On 27 January 1945, the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz, exposing the full scale of Nazi industrialized murder. More than 1.3 million people were deported there — at least 1.1 million were killed.

Among the perpetrators was Gerhard Palitzsch, one of the camp’s most feared SS men. A former guard from Sachsenhausen, he helped shape the early brutality of Auschwitz and became notorious for executions at the so-called “Black Wall.” He participated in the first experimental gassings with Zyklon B and personally carried out thousands of shootings.

Survivors described a man who boasted of killing without hesitation — a figure who embodied the cruelty of the camp system built under Adolf Hitler. Even Rudolf Höss, Auschwitz’s commandant, later called him one of the most ruthless men he had ever known.

From the selections on the ramp to executions at the Death Wall, this is the story of one of Auschwitz’s most brutal executioners — and how, in the chaos of the collapsing Third Reich, his own fate finally caught up with him.