SS-Hauptscharführer Otto Moll was born on 4 March 1915 in Mecklenburg. He had years of training in horticulture and then worked in a local horticultural company as a gardener. At the age of 20 he joined the SS on 11 May 1935. Here he underwent military training and a year later he also joined the battalion orchestra because he played the flute well and passionately. 

On his return from a concert in January 1937, the truck carrying the SS musicians was involved in a traffic accident. Moll suffered a serious head trauma and lost his sight in his right eye. The accident was caused by a Jewish man named Nikolaus Nathan and this planted the seed for Moll that eventually grew into extreme hatred of Judaism. After nine months of recovery he resumed his service but now in the camp as his disability made him unfit for military work. 

In December 1939 he married his first wife and they were expecting a child. She died of sepsis almost a year after having a miscarriage. After this tragic event, Moll’s anger seemed to grow even more. 

Otto Moll was one of the most sadistic SS officers of the Third Reich. He carried out a lot of atrocities during his stay in Auschwitz, where he supervised all the crematoria and the mass graves. He was known for his ingenuity because of the large pits he invented that were dug to burn the corpses. Around these pits he had gutters dug in which the human fat was collected so that these pits burned for an average of 30 hours. Concentration camp survivors gave horrific testimonies about Moll’s actions. According to them Moll assaulted and beat prisoners of the Sonderkommando with a whip and threw live babies in front of the mother’s eyes into the mass graves in which the bodies that came from the crematoria were burned. He had also locked a prisoner in a cage with monkeys ones for eating from a bucket of kitchen waste, which mutilated the man and this lead him to committed suicide that same night. Sometimes Moll chased his dog on running inmates before tearing them to pieces. He visibly enjoyed the fear of the victims.

Otto Moll had blond-ginger hair and freckles. He was not very tall by German standards, with his length of 1.72 meters. He had a chiseled face and a glass eye*. Only the left live eye shifted when he observed. This deviaton left him with a twitch that made him blink more than usual and so a large part of his face moved along with it. Despite his one-eyed-sight Moll was a surprisingly accurate shooter. He had a big belly and a receding hairline, this made him look much older than he was. He had broad shoulders, was muscular and incredibly strong. On his own he could do work for two men and he had inexhaustible energy. He had little self-control, but he often had a contented look on his face despite his anger and hunger for destruction. 

In February 1941 Moll married for the second time, to Dora Hansen who was also a member of the Nazi Party. They lived together in the camp and had two children, a girl and a boy. 

After the evacuation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, he still led several concentration camps. Including Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and a subcamp of Dachau. Before the subcamp was liberated by American troops, Moll arrived at the main camp with a group of prisoners he had forced on a death march. Once captured by the US military, he was sentenced to death by a US military tribunal at the first trial in Dachau in December 1945. For his participation in the death marches, he was executed by hanging in Landsberg on May 28, 1946.

Sources: Les violences concentrationnaires au prisme de la cruauté (1933-1945) : le cas d’Otto Moll by Elissa Mailänder and Patrick Bruneteaux / Eyewitness Auschwitz by Filip Müller / Dentist of Auschwitz by Benjamin Jacobs / Other: Wikipedia and Youtube