History of Sorts

I am always amazed why so many evil men got away with murder. Especially the physicians who were supposed to, “first do no harm.”

Hans Eisele was an SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer and Nazi physician in various camps, including Mauthausen and Buchenwald. There he mistreated and murdered prisoners, for example, by operating on them without anaesthesia and by giving lethal injections to people with tuberculosis. In 1945, he was convicted of the crimes he had committed. He was released again in 1952 after a reduced sentence.

Nazi party member 3125695, former SS Hauptsturmführer, began fighting on the Western Front and then worked in Nazi concentration camps at Sachsenhausen, Natzweiler, Dachau and Buchenwald. According to the American who prosecuted Eisele, Colonel William Denson, Eisele started as the good doctor, called, The Angel by prisoners, but steadily became cruel and sadistic, until at Buchenwald when given the moniker, The Butcher, because he carried out medical experiments on prisoners, allowing them to die slowly after injections of cyanide.

On 13 December 1945, Eisele and 39 others were tried at the main court trial for atrocities at Dachau.

Eisele was found guilty of complicity in three executions which he had issued death certificates for afterwards. His sentence was death. However, after a mandatory review of his case and those of his codefendants, the death sentence was one of eight out of 36 reduced to prison terms on appeal. The reasoning for sparing Eisele was that the military could not find evidence of him individually mistreating prisoners. In addition, medical care in the camp under his purview had improved somewhat, and he had barely spent any time in Dachau whatsoever.

On 11 April 1947, Eisele was tried at the Buchenwald main trial. He was found guilty and received another death sentence for complicity in murder and alleged human experimentation. However, the basic conviction against Eisele proved dubious and uncertain (much of what is now known about Eisele was then unavailable), so four of the eight military judges submitted an application that the judgment be converted by the reviewing body to a ten-year sentence, which was granted.

During his detention in a prison for war criminals, Landsberg wrote an extensive defence titled, Audiatur et altera pars, in which he denied the allegations and represented himself as a convinced Christian who had always been a physician only for the sake of others. In contrast, numerous witnesses of his crimes were former concentration camp prisoners and some former SS members. After his sentence was reduced [to ten years], Eisele was released from prison on 26 February 1952.

After his release, he opened a medical practice in Munich. In 1958, during the trial of Martin Sommer, a guard at Buchenwald, new allegations were made against Eisele. That he had murdered at least 200 Jews and performed gruesome medical experiments came to light. Eisele fled to Egypt with the help of an SS underground group, where he settled under the pseudonym Carl Debouche in the upmarket Cairo suburb Maadi. Eisele was arrested in July 1958 by police in Cairo.

However, before being extradited, he disappeared from custody the following month.

Eisele moved in the circles of former Nazi scientists in Egypt after a German extradition request had been rejected. The Mossad tried to assassinate Eisele via a mail bomb on 25 September 1963. However, the bomb detonated early, instead killing a postal worker. Eisele died on 3 May 1967 and was buried in the small German cemetery in grave No. 99

Sources

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1040518

https://data.niod.nl/WO2_biografieen/Hans-Eisele.html

Buchenwald Camp Physician Who Murdered Jews Captured in Cairo

https://dbpedia.org/page/Hans_Eisele_(physician)

https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa12415

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-butcher-of-buchenwald-in-an-egyptian-paradise-2045930.html