West Germany: The Commandant of Auschwitz

One foggy morning last week, three law-enforcement officers walked up to a strapping woodcutter bending over a power saw deep in the dark North German forest of Sachsenwald. “Hands up!” shouted an officer, and the surprised lumberjack allowed himself to be handcuffed without resistance. Thus the law finally caught up with former SS Sturmbannführer Richard Baer, 49, last commandant of Hitler’s infamous Auschwitz extermination camp.

When the blacklist of Nazi mass murderers was drawn up for the Nürnberg war crimes trials, Baer was presumed dead—The two SS men who commanded Auschwitz before him were caught and hanged by the Poles, one of them on gallows especially built so that the last sight to meet his eyes would be the camp in which he had sent an estimated 2,000,000 innocent Jews to their death. After Exterminator-in-Chief Adolf Eichmann was found in Argentina last May, West German intelligence officers started a fresh search for Baer.

Cherchez la Femme. Baer’s wife insisted that her husband was dead. But Frankfurt State Prosecutor Heinz Wolf found that she had never initiated legal proceedings to have him declared so, even though that would have enabled her to claim a widow’s pension. Investigators also discov ered that while ostensibly living with her father in a Hamburg suburb, she spent a lot of time in a cottage on the edge of the Sachsenwald, the home of a quiet-spoken woodcutter named Karl Egon Neumann.

When Prosecutor Wolf’s men stripped Neumann, they found on his right hip the same bullet scar SS Man Baer carried there. Woodcutter Neumann snapped to attention, confessed: “I am Richard Baer. I was an officer. Treat me accordingly.”

Stilled Ovens. A baker’s apprentice who joined the Nazis in 1930, he was trained in SS brutality as a guard at Dachau and in May 1944 sent to Auschwitz to replace a commandant deemed too soft by Eichmann & Co. That summer he kept the gas chambers and the four giant ovens roaring at top capacity to consume the 380,000 Jews Eichmann shipped in from Hungary. On Oct. 18, 1944, the gassing stopped because the Russians had pushed the battle line too close. In January, Baer ordered the camp’s surviving 64,000 inmates to march to the Gross-Rosen camp near Breslau. Hundreds of prisoners died of exposure or were shot by guards when they fell by the way. Baer skipped ahead to Gross-Rosen; then, as the Russians surged on Berlin, he submerged himself in the refugee tide flowing west and found his way under an assumed name to his forest refuge east of Hamburg.

With at least 23 other former Auschwitz officials whom Wolf and his Frankfurt staff have rounded up in the past two years (warrants are out for 14 others), Baer will be brought to justice some time next year in one big trial in Frankfurt.