36 Facts About Otto Moll

Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll was an SS non-commissioned officer who committed numerous atrocities at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War.

Otto Moll was known as "Cyclops", due to having a glass eye, and as the "Butcher of Birkenau".

SS Hauptscharfuhrer Otto Moll held the position of SS Rapportfuhrer a senior SS position within the SS Guard Units the "Totenkopfverbande" sanctioned within the camps.

Otto Moll is said personally to have killed hundreds at Birkenau, and oversaw the deaths of hundreds of thousands while at the camp, such as of the Hungarian Jews in 1944.

Otto Moll never stood trial for what he did at Auschwitz, having left shortly before its liberation and instead surrendering to the US Army at Dachau in April 1945.

Otto Moll has been described as "the ultimate example of the cruel 'Nazi spirit'", while doctor Miklos Nyiszli described Moll as "the most insane murderer of the World War".

Otto Moll has been described as "the sadistic and cruel executor of the 'Final Solution,' a man who was the terror of both the Jews and the SS men", and as one of the "most sadistic and evil figures in the history of Auschwitz".

Otto Moll was born in the town of Hohen Schonberg in the German Empire, on 4 March 1915.

Otto Moll trained as a gardener before joining the SS on 1 May 1935.

Otto Moll joined the battalion orchestra which performed in SS barracks or in public places.

One SS man was killed, while Otto Moll suffered serious head trauma and was blinded in his right eye.

Hans Schmid, a German historian who has written extensively about Otto Moll, considers it very likely that he suffered from frontal lobe syndrome from the accident.

Schmid discusses Otto Moll's criminal career with a strong focus on his mental state and concluded that he was a physically and mentally ill person who was deliberately exploited by a criminal regime.

Otto Moll joined the SS-Totenkopfverbande, the SS Death's Head Units responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany.

In May 1941, Otto Moll was transferred from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to Auschwitz where he was put in charge of digging mass graves.

Otto Moll soon became the director of employment services at the men's camp in Auschwitz II.

Otto Moll was a Lagerfuhrer of the Auschwitz sub-camps of Furstengrube in Wesola and Gleiwitz I According to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoss, he and Moll were both decorated by Adolf Hitler with the War Merit Cross, First Class with Swords.

Otto Moll appears several times in the photo album belonging to Auschwitz commandant Karl-Friedrich Hocker that showed SS camp staff on leave at the retreat called Solahutte.

In 1944, after realizing that the crematoria were not sufficient to burn the number of Jewish people arriving at the camp, Otto Moll forced prisoners to dig large open-air pits to incinerate excess bodies.

Otto Moll reopened a farmhouse which had been previously used as a makeshift gas chamber.

Otto Moll ordered a naked woman to sit on the corpses near a pit, while he shot at prisoners and threw them to the burning pit, ordering the woman to jump and sing.

Otto Moll halted him at the crematory, had him thrown into a furnace, started a fire using paper, and then they got him out, hanged him by his arms, tortured and interrogated him to find out where he had gotten the items found on him.

Otto Moll repeated the same thing in his speeches to the new arrivals.

On several occasions, Otto Moll threw people into the flaming pits alive.

Otto Moll ill-treated and beat Sonderkommando prisoners, treating them like animals.

The head of the crematoria, Otto Moll, once took a child away from its mother, I saw it at Crematorium IV.

We took the bundle to Otto Moll and told him he was alive.

Otto Moll took the kid to the edge of the pit, put him on the ground, stepped on his neck, and threw him into the fire.

Otto Moll revealed his sadism at times when he circulated among mothers who were about to be gassed and chatted with a boy whom they carried.

In February 1945, an execution unit headed by Otto Moll murdered approximately 3,000 prisoners deemed to be "dangerous".

On 28 April 1945, a day before Dachau was liberated by American troops, Otto Moll arrived at the main camp with a group of prisoners whom he had forced on a death march.

In November 1945, Otto Moll was put on trial by an American military court during the Dachau trials.

Otto Moll was only tried for what he did at Dachau.

Otto Moll was sentenced to death after being found guilty of fatally shooting prisoners who had collapsed from exhaustion.

Otto Moll requested an interview with him, saying the world needed to know what he had done in Auschwitz.

Otto Moll was executed by hanging at Landsberg Prison on 28 May 1946.