Arthur Rödl

Arthur Rödl (13 June 1898 – 5 April 1945) was a German Standartenführer (Colonel) in the Waffen-SS and a Nazi concentration camp commandant.

Rödl was born into a Catholic family. His father worked as a messenger and his mother ran a newsstand. The stand closed when Rödl was ten, and he was told by his mother that it had shut down as she could not compete with a nearby stand run by a Jew. The incident helped to instill a sense of anti-Semitism in the young Rödl, who was involved in extreme nationalist groups from an early age. Rödl was apprenticed to a blacksmith when World War I broke out. He soon enlisted in the German Imperial Army by forging his age on his documents after initially being rejected for being only 16. He was seriously wounded at least once during the war, and was demobilized at the age of 20. He eventually worked for the post office. When it became clear that he had participated in the Beer Hall Putsch, he was dismissed by the post office.

Rödl finally began to rise through the ranks following a transfer to Buchenwald, where he was deputy to commandant Karl-Otto Koch. In that role, he was given a largely free hand to indulge his cruel side, with Koch placing no restrictions on his men's actions. An example of this occurred late on 1 January 1939, when Rödl lined up the inmates, picked five at random, and had them stripped, tied to posts, and whipped until morning, in tune with the prisoner orchestra. Wilhelm Gideon replaced him as camp commandant on 16 September 1942.

He ended his service in Ukraine as part of the occupation police, before committing suicide with a hand grenade when defeat for Nazi Germany looked inevitable.