WEST GERMANY: The Monster

In other circumstances the man in the wheelchair would have seemed a pathetic figure. He had been at Buchenwald concentration camp. His face was pale and craggy, his left arm a stump, his right leg missing. Sick and shattered, he looked older than his 43 years. But in Bayreuth Circuit Court last week spectators hissed as the man was carried past. “Beast!” they cried. “Monster!”

Gerhard Martin Sommer, the man in the wheelchair, had indeed been at Buchenwald—but not as a prisoner. As the master of the punishment cellblock between 1938 and 1943, Sommer was the broad-shouldered bullyboy who, in the words of West German Prosecutor Helmut Paulik, perpetrated “probably the most hideous group of sadistic atrocities unearthed since the war.” In the camp where Use Koch, wife of the camp commandant and the “Bitch of Buchenwald.” purportedly made lampshades of human skin (she is serving a life term), SS Guardsman Gerhard Martin Sommer went so far in sadism that even his Nazi overlords were shocked. After an SS investigation they packed him off to the front “to redeem himself,” and there he lost a leg and an arm. After first declaring him unfit for trial, West German authorities changed their minds when Sommer married a blonde nurse in 1956, fathered her child and casually applied for an increase in his veterans’ pension. Sommer was haled into court. The charge: 53 murders. A psychiatrist’s finding: legally sane but flagrantly sadistic.

Sommer Specialties. For four weeks a parade of witnesses unfolded a grisly chronicle of crime that Prosecutor Paulik described as “a look into Dante’s inferno.” Sommer’s specialties:

¶ The whipping block—where prisoners were forced to count the strokes aloud as Sommer beat them with a heavy stick. When they lost count, Sommer started again. One man sentenced to 25 strokes got 60 lashes this way. He died on the spot. Sommer blandly admitted the beatings and even built a cardboard model of the whipping block to show the court. “I can’t claim to have hit the last strokes as hard as the first,” he said. “You always get a little tired.”

¶ The “singing forest”—so called because of the screams of the victims who were hung by their wrists to trees. Shown a photograph of prisoners hanging in this fashion, Sommer was asked, “Is that you standing beside the men?” Replied Sommer matter-of-factly: “No, we did not hang our prisoners so high.”

¶ Sommer’s bunker—where, according to former SS Judge Konrad Morgen, Sommer kept a secret compartment, concealed in the floor under his desk, to hide torture instruments and the needles with which he shot carbolic acid and air into his victims’ veins. Sommer often laid the bodies beneath his bed for the night.

Other testimony: Sommer beat a Weimar pastor, hung him outside, dashed buckets of water on him and left him to freeze to death. He beat a Catholic priest to death for hearing the confession of a fellow prisoner.

Tears of Pity. To keep the trial from going on indefinitely, defense and prosecution finally threw out all charges except one—23 murders by injection. Sommer denied that he had killed anyone.

Last week the three-man court and six-man jury in Bayreuth found Sommer guilty of murder, dealt to the master of punishment the maximum punishment permitted under West German law: life imprisonment. To the end Sommer was impassive. But when one German, looking at the cripple in the wheelchair, said, “You have already paid for your bestialities,” Sommer wept gratefully in pity—for himself.