“Let them die, so many of ours are dying!” Commandant Adolf Haas and the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

24. February 2019

14:30 - 16:30

Lecture and book presentation by Jakob Sass (Berlin)

SS-Sturmbannführer Adolf Haas was the first commandant of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. He was not considered either a “strict” commandant or a particularly fierce antisemite. All the same, his tenure as commandant was characterised by brutal ruthlessness, but also occasionally by the arbitrary patronisation of individual prisoners. In the eyes of his superiors, he was considered only moderately skilled and not particularly motivated.

Historian Jakob Sass from Berlin has published the first detailed biography of Adolf Haas. In this lecture, he presents his new findings on Adolf Haas’s career in the SS, particularly in relation to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, and he addresses Haas’s unexplained disappearance in April 1945.

Location: Bergen-Belsen Memorial, Film Room