The courtroom in Kraków fell silent as the presiding judge began to read the verdicts. It was December 22, 1947, and the men standing before the tribunal had once formed the staff of Auschwitz, the deadliest of all German Nazi concentration camps. After a month of gruesome testimony, the sentences came down one after another. Twenty-three of the forty-one defendants were condemned to death by hanging.

Among them stood Hans Aumeier, the former deputy commandant of Auschwitz, a man whose name had become synonymous with the cruelty he had administered inside the camp’s walls. Hans Aumeier was born on August 20, 1906, in Amberg, a town that was then part of the German Empire. Like his father, he found work in rifle factories, moving between jobs over the years, though periods of unemployment were frequent. To make ends meet, he took on summer work, and like many of his fellow Nazis, he saw in the rising National Socialist movement an answer to his stalled and unsuccessful career.

In 1929 he joined the Nazi Party. That same year he became one of the earliest members of the SS, carrying identification number 2,700, and in Munich he soon found himself attached to the staff of Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS. It was a position that would set him on a path toward some of the darkest crimes of the Second World War. Before he ever set foot in Auschwitz, Aumeier had already learned his trade in the camp system.

He served at Dachau, Esterwegen, and Buchenwald, each one a school of terror where he developed his specialties: torture, beatings, and executions. He handed the kapos and guards far-reaching power over the prisoners, and under his influence the level of terror in the camps rose sharply. But it was in Auschwitz that Aumeier would commit his worst crimes. It was Aumeier who introduced the punitive standing cells in the notorious Block 11.

These were not ordinary prison cells. Inside, the space was so cramped that a prisoner could only stand upright, unable to sit, lie down, or move. The only entrance was a small opening at floor level, and the sole source of air was a hole measuring five by five centimeters. Prisoners were locked into these standing cells every night, sometimes for weeks at a time, and every morning they were taken out and forced to go to work.

The exhaustion and suffocation were part of the punishment, slow and methodical. Aumeier also shared responsibility for mass shootings. On March 19, 1942, on his order, 144 women were shot at the execution wall in the courtyard between Blocks 10 and 11. The wall, known as the Black Wall, was where prisoners were lined up and executed by firing squad.

Aumeier was present again on May 27, 1942, when 168 prisoners were shot in the same manner. And after a failed uprising attempt in June 1942, he took part in the murder of the uprising’s survivors, making sure that none of those who had resisted would live to tell the story. To the prisoners of Auschwitz, Aumeier was a constant and dreaded presence. He was known for beating and kicking them for the slightest fault.

A prisoner who failed to march to the pace and rhythm of the camp orchestra could expect to feel his fists or boots. He drank heavily, and when he was drunk, he was known to shoot prisoners for no reason at all. His violence was unpredictable, and that made it worse. His crimes were not limited to physical brutality and mass executions.

Aumeier was active in the selections for the gas chambers, choosing which prisoners would be sent to their deaths. And after the victims had been murdered, he stole their belongings, including gold. The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, eventually discovered what Aumeier was doing. As punishment, Höss did not send him to a court-martial.

Instead, in mid-August 1943, he transferred Aumeier to the Vaivara concentration camp in Estonia, where Aumeier became the camp’s commandant. At Vaivara, Aumeier continued the same pattern of murder. Under his supervision, the camp’s personnel carried out selections of inmates who were too old or too sick to work. Men, women, and children were taken into the nearby woods and shot dead.

The killings were carried out methodically, the victims lined up and executed where no one could see. On January 22, 1945, as the war was collapsing around Germany, Aumeier took over the Grini concentration camp near Oslo in Nazi-occupied Norway. But by then, the end of the Second World War was approaching, and Aumeier’s behavior changed. He knew that he would eventually have to face justice for the atrocities he had committed, and so he began to court favor.

He started negotiations with the Norwegian Red Cross and even allowed them to enter the camp. On May 7, 1945, he opened the camp and let the prisoners go free. It was a calculated gesture, an attempt to build a defense for himself, but it would not save him. His capture came quickly.

Thanks to MI6, the British secret intelligence service, he was seized while still in his SS uniform by British forces on June 11, 1945. The man who had terrorized prisoners across three countries was now a prisoner himself. In 1946, Aumeier was extradited to Poland, where he was to stand trial at the Auschwitz trial that began in November 1947. The proceedings lasted a month, and the testimony was gruesome.

Survivors and witnesses recounted the beatings, the shootings, the selections, and the daily terror that had defined life in the camp. Aumeier, for his part, maintained his innocence. He claimed he knew nothing about the gas chambers. He insisted he had never killed anyone.

And he made a dramatic statement before the tribunal: if he was found guilty and sentenced to death, he said, he would die as a scapegoat for Germany. It was a plea that found no sympathy. The evidence against him was overwhelming, and on December 22, 1947, the tribunal sentenced Hans Aumeier to death by hanging. He was forty-one years old.

The sentence was carried out on January 28, 1948. There were no tears shed for Hans Aumeier. The man who had introduced the standing cells of Block 11, who had ordered the shootings of hundreds of prisoners, who had stolen gold from the dead and shot drunks for sport, was hanged.

The justice that had eluded his victims during their lives had finally caught up with him.