Fritz Sauckel (1894-1946)

Fritz Sauckel was born in Haßfurt in 1894 as a son to a post office clerk and a seamstress. He quit school at the age of 15 and joined the Norwegian and Swedish mercantile marine at sea.

Sauckel worked as an unskilled labourer in a ball bearing factory after the Great War, which he had spent inside a French detention centre for most of its duration. Furthermore he was active in right-wing extremist organisations, joined the anti-Semitic “Deutschvölkischer Schutz- und Trutzbund” and – in 1923 – the NSDAP. After leading local and regional branches of the NSDAP, he became “Gauleiter” (Leader of the Gau) in Thuringia in 1927. In 1932, he became a member of the first provincial government under the participation of the NSDAP as its Home Secretary.

He was appointed as “Generalbevollmächtiger für den Arbeitseinsatz“ (General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment) by Hitler in 1942. That was the name for the NS-Special Bureau  responsible for the deportation and forced labour of millions of people from all parts of Europe inside the German Reich. The so-called “Sauckel-Missions”, during which hundreds of thousands of people were forcefully deported from Eastern Europe, were part of this.

Fritz Sauckel was one of the 24 leading National Socialists charged before the International Military Tribunal (IMT) in Nuremberg. The presiding judge described Sauckel as the “biggest and most cruel slaveholder since the time of the Pharaohs”. On October 1st, 1946, Fritz Sauckel was found guilty unanimously in two out of four counts. Sentenced to death, he was hanged on October 16th, 1946.