Josef Kramer: Nazi Camp Commandant of Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz Executed After Trial

Josef Kramer, known as the “Beast of Belsen,” was a Nazi camp commandant responsible for mass murder who was executed after the Belsen Trial. Josef Kramer was one of the most notorious concentration camp commandants of Nazi Germany, remembered as the “Beast of Belsen.” His career traces the evolution of the Nazi camp system itself — from early political repression to industrialized mass murder. Born in Munich in 1906, Kramer joined the Nazi Party and the SS during the economic collapse of the Great Depression. Like many perpetrators, he was not driven by ideology alone but by opportunity, obedience, and ambition within the rapidly expanding SS camp apparatus. His first assignments took him to Dachau, where the brutal model for all later concentration camps was established under Theodor Eicke. Kramer later served at Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen before becoming commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof. There, he personally supervised the gassing of Jewish prisoners selected for a grotesque pseudo-scientific project known as the “Jewish skeleton collection.” These murders were carried out to support Nazi racial ideology and demonstrate alleged Jewish “inferiority.” In 1944, Kramer was transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he oversaw selections during the deportation of Hungarian Jews — one of the fastest mass extermination operations of the Holocaust. Tens of thousands were sent directly to the gas chambers under his authority. His final post was Bergen-Belsen. As the camp filled with evacuees from the collapsing Eastern Front, conditions deteriorated into absolute catastrophe. Starvation, typhus, and neglect killed tens of thousands. When British forces liberated the camp in April 1945, they found piles of corpses and living prisoners reduced to skeletons. Unlike many SS officers, Kramer did not flee. He was arrested, tried at the Belsen Trial, and convicted of war crimes. In December 1945, Josef Kramer was executed by hanging. This documentary examines how ordinary careerism, obedience, and cruelty combined to produce one of the most infamous figures of the Holocaust — and why justice, though delayed, ultimately caught up with him.This episode is part of the series The Nazi Camp Commandants.Watch the full documentary and explore hundreds of historical films at:WorldHistory.tv