Anton Thumann

From mid-February 1943 to March 1944 he began service as Protective Custody Camp Leader at the Majdanek concentration camp.[1][2] Due to his sadistic tendencies and participation in selections, gassings and shootings, the prisoners called him the "Hangman of Majdanek". According to eyewitness Jerzy Kwiatkowski, who was interned at Majdanek from March 1943 to July 1944, Thumann personally executed prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war. He owned a German Shepherd that he used to bite the inmates.[3]

For a few weeks between March and April 1944 Thumann was at Auschwitz-Birkenau.[4] Thumann also appears in a series of photographs from an SS recreation camp, the Solahütte near Auschwitz, discovered in 2007. In one of the photos Thumann is pictured with Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, Josef Kramer and Rudolf Hoess.[5]

Thumann then served as Protective Custody Camp Leader at Neuengamme concentration camp from mid-April 1944 until the end of April 1945. Often accompanied by his dog, he was very feared in Neuengamme due to a reputation for abuse of prisoners at Gross-Rosen and Majdanek.[6] As the British Army closed in on Neuengamme, the SS began an evacuation of the prisoners to prison ships. During the evacuation, 58 male and 13 female resistance fighters from nearby Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp were selected to be brought to Neuengamme to be executed on the orders of the Higher SS and Police Leader Georg-Henning Graf von Bassewitz-Behr. With the participation of Thumann, these prisoners were hanged between 21 and 23 April 1945 in a detention cell. After some of the doomed men continued to resist, Thumann threw a hand grenade through the cell window.[7] Under the command of Thumann and Wilhelm Dreimann, the last 700 prisoners remaining at Neuengamme were forced to dispose of bodies and cover up the traces of the camp. On 30 April 1945 the prisoners were then sent on a death march with the aim of reaching the area of the Flensburg government.[8] Georg Gussregen was his untersturmführer at Gross-Rosen.[9]