another section. In view of the preparation necessary for the “reception” of convoys from Hungary in 1944, he was put in

charge of all the Krematorien. It is he who organized the large-scale extermination of the people arriving in these convoys. Just before the arrival of the Hungarian transports, he ordered pits to be dug alongside Krematorium V  and restarted the activity of Bunker 2, which had been lying idle, and its pits. In the yard of the Krematorium, there were notices on posts, with inscriptions telling the new arrivals from the transports that they were to go to the camp where work was waiting for them, but that first they had to take a bath and undergo disinfection. For that, it was necessary for them to undress and put all their valuables in baskets specially placed for this purpose in the yard. Moll repeated the same thing in his speeches to the new arrivals. There were so many convoys that sometimes it happened that the gas chambers were incapable of containing all the new arrivals. The excess people were generally shot, one at a time. On several occasions, Moll threw people into the flaming pits alive. He also practised shooting people from a distance. He ill-treated and beat Sonderkommando prisoners, treating them like animals. Those who were in his personal service told us that he used a piece of wire to fish out gold objects from the box containing the jewels taken from new arrivals, and took them off in a briefcase. Among the objects left by the people who came to be gassed, he took furs and different types of food, in particular fat. When he took food, he said smilingly to the SS around him that one had to take advantage before the lean years came. Under his direction, the Sonderkommando was strengthened and increased to about 1000 prisoners.” Otto Moll was transferred to a sub-camp of Dachau after Auschwitz-Birkenau was abandoned by the SS on 1801-1945. Not all Jewish’s victims walked into their death without resistance as an lady called Franseca Mann

killed the 35 years old SS Oberscharführer  guard Josef Schillinger  in the undress room of the camp. She a twenty six years old nightclub dancer. On 23-10-1943 a transport of around 1700 Polish Jews arrived on passenger trains at the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, although they had been told that they were being taken to a transfer camp called Bergau near Dresden, from where they would continue on to Switzerland to be exchanged for German POWs. One of the passengers was Franceska Mann. She had probably obtained her foreign passport from the Hotel Polski on the Aryan side. In July 1943 the Germans arrested the 600 Jewish inhabitants of the hotel and some of them were sent to Bergen-Belsen as exchange Jews. The new arrivals were not registered but were told that they had to be disinfected before crossing the border into Switzerland. They were taken into the undressing room next to the gas chamber and ordered to undress. Different accounts give different details of what happened next, but what is confirmed is that she fatally wounded the roll call officer Josef Schillinger, using a pistol (many accounts say his own) and fired two shots, wounding him in the stomach. Then she fired a third shot which wounded another SS Sergeant named Wilhelm Emmerich.  According to Tabau, the shots served as a signal for the other women to attack the SS men; one SS man had his nose torn off, and another was scalped. However, different accounts say different things; in some Schillinger and Emmerich are the only victims. Reinforcements were summoned and the camp commander, Rudolf Höss

  came with other SS men carrying machine guns and grenades. Höss was hanged on his own camp on 16-07-1947, age 45, following a trial in Warsaw. According to Filip Mueller  , he was one of very few Sonderkommandos to have survived Auschwitz, all people not yet inside the gas chamber where mowed down by machine guns. Due to various conflicting accounts, it is unclear what truly happened next; the only things that are certain are on that day Schillinger died, Emmerich was wounded, and all the Jewish women were killed. On 28-04-1945, one day before the Dachau camp was liberated by American soldiers,

Death and burial ground of Moll, Otto Hermann Wilhelm.

   Moll arrived at the main camp, along with a group of prisoners that he had led on an evacuation “death march.” Moll was put on trial by an American Military Tribunal at Dachau in November 1945; he was charged with not allowing the prisoners to escape from the death march, which was a war crime, according to the Allies. He was hanged on 28-05-1946, age 31, at the Landsberg am Lech prison and buried on the Spöttinger prison cemetery.