Arthur Liebehenschel

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Throughout World War II, in addition to his duties as a Nazi, Arthur had a family that he had to take care of, his wife Annelise and his daughter Barbara. Annelise was Arthur’s second wife and has been blamed as the reason that he got demoted to be the commandant of Auschwitz. His daughter Barbara is still alive today to tell the story about her dad. Today she is 46. After the war ended she wrote a book about her father, describing his life during the war and what was happening to him during the war. Barbara asked Annelise what he was like during the war. She told her he would come home crying after work because he felt bad for killing all the innocent men, women, and children. She says that “he never wanted to be a commandant, he was sent there as punishment.” (Cacciottolo, Mario) When he came home she says that he took “long showers to try to wash the evil away but it didn’t work”.( Cacciottolo, Mario) At the beginning of the war when he joined the SS he did it voluntarily, and was not forced. Some of the SS officers were drafted to fight in the war or become guards in the concentration camps. Annalise says that “he stayed loyal to Hitler but she thinks of Arthur as someone “caught in a web.” In other words, he wanted to stay loyal to his leader but didn’t want to do what he was doing.

At the end of the war he was put on trial for war crimes. The allied forces handed him over to the Polish and he was put on trial. The trial was the Auschwitz trial, where survivors of Auschwitz could testify against all of the SS guards in the camp. His trial started in December of 1947 and ended in January of 1948. Some of the prisoners in Auschwitz testified on his behalf. They said “he tried to ease the living conditions in Auschwitz by telling them he was trying to get better food for them and make the medicine better for them. He also tore down a cell block and built a pool. ” At the end of his trial he was sentenced to life in prison with 23 other SS guards That imprisonment didn’t last very long for him because the jury then changed his sentence to death. On January 24, 1948 he was executed for war crimes. On that day he was hung in Poland. In the end some people would say he shouldn’t have died. Why thay would say that is because he set some prisoners free in the camp. While he was at the camp the gas chambers were broken and not functional so he didn’t have to be scared of sending people there. The only thing he was sentenced for was that he was really an accomplice to all the Jews that died. After his death, his second wife Annelise was put in a mental hospital and his daughter Barbara was put in an orphanage. She kept her identity a secret for many years. Then that when she wrote the book about her dad and then she was discovered. Today she 46 years old and is still heartbroken about her dad.

Works Cited

Arthur Liebehenschel, Commandant of Auschwitz. N.p., 24 Jan. 2010. Web. 25 Apr. 2013.

Cacciottolo, Mario. The child of Auschwitz's Kommandant. BBC news, 16 Nov. 2009. Web. 25 Apr. 2013

Moorhead, Joanna. My father the Auschwitz commandant. guardian news, 19 June 2009. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Shik, naama. The International School for Holocaust Studies. N.p., n.d. Web. 28 Apr. 2013.

Cacciottolo, Mario. The child of Auschwitz's Kommandant. BBC news, 16 Nov. 2009. Web. 25 Apr. 2013

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