Erich Hermann Bauer

Passions

Vocation

German Nazi war criminal, sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", who was a low-level commander in the SS and a Holocaust perpetrator. He participated in Action T4 program and later in Operation Reinhard, serving as a gas chamber operator at Sobibór extermination camp. He served as a soldier in World War I and was a prisoner of war under the French. In 1933, Bauer joined the NSDAP (Nazi Party) and SA while working as a tram conductor. In 1940, he joined the T-4 Euthanasia Program where the physically and mentally disabled were exterminated by gassing and lethal injection. In the beginning, he worked as a driver but he was quickly promoted. At Sobibór, Bauer was in charge of the camp's gas chambers. At the time the Jews called him the Badmeister ("Bath Master"), while after the war he became known as the Gasmeister ("Gas Master"). At the end of the war, Bauer was arrested in Austria by the Americans and confined to a prisoner of war camp until 1946. Shortly afterwards, he returned to Berlin where he found employment as a laborer cleaning up debris from the war. Bauer was arrested in 1949 when two former Jewish prisoners from Sobibór, Samuel Lerer and Esther Raab, recognized him during a chance encounter at a Kreuzberg fairground. His trial started the following year. On 8 May 1950 the court sentenced Bauer to death for crimes against humanity. Since capital punishment had been abolished in West Germany, Bauer's sentence was automatically commuted to life imprisonment. He served 21 years in Alt-Moabit Prison in Berlin before being transferred to Berlin Tegel prison. During his imprisonment, he admitted to his participation in mass murder at Sobibór and even occasionally testified against his former SS colleagues. Bauer died at Berlin Tegel prison on 4 February 1980, aged 79. Link to Wikipedia biography