Sunday, April 29th, 1945. As units of the US Army’s 42nd Armored Division and 45th Infantry Division approached the gates of the Dachau camp in Southern Germany, they had no idea that behind those walls lay one of the most shocking scenes of the entire war. Right outside the camp gates, along the train tracks, were more than 30 abandoned freight cars.
Inside those cars were thousands of bodies. Many had been dead for days before the Americans arrived. The air was so heavy with the stench of decay that some soldiers had to turn away or cover their noses with bandannas. When the gates of Dachau opened, what appeared inside was equally haunting. Nearly 30,000 surviving prisoners were still in the camp.
Many so emaciated they were just skin and bones after months of starvation, forced labor, and disease. But what the American troops saw that day wasn’t a random tragedy of war. During Dachau’s most brutal period, this system was run by Alexander Piorkowski, the camp commandant from 1940 to 1942. It was the result of years of organized operation inside this concentration camp.
Under his command, thousands of prisoners were subjected to a brutal disciplinary system where torture, forced labor, and executions became a part of daily life. For many American soldiers stepping into Dachau in 1945, what they saw was merely the final consequence of a mechanism that had been operating for years. The question is, how did a man like Piorkowski become the commander of one of Nazi Germany’s most infamous concentration camps? To understand that story, we have to go back to Germany after the First World War, to a time when political and
economic crises and the rise of extremism were completely transforming German society. From post-World War Germany to the Nazi machine, as the 20th century was just entering its early years, on September 30th, 1904, Alexander Piorkowski was born in the northern port city of Bremen. At that time, Germany was still ruled by the German Empire, an industrial and military powerhouse confident that its position in Europe was unshakable.
Just over a decade later, that world collapsed. In November 1918, World War ended with Germany’s defeat and the fall of the Empire. Piorkowski was only 14 at the time. His teenage years coincided with a period of profound upheaval for Germany. As the Weimar Republic was established, a new state struggling to restore order amidst political, economic, and social crises.
Post-war Germany was directly impacted by the Treaty of Versailles, signed on June 28th, 1919. Under this treaty, Germany lost about 13% of its pre-war territory, had to accept reparations of 132 billion gold marks, and saw its army limited to 100,000 soldiers. The nation was also forbidden from possessing tanks, an air force, and submarines.
These terms quickly generated a sense of humiliation and became the root of widespread discontent in German society. The economic crisis only made things worse. In 1923, Germany fell into hyperinflation with the value of the mark collapsing rapidly. By November 1923, $1 was equivalent to about 4.2 trillion German marks.
Many families’ savings became practically worthless, and faith in the Weimar government eroded. In this context, the younger generation, like Piorkowski, came of age in a society where economic ruin and political conflict were the norm. By the late 1920s, extremist political movements began attracting more and more supporters.
Following the global economic crash of 1929, the situation in Germany grew dire. By 1952, the number of unemployed had surpassed 6 million. Against this backdrop, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazi Party, led by Adolf Hitler, rapidly expanded its influence, drawing in voters disillusioned with the Weimar Republic’s political system.
It was during this period that Alexander Piorkowski joined the SA, Sturmabteilung, in 1929, simultaneously becoming a member of the Nazi Party. The SA was the party’s paramilitary wing, often used to protect rallies and clash with political rivals in the streets. Joining this organization showed that Piorkowski had aligned himself with the Nazi movement before the party even seized state power.
The turning point came on January 30th, 1933, when Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany. As the Nazi regime quickly consolidated power, the party’s paramilitary organizations were gradually integrated into the state apparatus. During this phase, Piorkowski transitioned into the SS, Schutzstaffel, under Heinrich Himmler.
The SS swiftly became the central agency in the regime’s security system, simultaneously taking control of the concentration camp network, an apparatus of repression expanding in the early years of Hitler’s rule. The move from the SA to the SS marked a critical shift in Piorkowski’s path. From a street-level paramilitary member, he stepped into the security apparatus of the Nazi regime.
From here, his career became permanently tied to the Nazi concentration camp system, where SS power was exerted directly over thousands of prisoners. It was within this structure that Alexander Piorkowski would later emerge as the commander of one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The road to Dachau.
In 1935, Alexander Piorkowski began making noticeable strides in the SS ranks. He was given command of an SS unit in Bremen, the city of his birth. Taking command at the local level indicated that Piorkowski was already seen as an SS officer capable of taking on the responsibility of organizing and managing forces in the region.
In 1936, he was transferred to Allenstein in East Prussia, now Olsztyn, Poland, to command the SS forces there. This transfer was part of the SS’s process of rotating and evaluating officers, preparing them for higher positions within the regime’s security system. The major shift in his career occurred in 1937, when Piorkowski became directly involved in the Nazi concentration camp system.
He was appointed temporary commander of the Lichtenburg concentration camp, a detention facility located in the state of Saxony-Anhalt. This camp was initially used to hold political prisoners of the regime, and later took in female prisoners in the late 1930s. After serving as temporary commander, Piorkowski remained in the camp system and became the deputy commander, marking a pivot from organizational SS activities to the direct management of detention facilities.
In 1938, Piorkowski was transferred to the Dachau concentration camp, taking the role of Schutzhaftlagerführer, the officer in charge of the prisoner compound. Within the organizational structure of the concentration camps, this position held direct power over the daily lives of the inmates. The person in this role managed operations within the holding areas, supervised the guard force, and organized disciplinary measures according to camp regulations.
From 1940 to 1942, Piorkowski served as the commandant of the Dachau concentration camp. During this time, Dachau had become a crucial facility in the Nazi concentration camp network, simultaneously acting as a transit hub for prisoners moving between other camps in the regime’s expanding system. As the war spread across Europe, the number of prisoners at the camp increased drastically.
Inside the camp, physical punishment, executions by firing squad, and various other repressive measures were inflicted upon the inmates. Around this same time, Dachau also became a site for medical experiments on prisoners conducted by certain SS doctors as part of the regime’s research programs.
During Piorkowski’s tenure as commandant, Dachau operated as a vital link in the Nazi machine of repression. SS decisions were enforced directly on the prisoners through the guard system, disciplinary actions, and forced labor. It was at Dachau that Piorkowski held operational control over one of the regime’s oldest and most important concentration camps, a place where the SS system of control and punishment was executed daily against thousands of captives.
The system of violence at Dachau. After Operation Barbarossa began on June 22nd, 1941, policy regarding Soviet prisoners of war in the SS concentration camp system shifted dramatically. While Piorkowski commanded Dachau, starting in the latter half of 1941, certain groups of Soviet POWs arriving at the camp did not go through the standard registration process.
They were separated from other prisoners immediately upon arrival and were never entered into the camp’s inmate registry. Not being recorded in the registry effectively made these prisoners vanish from the camp’s records. When a person didn’t appear in the ledger, their death went unrecorded in the official statistics.
After being pulled from the prisoner transports, many Soviet POWs were taken out of the barracks area and led to the Dachau camp’s firing range located behind the crematorium. In other instances, executions were carried out in enclosed spaces like bunkers or areas completely isolated from the inmates general living quarters.
Karl Schütz, a former prisoner who worked in the Dachau crematorium, described this process in his post-war testimony. “Those brought there usually stood in silence before the earthen wall of the firing range.” According to his testimony, the POWs brought to the range were typically forced to stand in a line before the firing squad opened fire from a distance of about 25 to 50 m.
Once the execution was over, the victims’ bodies were moved to the camp’s crematorium. Post-war historical research suggests that between 1941 and 1942, several thousand Soviet POWs may have been executed at Dachau. Because many were never entered into the camp registry, the exact number cannot be entirely verified.
But investigation files show the scale of the executions was vastly larger than the official statistics claimed. Alongside these executions, the internal control mechanism also operated through a punishment system targeting the prisoners. During Piorkowski’s time commanding Dachau, numerous physical punishments were applied to maintain camp discipline.
Common punishments included beatings with whips and sticks, as well as the pole hanging punishment. In this hanging punishment, a prisoner’s hands were tied behind their back and they were then hoisted up on a hook for hours, a position that could cause severe damage to the shoulder joints. Post-war investigation files reveal that in some weeks, over 100 such punishments were approved and on certain days, around 200 prisoners were subjected to pole hanging.
One specific case recorded in post-war documents involved Graf Polinski, a Polish diplomat imprisoned at Dachau. According to testimony in the investigation files, Polinski was beaten directly by Piorkowski during an interrogation. After this incident, he was severely injured and required lengthy treatment before passing away from the injuries sustained in that beating.
Beyond physical punishment, Dachau also employed solitary confinement for certain prisoners. Those sent to the isolation block were usually locked in dark cells and completely separated from the rest of the camp population. Dr. From, a prisoner at Dachau, stated that he was held in solitary confinement during several different periods.
On one occasion, he was kept in an isolation cell for 17 days. During another stretch, he was locked in a dark room for 42 days. Food rations during these times were severely restricted and at one point, he was given food only once every 3 days. During Piorkowski’s administration of Dachau from 1940 to 1942, these measures formed a mechanism of violence operating constantly within the camp.
The executions of POWs, physical punishments, and solitary confinement were not isolated events. They constituted a regular functioning system of violence under Piorkowski’s command. Medical experiments, the transport system, and the end. While Piorkowski still held command of the camp moving into 1942, Dachau was no longer just a place of detention and forced labor.
As the war expanded, the camp simultaneously became a site for numerous SS medical experiment programs. This research directly served Germany’s military objectives. One of the prominent programs implemented at Dachau under Piorkowski was the low-pressure experiment. The goal of these trials was to simulate high-altitude flying conditions for the German Air Force.
Prisoners were placed into pressure chambers to replicate an oxygen-deprived environment. The pressure in the chamber was often altered rapidly to observe the body’s physiological reactions. Another program was the hypothermia experiment. Its goal was to study how the human body reacts to extreme cold. These studies were intended to aid in scenarios where pilots crashed into freezing waters.
Post-war investigation files reveal that while Piorkowski ran Dachau, the scale of its transport system was quite massive. During certain periods, about 1,000 prisoners a month were moved out of Dachau. These people were transferred in large transport convoys. Alongside these experiments, the camp also operated mechanisms for eliminating prisoners.
According to post-war investigation files, a portion of the assets confiscated from occupied territories was not entered into the official SS management system. A fraction was diverted into illegal trafficking networks. Notably, the investigation that ultimately took him down did not focus on the executions of prisoners, nor did it target the physical punishments or the medical experiment programs within the camp.
Piorkowski’s removal from command closed the chapter on his administration of Dachau. It is striking that Piorkowski was not dismissed for the executions or torture of prisoners. His career in the SS ended because of financial corruption. On May 8th, 1945, Nazi Germany surrendered unconditionally and the war in Europe came to an end.
After the US Army took control of the Dachau camp, investigators began gathering testimonies from surviving prisoners and the remaining SS records. These documents proved that Dachau wasn’t some temporary wartime holding facility, but a systematically organized and operated piece of the concentration camp network.
In January 1947, Alexander Piorkowski was brought to trial before a US military tribunal as part of the Dachau trials. The charges included war crimes, mistreatment of prisoners, the execution of Soviet POWs, and allowing medical experiments to take place within the camp. The trial posed a crucial legal question.
How should a camp commandant be held responsible for the acts committed within the area under their control? The tribunal ultimately found Piorkowski guilty and sentenced him to death. All subsequent petitions for clemency were rejected. On October 22nd, 1948, the sentence was carried out by hanging when he was 44 years old.
This case also illustrates why the concentration camp system was able to operate for so many years. They functioned through the people who directly managed and exercised power within the camps. Men like Piorkowski became the links that turned the regime’s repressive policies into concrete actions against the prisoners.
The story of Alexander Piorkowski thus raises a broader question. How can systems of repression take shape and sustain themselves within a power structure? Understanding that mechanism helps explain why systems like Dachau could exist at all. If you are interested in stories like this, keep following the channel to discover more events and figures from the Second World War.
