August Miete

August Wilhelm Miete (born 1 November 1908 – 9 August 1987) was an SS functionary of Nazi Germany. He worked at the Grafeneck and Hadamar Euthanasia Centres, and then at Treblinka extermination camp. Miete was arrested in 1960 and tried in West Germany for participating in the mass murder of at least 300,000 people; in 1965, he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment.

SS career Miete was born in 1908 in Westerkappeln of the German Empire, the son of a miller and farmer. Miete completed elementary school before his father died in 1921. Together with his brother, Miete worked on the family farm and as a grinder in the flour mill. Miete was married and had three children.

At the beginning of 1940, Miete joined the Nazi Party, and he soon became involved in the T-4 Euthanasia Program. The local Münster agriculture chamber advised Miete about a job at Grafeneck Euthanasia Centre, and he accepted an offer to work on the farm that was attached to this killing center. From May 1940 to October 1941 he worked at Grafeneck. Miete then became more involved in the killing process at Hadamar Euthanasia Centre, where he worked as a stoker; that is, one who removed corpses from the gas chambers, broke out gold teeth, burned the bodies and performed other tasks around the gas chambers and crematoria. They were shot point blank at the edge of a burial ditch seven metres deep. Miete carried out most of these killings with his own hand, aided by his subordinate Willi Mentz nicknamed "Frankenstein" by the inmates, as well as Max Möller, the "Amerikaner". Dressed as medic, Miete "cured each one with a single pill".

Miete described his own actions in testimony:

Miete also sought out victims from other parts of the camp to be brought to the Lazaret and shot; victims whom Kurt Franz had injured with his hunting rifle or boxing gloves, prisoners who had been whipped for various "crimes" or other reasons. Miete would decide that these prisoners were too weakened from the blows sustained and no longer fit for work, so he would shoot them.