The 2nd of February 1943, Stalingrad, the Soviet Union. The German 6th army, after 5 months of fierce fighting and heavy casualties, having exhausted their ammunition and food, finally capitulates, making it the first of Hitler’s field armies to surrender during World War II. The battle for the city proves a decisive psychological turning point, ending a string of German victories in the summer of 1942 and beginning the long retreat westward.
The Soviet army remains on the offensive and in July 1944 liberates Majdanek – the first major Nazi camp to be liberated which is located in German-occupied Poland. Soviet officials invite journalists to inspect the camp and to see the evidence of the horrors that have occurred there.
Only after the liberation of the concentration camps, the full extent of Nazi horrors is finally exposed to the world. Because of the demands of forced labor and the lack of food, only a small percentage of concentration camp inmates survive. Compounded by months and years of mistreatment and torture, they resemble skeletons and many of them are so weak that they can hardly move at all.
One of the most infamous perpetrators of this criminal Nazi regime responsible for these atrocities is Egon Zill. Egon Gustav Adolf Zill was born on the 28th of March 1906 in Plauen, then part of the German Empire. His father was a brewer who was severely injured in the First World War and as such Egon, after 8 years of elementary school, was apprenticed to a baker at an early age in order to bring in much needed money to the family.
After World War I ended, Germany experienced great political turmoil. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles imposed harsh terms on Germany, which had lost the war. In addition, the country saw the overthrow of its monarchy. In its place was the new Weimar Republic, a democratic government.
Racist and antisemitic groups sprang up on the radical right and they blamed Jews for Germany’s defeat in the war. These groups opposed the Weimar Republic and the Treaty of Versailles. They were against democracy, human rights, capitalism, socialism, and communism. They advocated to exclude from German life anyone who did not belong to the German race. The Nazi Party, founded in 1920, sought to woo German workers away from socialism and communism and commit them to antisemitic and anti-Marxist ideology.
In 1920 Hitler formulated a 25-point program which remain the Party’s only platform. Among its points, it rejected the Versailles settlement and also demanded to unify all people of German “blood.” The program called for a Greater Germany ruled by a strong central state and the country was to acquire new lands and colonies.
The program would deny citizenship and rights to all non-Germans, particularly Jews. Under Hitler’s leadership the Nazi Party grew steadily. It attracted support from influential people in the military, big business, and society and the Party also absorbed other radical right-wing groups.
In 1921, Hitler organized a paramilitary force called the SA also known as the Storm Troopers and the Brownshirts, for the color of their uniform. SA members were war veterans and members of the Freikorps, paramilitary units that battled left-wing movements in postwar Germany. When in 1923 Egon Zill joined both the Nazi Party and the SA, he was only 17. Three years later he joined the SS with number 535, one of the lowest membership numbers.
On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg. Immediately after Hitler came into power, Germany became a dictatorship, and the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”.
One such camp was Hohnstein. Established in the Hohnstein castle, the camp was in service from the 14th of March 1933 to August 1934. The prisoners, mainly communists, were forced to dig in the nearby stone quarry. Many of them were killed by the SA or the SS guards or committed suicide. In 1934 Egon Zill got married.
His wife had been a member of various National Socialist organizations since the mid-1920s and the marriage produced three children. From the 12th of October 1934, Zill headed the guards at the Lichtenburg concentration camp. Housed in a Renaissance castle, Lichtenburg was among the first concentration camps to be built by the Nazis and was operated by the SS from 1933 to 1939.
From 1937 to 1939, it held only female prisoners. From the 1st of November 1936 to the 31st of July 1937, Egon Zill was a protective custody camp leader at the Lichtenburg camp. The camp’s commandant, Hans Helwig, left the management of the camp to Zill who was considered brutal and ruthless among the prisoners.
One of the camp’s most prominent prisoners was Armin Wegner, a German soldier and medic in World War I as well as prolific author, and a human rights activist. On the 11th of April 1933, shortly after the Nazi boycott of Jewish businesses, Wegner denounced the persecution of Jews in Germany in an open letter to Adolf Hitler.
He suggested that the persecution of the Jews was not just a question of “the fate of our Jewish brothers alone, but also the fate of Germany”, noting that he was writing the letter as a proud German who could himself trace his Prussian familial roots back to the time of the Crusades. Wegner asked Hitler what would become of Germany if it continued its persecution of Jews.
Answering his own question, Wegner declared, “There is no Fatherland without justice!” On the 19th of September 1933, Wegner was arrested by the Gestapo, who imprisoned and tortured him. He was subsequently interned in the Nazi concentration camps at Oranienburg, and Lichtenburg, among others, and after he was released in 1934, he fled to Rome, where he lived under an assumed name.
From the 1st of February 1938, Egon Zill became the commander’s adjutant in the Lichtenburg, which by then had become a women’s concentration camp. One of the camps female guards was Maria Mandl whose specialty at Lichtenburg was to strip the prisoners naked, tie them to wooden posts and beat them mercilessly until she could no longer lift her arm.
On the 15th of May 1939, Egon Zill was sent with the other Lichtenburg guards to the newly opened Ravensbrück concentration camp. Ravensbrück, opened in May 1939, was the only major women’s camp established by the Nazis. In total, some 132,000 women from all over Europe passed through the camp, including Poles, Russians, Jews, Gypsies, and others. Of that number, over 92,000 women perished.
At Ravensbrück Egon Zill held a position of commander’s adjutant. However, he was also a sexual deviant. Despite having his own wife, Zill was known for sexually harassing and brutally abusing the female prisoners. Once he even contracted a venereal disease. Zill, who due to his short stature was given the nickname “Little Zill”, remained in Ravensbrück until December 1939.
He gradually climbed up the camp hierarchy, owing these promotions to the cruelty and sadism with which he treated the prisoners. His behavior in each subsequent camp was more and more brutal. Not only did he order many crimes to be committed, he often carried them out himself. The second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
On the 1st of December 1939, Zill was deployed in Dachau concentration camp holding a position of Protective custody camp leader. Protective custody camp section oversaw the prisoner’s complex and was ruled by the infamous SS Death’s Head Units. Having received his Death’s Head unit training in Dachau, Zill was familiar with all the terrors the camp had to offer its inmates.
The SS Death’s Head Units named for the skull-and-cross-bones symbol worn on the right collar of their uniforms was established in 1934 by Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of Dachau and later inspector of concentration camps. It was an independent unit within the SS responsible for administering the Nazi concentration and extermination camps throughout Germany and later in occupied Europe.
The units were trained to conduct themselves with strict discipline and cruelty, and to view the prisoners under their guard as enemies of the state who should be destroyed if possible. They were responsible for facilitating what the Nazis called the Final Solution, known since the war as the Holocaust which was the genocide of Jews in Europe.
At Dachau, not only did Zill devise new and organized methods of torture for the prisoners but he took joy in taking part in the punishment personally, or else watching from the sidelines as the prisoners died at the hands of equally sadistic guards. Zill thrived on watching men beaten, drowned, hung, and broken until their bodies were unrecognizable masses of bone and skin.
A tag attached to their toes listed an identification number so they could be properly recorded in the record books as having died from a heart attack or some other medical ailment. On one occasion, the corpses of Soviet POWs murdered in Hebertshausen, which was a shooting range located two kilometers north of the Dachau where between 1941 and 1942, more than 4,000 Soviet prisoners were murdered, were brought to the Dachau camp crematorium.
When one of the kapos there asked Egon Zill where to store the ashes, Zill told him: “Dump the dirt of these Bolshevik swines.” Egon Zill had his dogs trained to react to the raising of his arm. On special amusement days, Zill would have a table of food placed in front of the starving prisoners who stood at attention.
If a person were to relax his body, the dogs would react automatically. As time went by and Zill became impatient, he raised his arm signaling the dogs into action. They then attacked the genital areas of the prisoners until they were dead. At this point Zill would finally leave the scene. Witnesses also testified that Zill personally tortured Soviet prisoners parading naked in front of him.
He mercilessly tortured them with a whip, and then selected victims from among them, who he then personally shot. He was also seen tying the prisoners to trees and then setting a dog on their genitals. Another common pastime for the guards at Dachau was having the Jewish prisoners sing anti-Semitic songs as they dug pits to be filled with stones, only to have the stones dug up again and used to fill other pits.
At other times, they would bind the prisoners’ hands and feet and have them crawl on the ground grunting like pigs. As the prisoners approached the pigsty, food was put out for their meal to be eaten by the pigs. The SS men stood watching as the bound prisoners fought with the pigs for the food. This type of torture was used mostly with Jews, priests, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Poles.
In the autumn of 1941, Zill selected a Soviet prisoner of war from a group because he had a lichen planus on his face. Zill personally led him to the Hebertshausen firing range for execution. The group containing the Soviet prisoner of war was initially scheduled to be executed, but was later pardoned and assigned to work in the quarries.
Zill made a selection here on his own initiative. A similar case happened in November 1940. When the work detail troops passed through the camp gate on the morning of the 18th of November, Zill pointed to two prisoners and said to Karl Kapp, who was a senior kapo in the garage construction work detail, that he did not want to see the two prisoners again that evening.
When they returned in the evening, the troop of this work detachment drove the two dead back to the camp in wheelbarrows. When Kapp reported the arrival of the two dead, Zill replied: “That’s what I call prompt execution of an order.”
In December 1941 Zill succeeded Hermann Pister as commander of the Hinzert concentration camp which remained mainly autonomous until the 21st of November 1944, when it was administratively linked to the Buchenwald concentration camp. Between 1939 and 1945, 13,600 political prisoners between the ages of 13 and 80 were imprisoned at Hinzert. Many were in transit towards larger concentration camps where most would be killed.
However, many prisoners were executed at Hinzert. Prisoners were housed in four barracks, each containing two spaces that in turn contained 26 bunk beds for the projected capacity of 208 prisoners. Later, straw mattresses were added to increase the total capacity to 560. The camp was administered, run, and guarded mainly by the SS, who, according to the Hinzert survivors, were notorious for their brutality and viciousness.
Prisoners sometimes had to stand still for hours facing the mast as punishment. The roll call area was also used as a drill and exercise area, where prisoners had to jump up and down at 4.30 am to the sound of a drum. In April 1942 Zill became the commandant of the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp which was the only concentration camp established by the Germans in the territory of pre-war France, about 31 miles southwest of Strasbourg.
Prisoners worked in nearby granite quarries, in construction projects, and in the maintenance of the camp. There were about 50 subcamps in the Natzweiler- Struthof camp system and by the fall of 1944, there were about 7,000 prisoners in the main camp and more than 20,000 in the subcamps. About 52,000 prisoners were estimated to be held there during its time of operation.
It was a labor camp, a transit camp and, as the war went on, a place of execution. Some died from the exertions of their labor and malnutrition – there were an estimated 22,000 deaths at the camp, including its network of subcamps. In mid-September 1942 Egon Zill became a commandant of the Flossenbürg concentration camp.
Flossenbürg’s original purpose was to exploit the forced labor of prisoners for the production of granite for Nazi construction projects. Until mid-1943 when the camp became a key supplier of Messerschmitt Bf 109 aircraft parts, the quarry occupied the labor of about half of the prisoner population. At Flossenbürg, the Germans created such harsh living conditions for the prisoners that they often committed suicide.
The camp’s Nazi personnel would often carry out executions, punish the prisoners with whipping, and order long and extremely tiring roll calls. As a commandant Zill expected his guards to act with the discipline of soldiers whilst also supporting the idea that camp inmates who had been indoctrinated into Nazism should be allowed to fight for Nazi Germany in return for their freedom.
Zill was replaced in April 1943 by Max Koegel after being judged ineffective as a commandant, The move followed letters of complaint to General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment Fritz Sauckel, from the villagers about the high standards of living enjoyed by camp guards and their wives in contrast to the impoverished standards in the village, as well as a culture of corruption amongst the guards.
In August 1943, Zill was transferred to the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen” which was a mountain infantry division of the Waffen-SS which from 1942 to 1945 fought a counter-insurgency campaign against communist-led Yugoslav Partisan resistance forces in occupied Yugoslavia.
Waffen-SS was an armed branch of the German Nazi Party that served alongside but was never formally part of the Wehrmacht – the German Armed Forces – during World War II. Zill later served in the 23rd Waffen Mountain Division of the SS Kama. Elements of the division fought briefly against the Soviet forces in southern Hungary in early October 1944 alongside the 31st SS Volunteer Grenadier Division.
From the point of view of his military superiors, Zill, However, did not stand the test. Assessments confirmed that he had had no basic training and that he had insufficient military and tactical skills. At the beginning of October 1944, Zill suggested placing selected concentration camp prisoners in the service of the Waffen-SS.
The suggestion was taken up by Oskar Dirlewanger, one of the most notorious perpetrators of the Nazi regime whose unit terrorized the civilians and committed unspeakable atrocities mostly in Poland and Belarus, and led to the transfer of prisoners to the Dirlewanger SS special unit.
After the war ended, Egon Zill went into hiding, changing his name to “Willi Sonntag”. However, after he put his real name on the birth certificate of his illegitimate child, Zill was exposed. On the 26th of August 1952, an arrest warrant was issued for Zill and after eight months of searching, he was arrested in Hamburg on the 24th of April 1953 and brought to a West German court.
According to the post-war investigations by the Munich public prosecutor’s office, Zill tortured numerous prisoners in Dachau and some of the prisoners died as a result of the abuse. The witnesses testified in the jury that Zill had actively called for the killing of prisoners on several occasions or had initiated the killing himself.
In 1955, a court in Munich sentenced him to the highest penalty in West Germany – life imprisonment, but after an appeal hearing, the sentence was reduced to only 15 years imprisonment resulting in Zill being released in 1970. He was 68 years old when he died on the 23rd of October 1974 in the city of Dachau, near the camp where he had once served.
There were no tears shed for Egon Zill.
