Death of Hans Koch
- Nazi Killer Who Murdered His Victims in Gas Chambers at Auschwitz - Holocaust

20 July 2022

Category: Male Nazi Guards

Hans Koch was born on the 13th of August 1912 in Tangerhütte and as with millions of Germans in the 1930s, Koch believed that Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party would create strong a Germany, fix the economy, and put people back to work. In 1940, Hans Koch arrived in Auschwitz. The longest-serving camp’s commandant - Rudolf Höss - stated in his autobiography that in 1941 he was summoned to Berlin, where Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, informed him that the Führer had issued an order to solve the “Jewish Question” for good, and that the order was to be implemented by the SS. Himmler told Höss: “The existing extermination places in the east are unsuited to a large scale, long-term action. I have designated Auschwitz for this purpose,”

Koch’s commando which consisted of around 20 prisoners, most of them Poles, was tasked with disinfecting the items taken off the prisoners arriving at the Auschwitz camp. The commando also dealt with the disinfection of buildings as well as the clothes and underwear of the SS staff. Another of Koch’s responsibilies at Auschwitz was to insert the Zyklon B into the gas chambers. This is the reason why he became known as the “ Gasmeister”.

Koch as the "Gasmeister"

One Auschwitz survivor who spoke German later testified that neither Hans Koch nor other SS men made any secret of how they gassed their victims and had loud conversations about it. The survivor often heard Koch complaining to his friends of being tired in the mornings because he had to gas so many prisoners that it had taken him all night.

The Auschwitz camp complex was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on the 27th of January 1945. By then approximately 1,000,000 Jews, 70,000 Poles, 25,000 Sinti and Roma, and some 15,000 prisoners of war from the Soviet Union and other countries had been murdered in the camp. After the end of the war, Hans Koch was finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. On the 22nd of December, 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Hans Koch to life imprisonment as opposed to death. Koch was 42 years old when he died on the 14th of July 1955 in a prison in Gdańsk. There were no tears shed for Hans Koch.

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