Anton Thernes was born on the 8th of February 1892 in the city of Trier, then part of the German Empire. He got married, and the marriage produced six children. Thernes later joined the SS and reached the rank of Obersturmführer, an equivalent to First Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. In the following years, Thernes was transferred to Majdanek concentration camp. Majdanek, situated in the south-eastern suburbs of Lublin in German-occupied Poland, was originally established in late 1941 as a camp for prisoners of war. However, it soon evolved into a full-scale concentration and extermination camp. The inmates were forced to live in conditions so primitive and overcrowded that disease and death spread rapidly. Basic sanitation was virtually nonexistent. Prisoners endured freezing temperatures in winter and sweltering heat in summer, often with broken windows and little protection from the elements. Over time, barracks intended for a few hundred people housed more than a thousand, creating a breeding ground for lice, typhus, and other deadly illnesses.
The daily life of the prisoners was marked by extreme hardship, cruelty, and terror. From the moment of their arrival, detainees faced dehumanization. Larger transports arrived in overcrowded cattle cars, and smaller groups were trucked in from nearby areas. Once inside the camp, they were stripped of all their belongings, and their hair was shaved, some of which was later shipped to German companies to be used in industrial production. New arrivals were sent to the bathhouse for a painful and humiliating disinfection process before being registered with a number that replaced their identity. Jewish prisoners underwent selections upon arrival, and those deemed unfit for labor, including the elderly and children, were immediately sent to the gas chambers and never even recorded in the camp’s files.
Punishments for even minor infractions were brutal and often fatal, and public beatings and lashings at rollcall were common. Prisoners would be forced to stand motionless for hours, endure backbreaking penalty exercises, or be hanged by their wrists with their arms twisted behind their backs. Escape attempts were met with execution, usually carried out in front of the entire camp as a warning. Inmates were routinely beaten, attacked by SS dogs, or even drowned in fire basins and sewage pits. The SS guards, along with selected prisoner-functionaries, wielded almost unchecked power over the lives of those held at Majdanek. Children, whom the guards saw as useless eaters, were often whipped and, on a few occasions, the camp personnel would grab them by their hair and throw them on trucks heading to the gas chambers. They would pull the children’s hair so hard that whole tufts would remain in their hands. Sometimes children were murdered in front of their parents, and the personnel would even whip pregnant women to death. Men, women, and children were also killed by the camp personnel, who stomped on them with their steel-studded jackboots. Anton Thernes served as the last administrative chief of the Majdanek concentration camp. He was also in charge of food and slave labor administration, starvation rationing, and the maintenance of camp structures, including the storage depot for property and valuables stolen from Holocaust victims at the killing centers in Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka. After the war, Thernes insisted that he was merely the camp’s bookkeeper and only “heard” about the mass extermination of prisoners. He did admit, however, that the camp administration constantly sent “huge sums” of money and valuables back to Berlin.
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