Execution of Heinrich Josten - Sadistic Nazi Commandant of Nordhausen Camp - Auschwitz - Holocaust
Heinrich Josten was born on the 11th of December 1893 in Malmedy. After Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany became a dictatorship. The same year Heinrich Josten joined the Nazi Party and the SS. The SS – Schutzstaffel or Protection Squads - was originally established in April 1925. In January 1929 Heinrich Himmler became the head of the SS and the organization greatly expanded in size and strength. By the time Hitler came into power in 1933, Himmler had made the SS the dominant organization within the Reich. SS officers were directly responsible for the management of concentration camps, where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
In one such camp – Flossenbürg– Heinrich Josten arrived in July 1939 which in 1943 became a key supplier of Messerschmitt Bf 109 aircraft parts.
After the outbreak of the Second World War on the 1st of September, 1939, Heinrich Josten briefly served in Waffen-SS regiment.
The Waffen-SS was the military branch of the SS. Before being sent to Auschwitz in June 1940, Josten had briefly served in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
At Auschwitz, Josten led firing squads in the gravel pits several times until the fall of 1941, Initially, a firing squad executed prisoners near the camp at places where gravel had been extracted—the so-called “gravel pits.” From the fall of 1941 to the fall of 1943, the majority of executions were carried out in the walled-off yard of Block 11 in the main camp, in front of a specially built “Death Wall.”
At Auschwitz, Heinrich Josten became the head of labor deployment office.
Josten was especially hostile towards the Poles. He would torment them as well as beat and kick them without any reason.
Josten’s favorite form of punishment was flogging. The prisoners were flogged publicly over a special construction called the “goat”.
In 1944 Heinrich Josten was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer.
In mid-May the same year, the Hungarian authorities, in coordination with the German Security Police, began to systematically deport the Hungarian Jews. SS Colonel Adolf Eichmann was chief of the team of "deportation experts" that worked with the Hungarian authorities. The Hungarian police carried out the roundups and forced the Jews onto the deportation trains.
In less than two months from May 15 to July 9, 1944, nearly 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary in more than 145 trains. Most were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where, upon arrival and after selection on a rail ramp, SS functionaries killed the majority of them in gas chambers.
In mid-January 1945, as Soviet forces approached the Auschwitz concentration camp complex, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps. SS units forced nearly 60,000 prisoners to march west from the Auschwitz camp system. Prisoners suffered from the cold weather, starvation, and exposure during these death marches. These forced evacuations of concentration camp inmates over long distances under guard became known as death marches.
After the evacuation of Auschwitz, Heinrich Josten became the camp commandant of the Boelcke barracks also known as Nordhausen which was a subcamp of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp located in Germany.
The camp, named by the prisoners a "living crematorium", was operated for only three months between January and April 1945. Out of 6000 prisoners who passed through the camp, 3000 died due to malnutrition, neglect and unsanitary conditions.
After the end of the war, Heinrich Josten was finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. He was captured by the Allies and handed over to the Polish authorities. Josten was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began in November 1947 and lasted one month.
During the trial, he tried to convince the Court that he had not known anything about the gas chambers or the murder and ill-treatment of the Auschwitz prisoners. However, his lies did not help him escape justice.
On the 22nd of December 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow found Heinrich Josten guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging.
He was 54 years old when he was executed on the 24th of January 1948.
There were no tears shed for Heinrich Josten.
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