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The bizarre thing about the Nazi regime was that they had so many contradictions.They had no issues with committing mass murder and genocide or evil and cruel medical experiments, but they had issues with cruelty which was not conform with their policies.
It was okay to murder and torture but it had to be done the Nazi way.
Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer was an SS Hauptscharführer who served as a guard in 2 concentration camps First he served in Sachsenhausen later in Buchenwald. Where he got the nickname “Hangman of Buchenwald”
He was born in Schkölen, to a farming family in Thuringia in 1915. In 1931 at age sixteen, Sommer joined the Nazi Party and 2 years later became a member of the SS.He was also a a depraved sadist.
After he left Sachsenhausen he was assigned to Buchenwald where he was put in charge of a cell block where he reigned over his prisoners with impunity. Later he promoted to head the punishment bunker and was promoted once more to Chief Penal Officer.
In both camps Somner served under Karl Koch.
Sommer was quick to utilize his position to fulfill his natural sadistic desires.
His favorite manner of torture was tying prisoners’ wrists together behind their backs and then hang them a few inches off the ground from cell bars, stanchions, or branches of trees until their arms became dislocated. This earned him the nickname “the Hangman of Buchenwald.”
When this special form of torture was conducted on prisoners in the woods around the camp, the screams of the victims were so intense that the other inmates soon gave the area a name, the “singing forest.”
Sommer had a special dislike for clergy men. One time he ordered two Austrian priests, Otto Neururer and Mathias Spannlang, to be crucified upside-down.Another time he beat a Catholic priest to death for performing the Sacrament of Penance for a fellow inmate.
At one stage he beat a German pastor, then hanged him naked outside in the winter and threw buckets of water over him and let him freeze to death.
Sommer also had a secret compartment underneath the floor under his desk. Where he kept his private instruments of torture concealed.Instruments such as the needles he used to kill his victims after he finished torturing them, he would inject them with carbolic acid, or inject air into their veins causing his victims to die by embolism. Sometimes, after ‘private’ late night torture sessions he would hide the bodies of his victims under his bed until he could dispose of them the following morning.
He sometimes would rubbed prisoner’s backs with steel brushes and then pour acid on the wounds
In 1943 ,Heinrich Himmler appointed SS judge Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen to investigate allegations of cruelty and corruption at the Buchenwald camp.
Morgen found the allegations to be true and Sommer was put on trial.
After the trial Sommer was sentenced to a reduction in rank and was sent to a penal battalion fighting on the Eastern Front where he was wounded in a tank explosion, losing his left arm and right leg. He was arrested by the Soviet army and was detained as P.O.W. until 1950 when his prisoner status was changed from Prisoner of War to war criminal. In 1955 as part of the negotiations conducted on behalf of Soviet held German prisoners by Konrad Adenauer, Sommer was released.
After his release he returned to West Germany where he married his Nurse, and they had a child ,Sommer filed for and received a pension for his service related disabilities. 
He received a pension of 280 marks a month and over 10,500 marks in back payments.
He escaped punishment for his crimes until 1957, when he was indicted for complicity in the death in 101 concentration camp inmates.In 1958, the German government deemed Sommer healthy enough for trial.
He was convicted of 25 deaths and received a life sentence. The sentence was appealed but the case was upheld in May 1959 by the German Federal Court. In 1971 he was released from jail because there was no facility to continue his treatment of his war injuries. he was transferred to a hospital and in 1973 to a nursing home where he remained until his death in 1988.
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Sources
Der Spiegel
German Wikipedia
History of Sorts 
Reblogged this on History of Sorts.
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