Background
Josef Kramer was born on 10 November 1907 im Munich, Germany.
Josef Kramer was born on 10 November 1907 im Munich, Germany.
Kramer had been Rudolf Hoess’s Adjutant at Auschwitz in 1940 and Commandant of Birkenau during the mass slaughter season of 1944. He had also previously served at Dachau, Esterwegen, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen and Natzweiler, where he was Commandant in 1943.
Kramer was transferred to Belsen from Birkenau on 1 December 1944 and managed within a short time to make another Auschwitz out of this ‘privileged' camp, even though there were no gas chambers there. Under his dull, brutal administration, chaos developed in the overcrowded camp with prisoners being left to rot in every stage of emaciation and disease and corpses piling up in the barracks.
Kramer was arrested by the British troops and tried by a British military court at Lüneberg, which condemned him to death on 17 November 1945.
Kramer played a personal part in the killing of some eighty prisoners there, including women, in order to complete the famous anatomical collections of Professor Hirt of Strasbourg University.
At the so-called Doctors’ Trial he described in detail how he had introduced poison to kill his victims in the gas chamber and how he had felt no qualms ‘because I had been ordered to kill these eighty internees in this way, as I have told you. Anyway, this is how I was brought up.'