From mid-February 1943 to March 1944 he began service as Protective Custody Camp Leader at the Majdanek concentration camp. Due to his sadistic tendencies and participation in selections, gassings and shootings, the prisoners called him the "Hangman of Majdanek". According to eyewitness Jerzy Kwiatkowski, who was interned at Majdanek from March 1943 to July 1944, Thumann personally executed prisoners and Soviet prisoners of war. He owned a German Shepherd that he used to bite the inmates. For a few weeks between March and April 1944 Thumann was at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Thumann also appears in a series of photographs from an SS recreation camp, the Solahütte near Auschwitz, discovered in 2007. In one of the photos Thumann is pictured with Richard Baer, Josef Mengele, Josef Kramer and Rudolf Hoess.
Thumann then served as Protective Custody Camp Leader at Neuengamme concentration camp from mid-April 1944 until the end of April 1945. Often accompanied by his dog, he was very feared in Neuengamme due to a reputation for abuse of prisoners at Gross-Rosen and Majdanek. As the British Armyclosed in on Neuengamme, the SS began an evacuation of the prisoners to prison ships. During the evacuation, 58 male and 13 female resistance fighters from nearby Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp were selected to be brought to Neuengamme to be executed on the orders of the Higher SS and Police Leader. With the participation of Thumann, these prisoners were hanged between 21 and 23 April 1945 in a detention cell. After some of the doomed men continued to resist, Thumann threw a hand grenade through the cell window. Under the command of Thumann and, the last 700 prisoners remaining at Neuengamme were forced to dispose of bodies and cover up the traces of the camp. On 30 April 1945 the prisoners were then sent on a death march with the aim of reaching the area of the Flensburg government. Georg Gussregen was his untersturmführer at Gross-Rosen.
Trial and execution
At the end of the war Thumann was arrested by the British occupation forces. Thumann was put on trial before a British military tribunal in the in Hamburg. Thumann and 13 other defendants, including Wilhelm Dreimann and the Commandant of Neuengamme Max Pauly, were charged with war crimes and crimes against humanity. The court handed down a guilty verdict on 18 March 1946 and sentenced 11 of the 14 defendants to death by hanging on 3 May 1946, including Thumann, Dreimann and Pauly. The death sentence was carried out by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint at Hamelin prison on 8 October 1946.
Literature
Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007,
Hermann Kaienburg: Das Konzentrationslager Neuengamme 1938-1945. Dietz, Bonn 1997,
Wolfgang Benz, Barbara Distel, Angelika Königseder: Der Ort des Terrors - Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Band 7, C.H.Beck, 2005,
