Snapshot Of A Mass Murderer Poem by Paul Hartal

SS general Oswald Pohl was in charge
of the distribution of detainees to a menu
of lagers in the Third Reich.
As chief administrator he managed
the concentration camps in accordance
with the Nazi principle of extermination
through labor. Among other things, Pohl
had been involved in the mass murder
of Hungarian Jews and supervised
the processing of the remains
of the murdered victims. His duties
included the delivery of the gold,
extracted from the dead,
to the Reichsbank.

At the Nuremberg Military Tribunal
Pohl insisted that he was innocent because
he did not order the executions.
But even Hjalmar Schacht, the former
Nazi minister of economics, agreed
that the SS general was a war criminal.
"Ach! Think of it! " said Schacht,
"To break teeth out of a dead body!
Think of it! Obviously that dog Pohl
knew everything about it. After all he was
in charge of feeding and housing
the inmates of the lagers".

When the Second World War ended
Pohl went into hiding. But in May 1946
British troops captured him
and in the following year an American
military tribunal tried the former SS general
for crimes against humanity and war crimes,
including mass murder. It found
the overall chief of the concentration camps
guilty and sentenced him to death.
In 1951 Oswald Pohl was hanged.

Of course Pohl did not act alone.
Under the watchful eyes and whip lashes
of SS men, dentists hammered out the gold
teeth, the crowns and the bridgeworks
from the mouth of the murdered
in the shooting pits and the gas chambers.
Then the Nazis melted the removed
precious metal into gold bars. Apart from
the gold teeth, they also deposited in
the Reichsbank golden eyeglass frames,
watches and coins that they had stolen from
their victims.

In the Nuremberg trials Pohl defended
himself by saying: "What could I do?
I never ordered these things to be taken."
So, he shifted the burden of responsibility
for the crimes to top Nazis,
like Heinrich Himmler and Walther Funk.