Moll, Otto

Otto Moll (4 March 1915 – 28 May 1946), SS Hauptscharführer at the war’s end, was employed as a gardener at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp until May 1941. Then he was transferred to Auschwitz, where he served in the same role. According to his own statement during post-war interrogations, he was deployed to excavate mass graves at Auschwitz in 1942. After that, he was transferred to the Monowitz Camp in late 1942, where he remained until early 1944. He was then transferred to the Gleiwitz Subcamp, were he remained until the evacuation in January 1945.

After the war, he was arrested by U.S. forces and held in Dachau, where imprisoned defendants were systematically tortured, as the U.S. commission led by van Roden and Simpson determined later.

Charles S. Bendel testified during the British Bergen-Belsen show trial that Moll had been in charge of an inmate unit deployed at the gassing “bunkers,” where these inmates buried and later burned corpses during the summer and fall of 1942. Bendel moreover asserted that, during the deportation of Jews from Hungary between May and July 1944, Moll was put in charge of all Birkenau crematoria. These claims entered the court’s verdict, and thus became legally indisputable “facts”. An analysis of Bendel’s various claims demonstrate, however, that he lied through his teeth on multiple issues, hence is untrustworthy. Other witnesses who made similar claims about Moll are Stanisław Jankowski, Henryk Tauber, Szlama Dragon and Filip Müller. (See their respective entries for an assessment of their trustworthiness.)

Due to these unchallengeable claims, Moll was sentenced to death on 13 December 1945 after a show trial staged by the U.S. in Dachau. Before he was executed, U.S. investigators interrogated him several times, probably to get “confessions” with which they could prosecute other former German officials, who were still awaiting their trial. During those interrogations, Moll accepted the claim that he was head of the crematoria during the claimed extermination of the Jews deported from Hungary. However, whenever he was asked for any details about the crematoria and about gassings supposedly taking place in them, he displayed a striking ignorance of the most basic (claimed) features of these facilities, clearly showing that he had never set a foot into these facilities, let alone managed their operations for two months.

When asked about the operations at the so-called Birkenau bunkers, he insisted that he did not know what the interrogator was talking about. Moll did not even change his mind when the interrogator pointed out to him that he was already a dead man, and that they would let him live only as long as he was willing to talk and confess. Moll insisted on his innocence and asked to be confronted with his former boss, the former Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss.

The Americans actually made this happen. They let both men talk in the presence of an interrogator and recorded the exchange. Höss, however, had been tortured by the British so severely that his spirit had been broken. He repeated any kind of historical nonsense his captors demanded him to confirm. During the confrontation with Moll, Höss betrayed him; step by step, Höss and the U.S. interrogator tried coercing Moll into confirming all Höss was claiming about him. Moll fought valiantly and desperately, but ultimately in vain. He was hanged twelve days later.

(For more details, see Mattogno 2020b, pp. 80-104, 229-231.)