Nazi SS Officer Roland Puhr: Killer at Sachsenhausen Camp & His Reckoning
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September 1938. After the Munich Agreement forces Czechoslovakia to cede the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany, crowds of ethnic Germans welcome Adolf Hitler’s troops with flags and flowers. Among them is Roland Puhr, a Sudeten German who soon joins the SS and becomes one of the brutal perpetrators in the Nazi camp system.
Assigned to the SS-Totenkopfverbände at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Puhr rises to the rank of SS-Unterscharführer and later serves as deputy commandant. At the camp he participates in the shootings of Soviet prisoners of war and personally murders dozens of inmates. Survivors describe his extreme brutality, including the savage beating that led to the death of Austrian prosecutor Karl Tuppy.
Puhr later serves with SS construction brigades and becomes the first commandant of Lager Sylt in the Channel Islands, where Jewish forced labourers are used to build German fortifications.
After the war he hides under forged papers in East Germany, but in 1963 he is exposed, arrested, and tried for war crimes. Convicted of murders and brutal mistreatment of prisoners at Sachsenhausen, Roland Puhr finally faces justice.
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