Brutal & Sexual Deviant SS Officer Who Shot 25,000 Jews at Auschwitz: Palitzsch

Brutal & Sexual Deviant SS Officer Who Shot 25,000 Jews at Auschwitz: Palitzsch

December 7th, 1944.

Somewhere near Budapest, Hungary, a German soldier stumbles through the frozen rubble of a bombedout street.

Soviet artillery hammers the city.

Buildings collapse.

This soldier wears no SS insignia anymore.

No badges, no rank.

He’s been stripped of everything that once made him powerful.

6 months ago, this man walked through Awitz like a god, deciding who lived and who died with a snap of his fingers.

He personally murdered thousands.

He shot babies in their mother’s arms.

He hunted children for sport.

And he did something else.

Something that even the SS, an organization built on systematic genocide, found unforgivable.

A bullet tears through his chest.

He falls.

Within hours, he’ll be buried in an unmarked grave at a crossroads.

in his body later moved to a war cemetery where he rots anonymously among soldiers who actually fought honorably.

His name was Ghard Pelitz and what he did at Awitz will shock you more than the fact that his own organization destroyed him for it.

June 17th, 1913.

A baby boy is born in Grosopitz, a tiny village near Dresdon in Saxony, Germany.

His parents name him Ghard Arno Max Pal.

They’re farmers, estate owners in the rural Saxon countryside.

Picture postcard Germany.

Rolling hills, medieval towns.

The kind of place where everyone knows everyone, where traditions run deep and life moves slowly.

Nothing about Ghard’s childhood suggests what’s coming.

He attends the local folk shula, the elementary school.

He learns farming from his father.

He’s training to become a landward, a qualified farmer.

By all accounts, he’s ordinary, just another German farm boy in the 1920s.

But Germany in the 1920 20s and early 30s is anything but ordinary.

The country is drowning in the aftermath of World War I.

The VHimar Republic collapses under economic disaster.

Hyperinflation wipes out savings overnight.

Rural communities like Grosopitz suffer terribly.

Unemployment, hunger, desperation.

And into this chaos comes a promise, a movement that claims it can restore German greatness.

In 1931 at age 18, Ghard Palitch joins the Nazi party.

Same year, he joins the SS.

He’s one of the early believers signing up before Hitler even takes power.

Think about that.

S an 18-year-old farm boy from rural Saxony looks at the world around him and chooses the Nazis.

Not out of coercion, not because he has to.

He volunteers.

He sees something in the movement that speaks to him.

Well, what exactly? We’ll never know.

Maybe it’s the promise of order in chaos.

Maybe it’s the appeal of wearing a uniform, of being part of something bigger.

Or maybe there’s something darker already lurking inside him.

Something that recognizes an opportunity.

For the next few years, Pelich continues farming while serving in the SS part-time.

But in 1933, everything changes.

Hitler becomes chancellor.

The Nazis seize total power.

And the concentration camp system begins.

Palich now 20 years old leaves the farm behind and enters full-time SS service.

His first assignment Likenberg concentration camp then Saxenberg then Bukinvald by 1936 he’s at Saxenhausen where he rises to Block Furer head of a prisoner’s barracks.

From 1938 to 1940 he serves at Noing as second in command of the prisoner’s work details.

Just pay attention to this progression.

This isn’t someone who stumbles into camp work.

This is someone who thrives in it.

Someone who gets promoted.

Someone the SS leadership recognizes as effective.

Effective at what? At controlling prisoners through terror.

At breaking human beings, at inflicting punishment without hesitation or mercy.

In seven years, Ghard Palitch transforms from a farm boy into a camp professional.

He learns the machinery of oppression from the inside.

And then in May 1940, he gets the assignment that will define him forever.

May 20th, 1940.

A train arrives at a new camp being established in occupied Poland.

The place is called Avitz.

It’s barely more than abandoned Polish army barracks when Palace arrives.

He’s 26 years old and he’s coming from Saxenhausen with a special assignment.

Um, he’s bringing 30 German prisoners with him.

Green triangle prisoners, criminals, murderers, thieves, rapists, men the Nazis consider racially acceptable but socially criminal.

These men will become functions heftling prisoner functionaries.

They’ll run the internal camp administration and they’ll be just as brutal as the SS.

Pelitz has hand selected them.

Think about what that means.

He’s chosen 30 of the most vicious criminals he could find.

Men who will do anything to maintain their privileged positions.

Men who will terrorize other prisoners without hesitation.

This is deliberate.

This is strategy.

And it tells you everything about how Pitish thinks.

He understands that control requires brutality at every level.

He’s appointed the first report furer of Awitz.

Report leader, the duty officer in charge of roll call or prisoner counts, camp reports.

It sounds administrative.

It’s not.

The rapport furer has immense power over prisoner life.

He decides punishments.

He oversees executions.

He’s the face of SS terror that prisoners see every single day.

And from day one, Gard Palitch makes sure they understand exactly what kind of man he is.

Witnesses later testify that Pelich practiced what they call extensive terror.

Not just following orders, not just maintaining discipline, extensive terror.

He beats prisoners personally.

He invents punishments.

He makes examples.

The camp is being built, expanded, transformed from a detention facility for Polish political prisoners into something far worse.

And Pelich is there for all of it, helping shape the system that will eventually murder over a million people.

But there’s one place where Pelitz truly makes his mark.

One location that becomes synonymous with his name.

Block 11.

Picture a brick building in the main Awitz camp, block 11.

From the outside, it looks like all the other prisoner barracks.

But in Hod, it’s different.

It’s isolated from the rest of the camp.

It’s the Gestapo prison, the punishment block, the place where prisoners are sent to be broken or killed.

The ground floor has prison cells.

The basement has standing cells, cramped spaces so small prisoners can’t sit or lie down, designed for slow torture.

And in the courtyard between block 10 and block 11, there’s a wall.

They call it the black wall, the death wall.

It’s where prisoners are executed.

The process is methodical.

Prisoners selected for execution are brought to block 11.

They’re told to undress.

They’re led into the courtyard naked and shivering.

They’re lined up against the wall.

And then Gard Palage walks up behind them with a pistol, presses it to the back of their head, and pulls the trigger.

One after another, methodical, efficient, no emotion, just execution.

The prisoner, Bolaw’s Boosezian, testified about one execution he witnessed.

A family of five is brought out.

A man, his wife, their three children.

One baby, two older kids.

The father holds the hand of one child on his left.

The other child stands between the parents.

The mother clutches the baby to her chest and police shoots the baby first.

right there in the mother’s arms.

The baby’s head explodes.

Blood sprays across the mother’s chest.

Then he shoots the middle child.

The parents don’t move.

They stand like statues, paralyzed by horror.

Well, the oldest child, maybe eight or nine, realizes what’s happening.

The kid tries to run.

Palitz grabs him, throws him to the ground, steps on his back with his boot, and shoots him in the base of the skull.

Then the mother, then the father.

This isn’t war.

This isn’t combat.

This is murder.

Calculated cold-blooded murder.

And it’s just one execution among thousands.

Palitch later boasts to a fellow SS member that he’s personally shot 25,000 people in the back of the head.

25,000.

Even if he’s exaggerating, even if the real number is half that, it’s still an unfathomable amount of killing.

We’re talking about one man with one pistol executing thousands of human beings at point blank range.

Men, women, children, Jews, Poles, Soviet PS, resistance members, anyone the camp administration decides deserves death.

Uh, think about the psychology required to do that.

Most soldiers who kill in combat never see their enemy’s face.

They shoot from a distance.

Artillery crews fire at coordinates on a map.

Pilots drop bombs from 30,000 ft.

their psychological distance.

But Pelitz stands inches away from his victims.

He sees their faces.

He hears them beg, cry, pray.

He smells their fear.

And then he pulls the trigger over and over and over.

But wait, it gets worse.

So much worse.

In the report written by we told Pelleki, the Polish resistance fighter who voluntarily entered Awitz to gather intelligence, there’s a passage about Pelich that’s almost too horrific to believe.

Pleki writes that in Block 11, Pelich would hunt children, hunt them like animals.

He would tell girls to run around the closed courtyard and he would shoot at them, killing them like rabbits.

He would snatch a child from its mother’s embrace and smash its little head against a wall or a stone.

Read that again.

Let it sink in.

This isn’t propaganda.

This isn’t exaggeration.

This is eyewitness testimony from a decorated Polish officer who was there.

Pulitz turned child murder into sport, into entertainment.

A true degenerate, Pleki wrote.

Tears and death followed him wherever he went.

September 3rd, 1941.

An experiment is about to take place in the basement of Block 11.

The Nazis have been using mobile gas vans to murder Jews and others in occupied territories, but it’s inefficient.

They’re looking for a better method.

Someone suggests trying Cyclon B, a pesticide used to fumigate the camp.

On September 3rd, is 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 256 Polish prisoners are crammed into the basement cells of Block 11.

The doors are sealed.

SS men wearing gas masks drop zlon B pellets through openings in the ceiling.

The pellets release hydrogen cyanide gas.

The prisoners choke, convulse, die.

Ghard Pellet participates in this first tenative gassing.

He’s there when they seal the doors.

He’s there when they wait for the screaming to stop.

The next day, September 4th, they open the doors.

Not everyone is dead.

Some prisoners are still barely alive, gasping in the poison air.

So Pitic adds more Cyclon B, more gas until everyone is dead.

This is the beginning.

From this experiment, the Nazis will develop the gas chamber system that murders hundreds of thousands.

And Pich is there at the start.

So helping perfect on the machinery of genocide.

By 1942, Awitz is expanding rapidly.

Awitz 2 Burkanau is being constructed.

a massive death factory designed specifically for mass extermination.

Pelitzka is promoted.

He becomes report leader in the men’s camp at Burkanau.

Now he oversees an even larger operation.

He’s at the ramp when trains arrive.

He participates in selections.

Jews pour out of cattle cars.

Disoriented, terrified.

SS doctors decide who goes to the gas chambers immediately and who gets temporary reprieve as slave labor.

Pitzic is part of this machinery.

From July to August 1943, he also serves in the Zeunar logger, the gypsy family camp.

Roma families are imprisoned here.

Eventually, almost all of them will be murdered.

But while Pelatic is there, something else is happening, something that will destroy him.

Ma, he’s living in SS housing in the camp complex.

He has a wife, Louise.

They have children.

From the outside, he appears to be a normal family man.

A teenage Polish girl named Helena Quisova works in his household.

She’ll later testify that at home, Palitch was wonderful.

He loved his children madly.

He was polite to her.

She couldn’t believe this kind man was the same person prisoners called the terror of Awitz.

But Pelich isn’t kind.

He’s compartmentalized.

He can murder a family before breakfast, then come home and play with his own kids.

This is the benality of evil Hannah wrote about.

These men aren’t monsters in every aspect of their lives.

They’re capable of love and tenderness, but only for those they consider worthy.

Everyone else is subhuman.

Now, here’s where it gets complicated.

Some prisoners at Awitz aren’t passive victims.

A few in trusted positions fight back in the only ways available to them.

The Polish resistance network inside the camp has access to the infirmary.

They know that typhus is spreading through the prisoner population carried by lice.

So they collect lice infected with typhus and they put these infected lice into clothing that will be given to SS personnel.

It’s biological warfare.

Resistance from inside hell itself.

Someone targets PTO.

They give him clothing contaminated with typhus infected lice.

The plan is simple.

Infect him.

Kill him.

eliminate one of the worst murderers in the camp.

But the plan goes wrong.

Politic doesn’t contract Typhus.

His wife Louise does.

In November 1941, Luis Politicish dees from Typhus, leaving Politic a widowerower with young children.

Just imagine his rage, his grief.

Not grief for the thousands he’s murdered, but grief for one person he actually cared about.

And according to multiple sources, this is when Pitk’s behavior takes a turn toward something even the SS finds unacceptable.

Her name was Katherina Singer, though accounts differ on whether she was the woman involved or if it was another prisoner.

What’s certain is this.

After his wife’s death, Ghard Pitch began a sexual relationship with a Jewish woman prisoner.

In the upside down moral universe of the SS, this is worse than murder.

Murder of Jews is policy.

It’s encouraged.

It’s the entire point of Awitz.

But sexual relations with a Jewish woman, that’s rasen shondaanda, race defilement.

It violates Nazi racial law.

It’s an absolute taboo.

The woman Pelich was involved with was given privileges.

A separate room.

Exemption from roll call.

She rode around in vehicles.

Other prisoners feared her, called her names.

The relationship was semiopen, and people noticed.

Rumors spread through the SS garrison.

This isn’t something Pelich can hide.

The Awitz Gustapo hears about it.

But here’s the thing.

Pitic isn’t just any SS man.

He’s been at Awitz since day one.

He’s killed more people than almost anyone.

He’s valuable.

So, Commandon Rudolph Hus, himself involved in a sexual relationship with a prisoner named Eleanor Hodis, intervenes.

He tries to protect Pallet.

He has him transferred to Brun, a subc camp, hoping to make the scandal disappear.

It doesn’t work.

The SS has a judge, Gayorg Conrad Morgan, who’s been investigating corruption in the concentration camps.

Morgan is a true believer in SS ideology.

He thinks the camps are being run corruptly, that officers are enriching themselves by stealing from victims, that moral decay is setting in.

He investigates H for his affair with Hodis.

He investigates theft rings and he investigates Pitic.

Shortly after the transfer to Brun, Pit is arrested.

He’s sent back to Awitz and they lock him in block 11, the same punishment block where he murdered thousands.

Now he’s a prisoner there himself, locked in a cell facing charges of racial defilement and theft.

Think about the irony.

Pelich shot 25,000 people.

He hunted children.

He helped pioneer the gas chamber system.

None of that matters to the SS.

That’s all acceptable, expected even.

But having sex with a Jewish woman, that crosses the line.

He’s sentenced to death.

The SS sentences him to death.

His own organization.

Each the system he served faithfully for over a decade condemns him.

But then something unexpected happens.

The sentence is commuted.

Instead of execution, he’s dismissed from the SS.

In June 1944, Ghard Palace is stripped of his rank, expelled from the organization, and sent to a penal unit.

Penal units in the SS are death sentences by another name.

They’re sent to the worst combat zones as cannon fodder.

Officially, you’re still serving.

Realistically, you’re expected to die.

Pelich is assigned to the fourth SS Piti division, specifically to a penal battalion attached to the ninth company of SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment 8.

By late 1944, this unit is fighting in Hungary.

The Red Army is advancing.

Budapest is surrounded.

The battle for Budapest is one of the bloodiest of the entire war.

Soviet forces encircle the city.

Yet, German and Hungarian forces are trapped.

Its urban warfare at its most brutal.

Buildings collapse.

Artillery pounds the streets.

Casualties mount by the thousands.

December 7th, 1944.

Gard Pelletch is somewhere in or near Budapest.

He’s just another soldier now.

No power, no prestige, no prisoners to terrorize, just a man with a rifle fighting a losing battle.

A bullet finds him.

Maybe a Soviet sniper, maybe artillery shrapnel.

Maybe he’s just in the wrong place when a building collapses.

However it happens, he dies.

He’s 31 years old.

He’s been alive for three decades, and in that time, he’s murdered more people than most soldiers kill in entire wars.

The official record says he fell in action December 7th, 1944.

He’s initially buried at a crossroads near Hobagi Apusta in Hungary.

Later, Yep.

his body is moved to the Buddha’s War Cemetery, block 11, row 5, grave 282.

The irony of being in Block 11, even in death, isn’t lost on anyone who knows his history.

The Holocaust wasn’t random violence.

It was systematic ideological genocide rooted in racial theory.

Jews were defined as subhuman, as a threat to Aryan purity.

Killing them wasn’t murder in the Nazi mind.

It was pest control, necessary, justified.

But having sexual relations with a Jewish woman, that implied she was human.

It implied desire, attraction, maybe even affection.

[clears throat] It shattered the entire ideological foundation.

If Pelich could see this Jewish woman as a sexual being as someone worthy of desire, then the entire racial hierarchy collapses.

You can’t systematically exterminate people you’re sexually attracted to.

You can’t maintain the fiction of subhumanity when you’re sleeping with them.

The SS recognized this.

They understood that sexual relationships across racial lines were more dangerous to their ideology than mercy because mercy can be explained as weakness.

But desire implies recognition of humanity.

So Pellet had to be destroyed, not for murder, for contamination.

Rudolph Hus, who was not hesitant in his criticism of his subordinates, wrote in his memoirs that Pelitz was the most cunning and sly creature he’d ever encountered in all his years in the concentration camp system.

He literally climbed over dead bodies to satisfy his lust for power.

This from a man who commanded Awitz during its deadliest period, who oversaw the murder of hundreds of thousands.

Even Husse found pallet repulsive.

Why? In letters smuggled out of Awitz by the Polish resistance, Palitch was described as the greatest bastard of Awitz.

The greatest bastard.

In a camp run by murderers, by sadists, by doctors who performed experiments on living prisoners, by guards who beat people to death for entertainment, Palitch stood out as the worst.

Perry Broad, an SS man who later testified about Awitz, wrote that Pallet enjoyed taking part in mass executions.

enjoyed it, not tolerated it, not performed it because he had to.

Enjoyed it.

He found pleasure in pulling the trigger, in watching people die.

The 25,000 people he claimed to have murdered never got to see him answer for their deaths.

Their families never got closure.

The children he hunted never got justice.

The family of five he executed methodically never saw him pay.

Well, he just died in a war zone and was buried in a military cemetery like any other soldier.

Is that fair? Is that enough? Today, Awitz stands as a museum.

Block 11 is preserved.

The death wall is marked with plaques.

Visitors walk through and try to comprehend what happened there.

They see the courtyard where Pitz shot thousands.

They stand in the basement where he helped conduct the first Cyclon B experiment.

They read testimony from survivors who witnessed his crimes.

But Palich himself is barely remembered.

No trials, no dramatic testimony, no historical reckoning, just a name in SS records, just an entry in a war cemetery registry, just another dead German soldier buried in Hungary.