In January 1945, the white snow of Sandhofen district was stained with blood. At an old schoolhouse, Polish prisoner Marian Krainsky was coldly executed under allegations of production sabotage. As the gun smoke cleared before the eyes of five high-ranking representatives from the Daimler-Benz Corporation, the man casually holstering his pistol was none other than Heinrich Wicker.
At the age of 23, this SS second lieutenant was turning human lives into lubrication for the Nazi war machine. He arrogantly used an execution as a demonstration display for his partners, believing the reign of violence backing him was immortal. But that illusion of power shattered just 3 months later. On April 28th, 1945, as American tank tracks crushed the Munich defense line, the cowardly former commandant of Dachau fled.
Thrusting Wicker into the command seat of a living hell on the verge of collapse. The following day, when the US 45th Infantry Division marched in, what welcomed them was not an honorable surrender agreement, but a direct blow to the senses. A dense stench of death mixed with human excrement, forcing even the most battle-hardened soldiers to their knees in vomit.
Right at the entrance, a ghost train of over 30 cars baked under the sun, piled high like mountains of naked, emaciated corpses stacked on top of each other like firewood. Inside, tens of thousands of walking skeletons crawled out from the dark barracks, clinging to life amidst typhus epidemics and starvation.
Facing the gun barrels of the liberators, Wicker callously denied all guilt on the pretext of having been in office for less than 2 days. But justice that day did not wait for a tribunal. Fury erupted. .30 caliber machine guns wiped out the SS guards in half a minute of relentless gunfire and the vengeful shovels of the prisoners stood ready to smash the faces of their former tormentors.
It was precisely within that chaotic crossfire and the screams of revenge that his fate was abruptly twisted into a mysterious fog of history. On the thin line of judgment day at Dachau, could the young lieutenant use lies to successfully escape or did he pay a catastrophic price on the spot with his own blood? That answer still remains in the dark basement of this place waiting to be uncovered in the final minutes.
But before determining the fate of a monster in an SS uniform, we are forced to confront another shocking question. What ruthless formula did Hitler’s indoctrination machine use to transform a 12-year-old boy with a gentle dream of becoming a merchant into a cold-blooded, unfeeling machine a decade later? And when facing such pure evil, will the line between executing justice and the primal brutality within us be erased? Let us travel back in time to dissect the deeply haunting
journey of depravity of Heinrich Wickel, the last commander of Dachau hell. The merchant boy and the contract to sell his soul to Hitler. To decode how an ordinary human transformed into an unfeeling executioner, history must reopen the very first pages of Heinrich Wickel’s life.
On June 30th, 1921, he was born in the small village of Gausbach within the Weimar Republic, a turbulent transitional government between the collapse of the Imperial era in 1918 and the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933. Coming from an ordinary family with a salesman father, Wickel spent a peaceful childhood in the Mühlburg district of Karlsruhe.
After graduating from elementary school, he attended a commercial school for 2 years. The only dream of the teenage Heinrich at that time was simply to become a merchant, follow the family business, and live a quiet life. But that illusion of peace was smashed. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, killing off the Republic and opening the dark dictatorial era of the Third Reich.
>> >> This turning point struck exactly in the year Wicker turned 12, a psychologically unformed age that was easily manipulated by extremist doctrines. Right in 1933, he joined the Hitler Youth under the leadership of Baldur von Schirach. This was no ordinary scouting club, but the supreme tool of the regime designed to impose a toxic ideology, control thinking, and pull the strings for every future action of an entire young generation.
The absolute grip of this dogmatic machine was proven by shocking data. In January 1933, the Hitler Youth had only about 100,000 members, but by the end of the year, this figure skyrocketed to over 2 million people. Accompanying this expansion was a ruthless condition of discrimination.
Jews were strictly forbidden from participating. In essence, this paramilitary organization possessed a strict military structure, hierarchical from local to national levels. The sole objective of the system was to eliminate innocence, forging both body and mind with iron discipline to train young boys into a resilient fighting force for total war.
Heinrich Wicker began his journey of depravity >> >> from this very foundry. Entering the SS system >> >> and the history of Dachau camp, in 1936 at the age of 15, Heinrich Wicker took his first step into the Nazi power structure by becoming a leader in the Jungvolk. In this position, he directly enforced iron discipline, indoctrinating the minds of children aged 10 to 13 with extremist ideology.
The coldness forged day by day helped him catch the eye of high-ranking recruiters. In 1937, having just turned 16, Wicker officially joined the SS, >> >> Adolf Hitler’s loyal bodyguard and notorious instrument of purgation. He was assigned directly to the first SS Death’s Head Division at Dachau, undergoing rigorous military training and directly putting on the prison guard uniform, joining the system of human incarceration.
Wicker’s field environment was the most brutal cradle of the Third Reich. Established in March 1933 on the outskirts of Munich, Dachau was the first regular concentration camp of Nazi Germany, receiving its first train of prisoners on March 22nd, 1933. By October of the same year, a cruel turning point took shape when Commandant Theodor Eicke introduced a grim set of internal regulations.
Eicke legalized corporal punishment, starvation, and forced labor, allowing guards to severely abuse detainees for the slightest offenses. Eicke’s goal was to turn Dachau into a model camp to replicate across the entire territory, building a school of violence to eradicate humanity, molding the empathy of SS guards into ruthlessness before distributing them across Europe.
During its first year of operation, the facility was designed with a capacity of 5,000 people, directly targeting the immediate political opponents of the Nazi regime, including German communists, social democrats, and members of free trade unions. However, by the time Wicker began his guard duties, the scale of oppression expanded relentlessly and fiercely.
The SS guard system, including Wicker, directly used force to manage and subdue a series of new victim groups: Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, Sinti, homosexuals, repeat offenders, and even citizens imprisoned under the label of asocials because they did not have jobs. Here, Heinrich Wicker accumulated prison guard experience, directly witnessing and participating in a chain of actions that stripped away human dignity to prepare for his next stage of promotion in his career of crime.
The combat journey and the process of self-upgrading. The ruthlessness nurtured at Dachau >> >> immediately turned Heinrich Wicker into an armed instrument when the gears of war erupted. On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany attacked Poland, and he was present from the very first rounds of gunfire in the uniform of the Death’s Head Division.
Continuing along the chain of tank tracks sweeping westward, on May 10th, 1940, Wicker directly participated in the campaign to capture France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands. By 1941, he marched to the Eastern Front, plunging into the total conflict aimed at the Soviet Union. On the Soviet-German battlefield, his ladder of promotion was temporarily broken.
In 1942, at the Battle of Demyansk, Wicker was struck by gunfire and severely wounded. This event left him classified as no longer physically fit to stay at the front lines, forcing his entire career to shift in a more sinister direction in the rear. Unable to directly engage in combat at the front, Wicker’s extremist mindset was utilized by Nazi Germany >> >> to train new instruments of enforcement.
At the beginning of 1943, he joined the force specialized in indoctrination and technical training for volunteers from occupied territories in Graz, Austria. Recognizing his absolute fanaticism, the high command decided to induct him into the core officer ranks. From August to November 1943, Wicker was sent to the SS Junker School at Bad Tölz, the notorious leadership foundry built by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
The philosophy at the SS Junker School was completely separate from regular military academies like West Point in the United States, which combine academic knowledge with combat instruction. At Bad Tölz, Himmler completely eliminated humanistic science to focus maximally on the Nazi personality training process.
The syllabus was designed to nail into the cadets’ minds the ideology of racial superiority, coldness before human life, resilience, and blind loyalty. The ultimate goal of this training forge was to transform candidates into flexible tools ready to carry out any heavy-handed coercive measures assigned to them, >> >> whether acting as oppressive police, fighting soldiers, or running the incarceration system.
Heinrich Wicker graduated from this academy with a cold head and a heart completely devoid of humanity. The path of crimes and the death marches. In November 1943, >> >> immediately after leaving the Bad Tölz training facility with the rank of Oberscharführer, or staff sergeant, Heinrich Wicker promptly joined the SS Main Economic and Administrative Office, the headquarters coordinating the forced labor network and the concentration camp system.
His diligence within the machine of violence helped him advance rapidly at the expense of his victims’ suffering. Exactly on January 30th, 1944, at the age of 22, Wicker received his promotion to Untersturmführer, or second lieutenant. Armed with the privileges of his commission, he officially held the power of life and death over sub camp facilities.
In mid-1944, he took over the leadership of the Bruttig-Triesch camp within the Natzweiler-Struthof system until its evacuation on September 15th, 1944. By December 1944, Wicker’s ladder of power reached its peak when he became the commandant of the Mannheim-Sandhofen subcamp, a notorious facility operating until March 1945 in Mannheim, Germany.
Here, he used brute force to imprison approximately 1,000 European political prisoners, crowding them into the suffocating spaces of a local schoolhouse converted into a forced labor workshop. Under Wicker’s ruthless driven oversight, the victims were worked to exhaustion at industrial complexes, including the Daimler-Benz corporation, to supply aircraft parts for the Nazi war machine.
The internment regime at Mannheim-Sandhofen was a naked tragedy. He slashed rations to drive human beings into starvation, maintained wretched sanitary conditions that spread disease, and condoned violent measures that caused many to collapse right on the factory floor. Wicker’s symbolic act of brutality was cemented in January 1945.
To punish an alleged production sabotage, he directly approved and organized a public execution detail for a Polish prisoner from Warsaw named Marian Krainski. Aiming for collective deterrence and an exhibition of absolute power, the arrogant 23-year-old lieutenant sent personal invitations to five high-ranking representatives of the Daimler-Benz corporation to come directly to the execution site >> >> to witness this deprivation of life against the cold snow.
As the Allies closed in during the final stages of the war from 1944 to 1945, Wicker transitioned into the role of an executioner, commanding the brutal forced evacuations of Nazi Germany, otherwise known as the death marches. The goal of this campaign was to herd the victims deep into German territory >> >> to conceal systemic crimes and retain the forced labor supply.
Wicker and his guards forced emaciated bodies to march hundreds of kilometers through the harsh winter without providing provisions or shelter. Anyone who failed to keep up with the pace was liquidated on the spot by guards. Tens of thousands perished on the frozen paths from physical exhaustion or execution.
In March 1945 alone, a forced march led by Heinrich Wicker himself resulted in the deaths of exactly 170 prisoners >> >> who were either murdered or dropped dead along the way. The blood-soaked fury of hell. April 28th, 1945. Under the suffocating pressure from the armored pincers of the American military, the former Dachau commandant, Martin Gottfried Weiss, fled in panic, leaving behind a system on the verge of collapse.
Heinrich Wicker was unexpectedly thrust into the commandant’s seat amidst the chaos of the regime’s final days. Realizing the situation was hopeless, the 23-year-old lieutenant sought a path to surrender through Victor Maurer, a delegate of the International Committee of the Red Cross. Maurer ultimately succeeded in convincing the young officer not to desert or continue forcing the prisoners into evacuation because such enforcement would only drive tens of thousands of lives into certain death.
On April 29th, 1945, >> >> Wicker signed the surrender document, handing over the entirety of Dachau hell >> >> to General Henning Linden of the 42nd Infantry Division, United States 7th Army. Despite having gone through a hundred life and death battles and enduring thousands of casualties, the American soldiers were still completely stunned by the scene exposed behind the gates.
The first thing to [ __ ] the liberating force was a direct blow to the senses. The stench of death rising thickly from a ghost train of about 40 cars parked right at the entrance, its inside packed with thousands of decomposing bodies. When questioned by General Linden about this nameless train, Wicker callously denied all responsibility using the pretext of having held the position for less than 48 hours to wipe away any knowledge of the cycle of atrocities.
Yet, behind the brick walls, >> >> lies were utterly powerless against naked reality. American soldiers discovered countless naked corpses piled high like firewood lying next to 30,000 human beings in the form of walking skeletons clinging to life amidst epidemics. At that moment, >> >> the US military understood they were not just confronting a military opponent, but were standing before pure evil.
Justice that day refused to wait for a tribunal. A fury erupted when all captured SS personnel and guards were marched to a coal yard along the guard tower. Lieutenant Wolf shouted the command, “Let them have it.” The liberating force immediately opened fire simultaneously with rifles, pistols, and .30 caliber machine guns.
After 30 seconds of relentless gunfire, the entire line of German guards collapsed dead on the spot. The tragedy of retribution did not stop there. A wave of uprising from the surviving prisoners >> >> surged through the barbed wire fence like a raging tide. According to the account of witness Walenty Lenarcic, the purge broke out when an SS guard used his elbow to knock a victim down to clear an escape path.
Immediately, the enraged crowd rushed in to overpower and subdue the SS guards, camp administrators, and informers with sticks, working shovels, and fists. The deaths executing justice were incredibly horrific. One American soldier witnessed a prisoner repeatedly stomping on a former ruler’s face until his features were completely deformed.
In another corner of the camp, two prisoners used working tools to finish off a German guard right before the implicit permission and turned blind eye of Lieutenant Bill Walsh. It is estimated that about 30 to 50 SS guards paid with their lives during the terrifying day of judgment at Dachau.
Karma consumes the commandant. The fury at the coal yard in the Dachau barracks was precisely where the fateful sentence was nailed into the destiny of Heinrich Wickert. At the age of 23, the final commandant received no privilege or clemency. He endured a catastrophic end identical to the soldiers under his command.
To this day, historical records still contain two contradictory yet raw theories regarding how his life was taken. The first line of thought asserts that Wickert was escorted to a wall corner by American soldiers and faced summary execution on the spot without trial. Meanwhile, the second source of files records a more violent scenario where he was swarmed by the crowd enduring continuous violence until he stopped breathing.
Regardless of whether Heinrich Wickert fell under the gun barrels of the liberators or the retribution of his victims, the ultimate irony only unfolded after he drew his last breath. Witnesses recorded that the young lieutenant’s body was dragged across the ground and thrown straight inside the camp’s raging crematorium.
His form was consumed by fire while lying on top of the naked gaunt corpses of the very human beings that the Nazi system of violence had murdered beforehand. This was a ruthless karmic loop determining the life of the last commander right at the heart of the first regular concentration camp built by the fascist regime.
Just like the cold judgment that entered history, there were no tears shed for Heinrich Vicker. The in-depth file on the final chapter of Dachau hell and the journey of depravity of Heinrich Vicker is closed here. Thank you, viewers, for taking the time to watch. Your companionship is our greatest motivation to continue excavating the hidden corners buried beneath the ruins of the Second World War.
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