Erich Bauer was born in Berlin on 26 March 1900. He served as a soldier in World War I and was a prisoner of war under the French. In 1933, Bauer joined the NSDAP and SA while working as a tram conductor.
Action T4
In 1940, he joined the T-4 Euthanasia Program where the physically and mentally disabled were exterminated by gassing and lethal injection. In the beginning, he worked as a driver but he was quickly promoted. Erich Bauer described in testimony one of his first mass murders:
Sobibór
In early 1942, Bauer was transferred to the office of Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader of Lublin in Poland. Bauer was given an SS uniform and promoted to the rank of Oberscharfuhrer. In April 1942, he was dispatched to the Sobibór death camp where he remained until the camp's liquidation in December 1943. At Sobibór, Bauer was in charge of the camp's gas chambers. At the time the Jews called him the Badmeister, while after the war he became known as the Gasmeister. He was described as a short, stocky man, a known drinker who regularly overindulged. He kept a private bar in his room. While other SS guards were neatly dressed, Bauer was different: he was always filthy and unkempt, with a stench of alcohol and chlorine emanating from him. In his room, he had a picture on the wall of himself and a picture of all of his family with the Führer. On 14 October 1943, the day of the Sobibór uprising, Bauer unexpectedly drove out to Chełm for supplies. The uprising was almost postponed since Bauer was at the top of the "death list" of SS guards to be assassinated prior to the escape that was created by the leader of the revolt, Alexander Pechersky. The revolt had to start early because Bauer had returned earlier from Chełm than expected. He discovered that SS-OberscharführerRudolf Beckmann was dead and started shooting at the two Jewish prisoners unloading his truck. The sound of the gunfire prompted Pechersky to begin the revolt early.
After the war
At the end of the war, Bauer was arrested in Austria by the Americans and confined to a prisoner of war camp until 1946. Shortly afterwards, he returned to Berlin where he found employment as a laborer cleaning up debris from the war. Bauer was arrested in 1949 when two former Jewish prisoners from Sobibór, Samuel Lerer and Esther Raab, recognized him during a chance encounter at a Kreuzberg fairground. When Raab confronted Bauer at the fair, he reportedly said, "How is it that you are still alive?" He was arrested soon afterwards and his trial started the following year. During the course of his trial, Bauer maintained that at Sobibór he only worked as a truck driver, collecting the necessary supplies for the camp's inmates and the German and Ukrainian guards. He admitted being aware of the mass murders at Sobibór, but claimed to have never taken any part in them, not engaged in any acts of cruelty. His primary witnesses, former Sobibór guards SS-OberscharführerHubert Gomerski and SS-UntersturmführerJohann Klier, testified on his behalf. The court, however, convicted Bauer based on the testimony of four Jewish witnesses who managed to escape from Sobibór. They identified Bauer as the former Sobibór Gasmeister, who not only operated the gas chambers in the camp, but also engaged in mass executions by shooting as well as in a variety of particularly vicious and random acts of cruelty against camp inmates and victims on their way to the gas chambers. On 8 May 1950 the court, Schwurgericht Berlin-Moabit, sentenced Bauer to death for crimes against humanity. Since capital punishment had been abolished in West Germany, Bauer's sentence was automatically commuted to life imprisonment. He served 21 years in Alt-Moabit Prison in Berlin before being transferred to Berlin Tegel prison. During his imprisonment, he admitted to his participation in mass murder at Sobibór and even occasionally testified against his former SS colleagues. Bauer died at Berlin Tegel prison on 4 February 1980.
