Erich Bauer

Erich Bauer (26 March 1900 – 4 February 1980), sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", was a low-level commander in the Schutzstaffel (SS) of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator. He participated in Action T4 program and later in Operation Reinhard, when he was a gas chamber operator at Sobibór extermination camp. In 1950 he was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment.

Biography Erich Bauer was born in Berlin on 26 March 1900. He served as a soldier in World War I and was captured as a prisoner of war by the French.

After returning to Germany, Bauer finally found work as a tram conductor. In 1933, he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and Sturmabteilung (SA).

Action T4 In 1940, Bauer was assigned to the T4 Euthanasia Program, in which physically and mentally disabled people in institutions were killed by gassing and lethal injection. In the beginning, he worked as a driver, sometimes collecting and transporting people from hospitals or homes, but he was quickly promoted. Erich Bauer testified to one of his first mass murders:

Sobibór In early 1942, Bauer was transferred to the office of Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, Poland. Bauer was given an SS uniform and promoted to the rank of Oberscharfuhrer (Staff Sergeant). In April 1942, he was dispatched to the Sobibór death camp. He worked there until the camp's liquidation in December 1943, following a revolt by prisoners in October 1943. After the war, he was referred to by survivors as the Gasmeister ("Gas Master"). He was described as a short, stocky man, a known drinker who regularly overindulged. He kept a private bar in his room. While other SS guards were neatly dressed, Bauer was different: he was always filthy and unkempt, with a stench of alcohol and chlorine emanating from him. In his room, he had a photograph on the wall of himself and a photo of all of his family with the Führer. It reportedly took the victims up to half an hour to die, and the SS kept a flock of geese to drown out the screams of those who were dying.

On 14 October 1943, the day of the Sobibór uprising, Bauer unexpectedly drove out to Chełm for supplies. The resistance almost postponed the uprising since Bauer was at the top of the "death list" of SS guards to be assassinated prior to the escape that was created by the leader of the revolt, Alexander Pechersky. The revolt had to start earlier than planned because Bauer had returned earlier from Chełm than expected. When he discovered that SS-Oberscharführer Rudolf Beckmann was dead, Bauer started shooting at the two Jewish prisoners unloading his truck. The sound of the gunfire prompted Pechersky to begin the revolt early.

After the war At the end of the war, Bauer was arrested in Austria by the Americans and confined to a prisoner of war camp until 1946. Shortly afterward, he returned to Berlin, where he found employment as a laborer cleaning up debris from the war. When Raab confronted Bauer at the fair, the former SS man reportedly said, "How is it that you are still alive?" Since capital punishment had been abolished in West Germany by that point, Bauer's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. He served 21 years in Alt-Moabit Prison in Berlin, before being transferred to Tegel Prison. During his imprisonment, he admitted to his participation in mass murder at Sobibór and occasionally testified against former SS colleagues, such as at the Sobibor trial. Bauer died in 1980 in Tegel Prison.