On the fifteenth of April, 1945, the men of the British Eleventh Armoured Division rolled through the gates of a place they could not have imagined. Bergen-Belsen was not a battlefield in any conventional sense, but the scene that greeted them was worse than any fighting they had seen. Thousands of corpses lay unburied across the grounds, tangled and rotting in the open air. Among them, roughly sixty thousand prisoners were still alive, though barely.

They were skeletal, starving, and ravaged by typhus and tuberculosis that had swept through the camp unchecked. The official ration for a prisoner was half a litre of coffee in the morning and half a litre of soup for lunch and dinner. Bread was issued sometimes, but never more than twice a week, and in the final period of their captivity it stopped altogether. By the time the British arrived, there was no bread left at all.

The guards who had overseen this horror had not managed to flee in time. The arrival of the British forces had been sudden enough to trap many of them inside the camp, and now the Allied soldiers began rounding up the Nazi men and women responsible for what they found there. One of those guards was a man named Karl Francioh. He had been born on the fifth of October, 1912, in the town of Riesen, in the Brandenburg region of Germany.

He was a married man, the father of four children. Before the war, he had worked as a coal miner, a hard and ordinary trade. When the war came, he served as a cook in the Wehrmacht, the armed forces of the Third Reich. Then, on the seventeenth of April, 1940, he made a choice that would define the rest of his life: he joined the SS.

From there, he was assigned to kitchen work at a place referred to as “Possiet,” serving as an SS element. His next posting was Auschwitz, where he continued his work. But the worst of his crimes were committed at Bergen-Belsen, where he arrived in March of 1945 to take up his duties as a cook. In his own testimony, Francioh would later claim that all the prisoners wanted to work in the kitchen because it was good work.

He failed to mention that those prisoners were forced to labour at least eighteen hours a day. He also failed to mention what kind of cook he truly was. Karl Francioh was exceptionally cruel. On several occasions, he was seen shooting starving prisoners simply for trying to take potato peelings.

He took pleasure in beating prisoners with a rubber hose and showed them no mercy whatsoever. One female prisoner testified that while she was carrying a container to the kitchen with her friend, Francioh came out and shot the friend dead on the spot, without any reason at all. On another occasion, he shot a pregnant woman in the arm without pity. She died as a result of the wound.

His reign of terror did not end when the British arrived. On the very day that the British forces reached the camp, Francioh saw a female prisoner bend down to pick up some potato peelings. He shot her immediately. Even after the British army was present in the camp, he continued his killing, and he would be accused of shooting around fifty prisoners in total.

When the British took him into custody, he was held alongside other German Nazi criminals such as Wilhelm Dörr and Dr. Fritz Klein. These men, the ones responsible for the conditions at Bergen-Belsen, were forced to help bury the thousands of corpses that lay scattered throughout the camp in mass graves. It was grim, necessary work, and it was carried out under the eyes of the soldiers who had liberated the living.

Karl Francioh was put on trial at the Belsen trials, formally known as the Belsen Trial, which convened before a British military court. He was charged with atrocities committed during his time at Bergen-Belsen. Like his fellow Nazis, he pleaded not guilty and denied everything he was accused of. He even went so far as to claim that he had not escaped with his wife when he had the chance because of his love for the prisoners.

His lies did not help him. The court found him guilty and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was thirty-three years old when the British executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, carried out the sentence on the thirteenth of December, 1945.

No tears were shed for Karl Francioh.