Otto Hermann Wilhelm Moll (4 March 1915 – 28 May 1946) was an SS non-commissioned officer who committed numerous atrocities at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Second World War. Moll held the rank of SS-Hauptscharführer' "Head Section Leader", the equivalent to a US Military Master Sergeant and or British Military Warrant Officer.
SS Hauptscharführer Moll held the position of SS Rapportführer a senior SS position within the SS Guard Units the "Totenkopfverbände" sanctioned within the Camps.
He is said to have personally killed thousands of innocent victims (over 20 thousand according to some reports) during his time at Birkenau. The Kommandant of Auschwitz Rudolf Höss appointed Moll as Rapportführer for all Crematorium at Auschwitz, a role that Moll carried out with incredible cruelty.
Early life
Moll was born in the town of Hohen Schönberg in the German Empire, on 4 March 1915. He trained as a gardener before joining the SS on 1 May 1935 (serial number 277670).
Moll joined the battalion orchestra which performed in SS barracks or in public places. In January 1937, Moll was returning home from a concert when the truck he and other SS musicians were riding got into an accident. One SS man was killed, while Moll suffered serious head trauma and went blind in his right eye. Hans Schmid, a German historian who has written extensively about Moll, considers it very likely that he suffered from frontal lobe syndrome from the accident. An American forensic scientist examined, among other things, witness statements about Moll's actions and came to this diagnosis. Frontal lobe syndrome is organic damage that can manifest itself in psychotic or psychopathic behavior. A dulling of feelings, exaggerated spirit of enterprise, general disinhibition and particular pity are symptoms.
Schmid discusses 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. As such, Moll does not qualify as a "normal German" who became a perpetrator.
SS career
Moll joined the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the SS Death's Head Units responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps for Nazi Germany. One of his earliest jobs was a Kommandoführer in charge of a camp's gardeners' work detail. In May 1941, Otto Moll was transferred from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to Auschwitz where he was put in charge of digging the mass graves. Over the next three and half years, Moll served in several staff roles at the camp. He soon became the director of employment services at the men's camp in Auschwitz II. In 1944, Moll oversaw all the crematoria in Birkenau. He also was a Lagerführer of the Fürstengrube subcamp in Wesola and the Gleiwitz I sub-camp. According to Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Höss, he and Moll were both decorated by Adolf Hitler with the War Merit Cross, First Class with Swords. He appears several times in the photo album belonging to Auschwitz commandant Karl-Friedrich Höcker that showed SS camp staff on leave at a retreat. From 11 to 25 September 1943, the wife of one of Otto Moll's friends, Hans Anhalt stayed at a garrison near Auschwitz with his permission.
Moll would say to his personnel: "Befehl ist Befehl!" ("An order is an order!") to justify his actions. This was an attitude that other defendants at the Nuremberg Trials also cited as a defence.
Brutality
In 1944, after realizing that the crematoria were not sufficient to burn the number of Jewish people arriving at the camp, Moll forced prisoners to dig large open air pits to burn excess bodies. He also reopened a farmhouse which had been previously used as a makeshift gas chamber.
Alter Feinsilber, a member of the Sonderkommando at Birkenau who worked for Moll, later recounted:
At that time, on average around 18,000 Hungarians were murdered daily at Birkenau. Transports would come from dawn till dusk, one after another, and around 20% of those arriving were sent to the camp. They were recorded in series A and B. The rest were gassed and incinerated in the crematorium furnaces. In cases where there were not enough prisoners, they were executed by shooting and burned in pits. As a rule, a gas chamber was only utilized for groups bigger than 200 people because it was uneconomical to use it for smaller groups. It sometimes happened that during executions by shooting some prisoners put up a fight or children cried, and then Oberscharführer Moll would throw these people into the burning pits alive.