Martin Weiss: SS Commandant Who Ran Some of Nazi Germany's Deadliest Camps

Martin Gottfried Weiss was a German SS officer and one of the most important concentration camp commandants in Nazi Germany. During World War II, he held senior positions at Dachau, Neuengamme, Majdanek, and Mühldorf, helping oversee forced labor, deportations, executions, and the broader machinery of Nazi persecution.Born in 1905 in Weiden in der Oberpfalz, Weiss joined the Nazi Party and the SS during the early years of the movement. He began his concentration camp career at Dachau, the first regular concentration camp established by the Nazi regime, where he rose through the ranks from guard to senior SS administrator.Weiss later became commandant of Neuengamme concentration camp, where prisoners were exploited as forced laborers under brutal conditions. In 1942, he returned to Dachau as commandant, overseeing a camp marked by harsh discipline, executions, medical experiments, and systematic abuse.He was also connected to Aktion T4, the Nazi euthanasia program. Under his authority, prisoners were transferred from Dachau to the Hartheim killing center, where they were murdered as part of the regime's campaign against those deemed “unfit.”In November 1943, Weiss was appointed commandant of Majdanek concentration camp shortly after Operation Harvest Festival, the largest single-day massacre of the Holocaust. Later, he was transferred to the Mühldorf camp complex, where prisoners were forced to construct underground aircraft facilities under deadly conditions.As Nazi Germany collapsed in 1945, Weiss briefly returned to Dachau before fleeing ahead of the camp's liberation by American forces. Captured after the war, he was tried by the Dachau Military Tribunal, convicted of war crimes, and executed by hanging in 1946.This documentary explores Martin Weiss's role in the Nazi concentration camp system, his involvement in forced labor and mass murder, and the postwar justice that followed the collapse of the Third Reich.This episode is part of the series The Nazi Camp Commandants.Watch the full documentary and explore hundreds of historical films at:WorldHistory.tv