Martin Sommer, the infamous “Beast of Buchenwald” who killed hundreds of Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and was set free last year on the basis of a German medical finding that he is “unable to stand trial,” has just been married after securing another medical finding that entitles him to a lengthy “honeymoon leave” from the veterans hospital where he resides. Proceedings against him were quashed in March of 1955, when German physicians pronounced him “physically unfit to stand trial.”
As a first sergeant in the SS, the former agricultural laborer was for many years in charge of the Buchenwald guardhouse. A large number of Jews were his victims. The files of the Bayreuth District Attorney contain sworn affidavits giving the names and dates of 67 murders he committed within and 11 he perpetrated outside the camp, as well as exact data on several hundred assaults, mostly against sick prisoners, that resulted in death. Documented instances of manslaughter and aggravated assault are too numerous to have been counted.
These crimes, testified to by 400 witnesses, are only a small fraction of the killings Sommer is believed guilty of. Memoirs by former Buchenwald inmates, such as Eugen Kogon’s “The SS State,” recount how his sadism stood out even in the hell of the camp. He is described as “so terrible that Ilse Koch, the “Bitch of Buchenwald,” looks like an angel by comparison.”
When General Eisenhower visited Buchenwald shortly after its liberation by United States troops in April of 1945, the name of Martin Sommer was on the lips of the 50,000 inmates as the most hated of the SS guards. If he could have been located at the time, he would almost certainly have been sentenced to death by a U.S. war crimes court.
Yet, while the search for him went on, he was in American hands and under his own name. He had been sent to Bavaria as an SS tank driver at the tail-end of the war and was captured by U.S. troops after his vehicle was hit by an artillery shell that blew off his left leg and shredded his body with bits of steel. GI’s took him to a PW hospital, where Jewish army doctors saved his life by dint of 30 surgical operations. Later, he was transferred to a leading German-run veterans hospital. His identity as the “Beast of Buchenwald” was learned only when his first wife filed suit for divorce in 1950. “No one bothered to ask me before,” he told interrogators.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
