(1900-1947)

The founder and first commandant of Auschwitz. He joined the NSDAP in 1922 and the SS in 1933. In May 1940, he was named commandant of the newly created Auschwitz concentration camp. In the course of three years he turned it into the largest center for the extermination of the Jews and the largest Nazi concentration camp complex, with prisoners hired out to German companies.

While serving at Auschwitz, he lived—with his wife and five children—in a villa standing only 30 m from the camp fence, and 170 m from the crematorium chimney. Horses were his life’s passion. Arrested in March 1946 in Germany, where he was in hiding, he testified in one of the Nuremberg trials. In May 1946, he was extradited to Poland. The Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw sentenced him to death. The sentence was carried out in April 1947, between the crematorium and the house where he lived during the war. The scaffold from which he was hanged still stands on the grounds of the Auschwitz Memorial.

(Mini dictionary of terms from the history of Auschwitz)