The HORRORS of Josef Kramer Execution Method *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

A 19-year-old British soldier named Gilbert King had survived combat across Europe. He had watched friends die beside him in the mud. He had heard artillery tear through the night sky for months. He thought absolutely nothing could shake him anymore. Then on April 15th, 1945, he walked through the gates of Bergen Bellson concentration camp and the world he thought he knew collapsed in an instant. Something came crawling toward me,” he recalled decades later, voice cracking. And I don’t know if it was a man or a

woman. You couldn’t tell. And it kissed my boots. It nearly brought tears to my eyes. That broken human being had been kept alive, barely by Yseph Kramer. 13,000 unburied corpses rotted in open pits under the April sun. The stench rolled for miles across the surrounding countryside. Soldiers said it physically hit them before they saw a single body. 60,000 survivors stood blinking in the sunlight. Skeletal typhus ridden [clears throat] a barely breathing. Combat veterans who had fought from the

beaches of Normandy all the way into Germany stood at the edge of Bergen Bellson and wept openly. And right there in the middle of all of it, standing calmly in his pressed SS uniform, well-fed and completely composed, was the man who had built every single piece of this horror. Joseph Kramer, the beast of Bellson. He wasn’t hiding. He wasn’t running. He was waiting. What happened next, his arrest, his trial, and in the cold December morning when Britain’s most precise executioner came for him is

one of the most powerful stories of World War II justice ever recorded. Army history is telling it in full right now. Welcome to Army History. Real stories, real people, zero sugar coating. The darkest and most important chapters of World War II told exactly the way they actually happened. Hit subscribe right now and ring that bell because you will not want to miss what’s coming next on this channel. Now, let’s go back to where this monster began. Because the most disturbing thing about Yseph Kramer

isn’t what he did. It’s how completely ordinary he was before he did it. Joseph Kramer was born on November 10th, 1906 in Munich, Germany. An only child in a strict Roman Catholic middle-class household. His father Theodore was a government accountant. His mother Maria raised him faithfully in the church. The family later relocated to Agsburg. Ordinary kid, school, church, Sunday dinners at the family table. At 14, he started an electrician’s apprenticeship. Didn’t finish it. Tried a department

store, tried accounting. Neither lasted. From 1925 to 1933, eight full years, Kramer was almost entirely unemployed, living in his parents’ house, going nowhere. Then the Great Depression crashed through Germany and his father lost his job, too. The whole family had nothing left. Germany in those years was boiling over. mass unemployment, national humiliation from WWI, in rage, poverty, and in a desperate hunger for someone to blame. The Nazi party fed every piece of that anger perfectly. In December 1931, at

age 25, Kramer signed his name to a Nazi party membership card. 6 months later, he joined the SS. His own widow confirmed it after the war. He hadn’t joined out of burning ideology or deep-seated hatred. He joined because he had absolutely no other prospects. The SS gave him a uniform, a salary, a chain of command in and an identity he had never found anywhere else. That was enough to turn a desperate nobody into one of the most dangerous men in Europe. By 1934, he was a guard at Dau. Promotions followed steadily.

Saxonhausen, Mount Housen, up the ladder. Each camp stripped away more of whatever humanity he started with. By the time Awitz opened in 1940, Kramer was exactly the kind of man the Nazis needed running it. In 1940, Kramer arrived at Awitz as assistant to Commandon Rudolph Hus, the architect of the most industrialized murder operation in human history. The man who built Avitz personally mentored Ysef Krommer. In April 1941, he became common of nuts viuto in occupied France. And here is where he stopped being a cog in the

machine and became the machine itself. A Nazi professor brought him a project that sounds invented until you read the trial records. The goal, gas Jewish prisoners that photograph their bodies, strip their skeletons, and display them at a German university as scientific proof that Jews were a subhuman race. 86 people, 57 men, 29 women, all gassed. Investigators believe Kramer personally operated the gas chamber, standing at a small peepphole, watching people die and calmly noting the time. When Allied

forces discovered the corpses, some decapitated all preserved in formal tanks, the evidence became among the most damning in all of post-war prosecution history. After the war, Kramer openly admitted gassing those people on direct orders from Reichfurer Hinrich Himmler. He said he had no choice but to obey. Then came the line that still stops people cold more than 80 years later. He did not consider killing those innocent people a crime. In May 1944, War Kramer returned to Awitz as commandon of Awitz Burkinau,

the single deadliest location in the history of the 20th century and the main killing center of the entire Holocaust. That summer, hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews arrived in packed cattle cars day and night without pause. The crematoria ran constantly, but couldn’t keep up with the sheer volume. Kramer ordered open burning pits dug outside the crematoria walls. The black smoke was visible for miles in every direction. On survivor Anita Lasker, a kellist in the prisoner orchestra who

survived because of her music, testified at the Bellson trial that she personally saw Kramer on the selection platform pointing people left for forced labor and right for the gas chamber. He was doing it himself. He forced women prisoners into punitive exercise drills, marching, sprinting, squat jumps until they collapsed face down in the dirt. On one documented occasion, he drew his sidearm and fired at a prisoner. Oh, the bullet tore through the inmate’s hand. That prisoner survived the war and

testified in a courtroom about exactly what happened. Then there was Irma Graca, the hyena of Awitz, a 21-year-old SS guard with a cellophane wrapped leather whip in steel reinforced boots who selected prisoners for death with a casual smile. Hey, historians have documented that Kramer and Grace allegedly had an affair while both served at Burkanau. The common daunt of the deadliest camp on Earth and the most sadistic female guard in the Nazi system, running it together. Meanwhile, Kramer had a wife and children at home.

He formally asked his superiors if he could bring his family to live near Bergen Bellson when he took command there. And he was arranging housing for his own children while overseeing the deaths of thousands of other people’s children every single week. On December 1st, 1944, Kramer arrived at Bergen Bellson. No gas chambers, no crematoria. Under Kramer, they weren’t needed. People died fast enough on their own. The camp sat just 400 meters from a river. roughly four city blocks. Thousands were dying of thirst. When the

tribunal asked Kramer why he hadn’t pumped water, he claimed he lacked the equipment. The British troops arrived, found the equipment sitting unused inside the camp, and had water flowing to prisoners within hours. The water Kramer had been providing came from concrete tanks the British found completely contaminated with filth. One transport of 1,900 people arrived with over 500 already dead sealed inside the cattle cars. Survivors were too weak to walk from the station. Prisoners slept sitting upright. No space to lie down.

In the entire camp through a brutal German winter, there were only 200 blankets. By March 1945, 250 to 300 prisoners were dying every single day. Kramer forced the sick and dying outside for mandatory morning roll calls lasting hours in freezing temperatures. His post-war explanation to the tribunal. Prisoners were simply lazy and needed fresh air. Guards set dogs on prisoners. Others were machine gunned at burial pits, all under his direct command. SS men made a sport of shooting at starving prisoners near the

kitchen. Dwin eyewitnesses placed Kramer among those who joined in. When Guard Hera Aert, later sentenced to 15 years in prison, raised the rising death rate directly with Kramer, he replied without blinking, “Let them die. Why should you care?” By early 1945, the Allies closed in from both directions. Most Bergen Bellson guards ran, burned their records, shed their uniforms, and vanished into civilian Germany. Kramer stayed and in one of the war’s most cynical acts, he suddenly transformed.

Finding food for dying prisoners, attempting to improve conditions, apparently convinced that a few weeks of performing decency could erase a decade of documented atrocity. When British forces arrived on April 15th, 1945, Kramer was at the gate waiting to receive them. He personally escorted officers through the camp, past mass graves, and thousands of the living dead as if conducting a routine inspection. Then he formally requested that his armed SSG guards remain in place to maintain order. Surrounded by 13,000

unburied corpses and 60,000 half-dead survivors, the beast of Bellson was asking to keep his weapons. He was arrested on the spot. The Bellson trial opened on September 17th, 1945 in Lunberg, Germany. One of the first major war crimes trials after the Nazi surrender. 45 SS defendants sat in the dock. Kramer sat at the top of the list. He pleaded not guilty. Denied the selections. He denied the gas chambers. Denied everything. Anita Lasker took the stand. Calm, precise, and devastating. She had seen Kramer on the Awitz

platform with her own eyes and told the tribunal exactly what she witnessed. When the prosecution raised Irma grease, Kramer declared he could speak only the best about her, that she took her duties very seriously. When her own written confession, admitting deliberate and regular use of the whip was read aloud in open court. Ash Kramer told the tribunal she was simply exaggerating. The man who ran Bergen Bellson was in court defending the woman who whipped prisoners for pleasure. Then the tribunal asked the question that echoed

through history. Did you prefer to be a party to wholesale murder rather than be arrested yourself? The failed electrician from Augsburg, the unemployed young man who joined the SS for a paycheck. The husband and father who had asked to bring his children near the camp he was filling with corpses. He looked straight at the tribunal. Yes. No pause, no hesitation, no regret. The tribunal found Ysef Crommer guilty of war crimes at both Awitz and Bergen Bellson. The sentence, death by hanging. Albert Pierre Point, Britain’s most

precise executioner, arrived at Hamlin Prison on the morning of December 13th, 1945. Clinical, fast, professional, 11 executions total. women first, kuna, then men in pairs. The process ran from early morning until late afternoon. Joseph Kramer was 39 years old. The man who gassed 86 people while watching through a peepphole. Who directed hundreds of thousands toward death at Burkanau. Who watched 300 people die daily at Bergen Bellson and told his staff, “Let them die.” Who arranged housing for his own children near the

graveyard he was building gone. The British army burned Bergen Bellson entirely to the ground. Every barrack, every building in every wall to stop typhus spreading. The physical camp was reduced to ash. But Anita Lasker’s testimony survived. The memory of the soldier whose boots were kissed by a person too broken to stand survived. 13,000 unburied dead. 200 blankets for tens of thousands of freezing prisoners. a river just 400 meters away while thousands died of thirst. None of that burned. Joseph Kramer was not born evil.

And he was a desperate young man from a broken economy who found a uniform that gave him power and chose every single morning for over a decade to use that power to destroy human lives. That is what Bergen Bellson teaches. That is why Army history exists because forgetting is the most dangerous thing we can do. And these stories are too important to disappear. Share this video right now with someone who needs to understand what really happened in World War II. Subscribe to Army History and hit that

bell so you never miss an upload. Drop one word in the comments, justice, if you believe Yseph Kramer got exactly what he deserved. See you in the next one. This is army