HISTORYThe Man History Called the Beast of Belsen6 min read

Josef Kramer Before Bergen-Belsen

Josef Kramer did not begin his career as a camp commandant. He worked his way up through the system, serving in a series of transit and detention facilities in occupied territories before being entrusted with command-level responsibilities. His early postings gave him a working knowledge of camp logistics — prisoner processing, labor assignment, and the infrastructure of mass detention. These were not passive administrative roles. They required direct participation in decisions about who lived, who worked, and who was killed. By the time Kramer was handed a commandant’s position, he had already accumulated years of operational experience in the system.

The Natzweiler-Struthof Assignment

In 1941, Kramer was sent to run the Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in occupied France — one of the only camps located on what is now French soil. It was here that his personal willingness to kill became unambiguous. Kramer personally gassed approximately 80 to 86 Jewish men and women, using the bodies afterward for skeleton collection research being conducted by a professor at the Reich University of Strasbourg. He later described the killings in clinical, detached terms during his postwar trial — explaining the process step by step with no apparent distress. The statement became one of the more chilling documents produced during the Nuremberg-era proceedings.