Nazi SS Guard Who Injected Poison, Nailed & Hanged Prisoners at Buchenwald: Martin Sommer

The snow made Buchenwald look quiet from a distance.

That was the first lie.

From the hill outside Weimar, the camp could almost disappear into the winter landscape — rows of barracks under white roofs, black trees standing still, watchtowers cutting into the gray sky. But behind the barbed wire, silence did not mean peace. It meant people were too weak to cry out. It meant boots had already passed. It meant someone had been dragged away and everyone else had learned not to turn their head.

By the final years of the Second World War, Europe had become a map of fear. Cities burned. Borders collapsed. Families vanished into trains with sealed doors. And inside the machinery of the SS, violence was no longer an exception. It was paperwork. It was routine. It was a job title, a shift schedule, an order signed in ink.

But even in that world, even among men trained to obey without mercy, there were names that made other men lower their voices.

Martin Sommer was one of them.

On paper, he did not look extraordinary. Walter Gerhard Martin Sommer. Born in 1915. Son of a farmer. A young German man from Schkölen, the kind of place where people knew the weather by the smell of the soil and measured a life by harvests, church bells, and family names.

In an administrative file, he could have been mistaken for thousands of other men of his generation.

But in the memories of those who survived Buchenwald, his name did not belong to an ordinary man.

It belonged to the “Hangman of Buchenwald.”

The question that followed him was not simply what he did. History has recorded enough of that to make the stomach turn. The deeper question is harder.

How does a boy from a farming family become a man feared inside a concentration camp?

How does someone with no obvious mark of childhood brutality grow into a figure whose cruelty stood out even in a system built on cruelty?

And perhaps most disturbing of all: how could a man like that later pass through the world as if he were just another wounded veteran, another broken body from a broken war, another German trying to disappear into postwar silence?

To understand the shadow Martin Sommer cast over Buchenwald, you have to begin before the camp.

You have to begin in a defeated country.

Germany after the First World War was not only poor. It was humiliated. The old empire had fallen. The economy stumbled from crisis to crisis. Men who once wore uniforms returned home to unemployment, anger, and the feeling that someone had stolen their future. Boys grew up hearing adults speak of betrayal, revenge, and national shame as if these were household truths.

Sommer was born into that world on February 8, 1915.

His childhood, by most accounts, did not announce a monster. He was a farmer’s son. He attended the local school. He was expected to follow the life his father knew: land, labor, seasons, obedience.

There is a danger in imagining evil must always arrive wearing a warning sign.

It rarely does.

Sometimes it arrives as a quiet boy in a village. Sometimes it learns discipline before it learns compassion. Sometimes it is not born fully formed, but shaped, rewarded, promoted, and protected until one day people look back and ask why nobody stopped it earlier.

By the time Sommer was a teenager, Germany was already changing around him.

The Nazi movement did not only offer politics. It offered identity. It told wounded men they were powerful. It told poor young men they were chosen. It told the resentful that their anger was noble. It turned blame into belonging.

In 1931, Martin Sommer was only sixteen years old.

At an age when many boys are still deciding what kind of men they want to become, Sommer joined the Nazi Party and the SA.

Sixteen.

Old enough to understand the thrill of a uniform. Young enough to be shaped by it.

For a young man from a modest background, the movement offered something farm life could not: status. A hierarchy. A place in history. A language of strength. A way to stand taller than others without having earned wisdom, kindness, or real achievement.

Then came 1933.

Hitler took power. What had once been street movement became state authority. The men who had shouted slogans were now backed by police, courts, offices, and guns.

Sommer moved from the SA into the SS.

That change mattered.

The SS did not present itself as a normal organization. It sold itself as an elite brotherhood, a racial order, a corps of men above ordinary morality. It demanded loyalty, hardness, and ideological obedience. It taught that pity was weakness. It taught that the enemy was not fully human. It taught young men to confuse cruelty with strength.

Sommer put on the black uniform.

And something in him found a home.

Not all men who joined the SS became notorious sadists. That is what makes Sommer’s path so chilling. The system created permission, but he supplied the appetite. The ideology opened doors, but he walked through them with unusual willingness.

He was not dragged into history.

He stepped forward.

In the mid-1930s, Sommer entered the world of concentration camp service. Before Buchenwald, there was Sachsenburg, one of the earlier camps that helped train the habits of the SS: control through humiliation, discipline through terror, obedience through pain.

This was the school that mattered.

Not the village school of his childhood, where a boy learned letters and numbers.

This was another kind of education.

Here, a guard learned how quickly a hungry man lowered his eyes. How cold could break the body before a baton touched it. How a prisoner’s name could be replaced by a number. How a joke from one guard could become a beating from another. How a human being could be turned into a task.

By 1937, the SS began building Buchenwald on the Ettersberg, near Weimar.

The location itself carried a cruel irony. Weimar was associated with German culture, literature, music, and the memory of Goethe. Nearby, on a forested hill, the Nazis built a camp where human dignity was stripped away with industrial efficiency.

Prisoners were forced to build the place that would imprison them.

They cleared land. They carried materials. They stood for roll call in weather that cut through their clothes. They learned the geography of fear: the gate, the square, the barracks, the quarry, the bunker.

And into that rising system came Martin Sommer.

At first, he was not a famous name.

He was a functionary. A guard. A man in uniform among other men in uniform. The kind of man prisoners watched carefully because survival often depended on reading a guard’s mood before he spoke.

But Sommer distinguished himself.

Not through administrative talent. Not through strategic intelligence. Not through battlefield courage.

Through cruelty.

That is the part that unsettles people who want history to make sense. In a normal society, cruelty is supposed to shame a person. In Buchenwald, cruelty could become reputation. It could become usefulness. It could become power.

A prisoner learned quickly which guards shouted, which guards stole, which guards beat men for infractions, and which guards seemed to take private pleasure in pain.

Sommer belonged to the last category.

His name began to travel through the camp in whispers. Prisoners warned one another. A man assigned near him understood that the danger was not only the official punishment. It was the unofficial moment. The closed door. The delayed return. The look in a guard’s eyes when no superior was watching.

Even other SS men reportedly recognized something excessive in him.

That detail matters.

Because Buchenwald was not a place run by gentle men suddenly shocked by bad behavior. The SS created and operated the terror. Yet Sommer’s reputation became dark enough that he stood out inside that darkness.

He was the kind of man whose presence changed the air in a room.

Imagine a prisoner standing in the cold, hands numb, stomach empty, trying not to sway during roll call. He hears boots behind him. He does not know whose boots they are. Then the line stiffens. Someone near him stops breathing normally. Nobody says the name aloud.

They do not have to.

Sommer is there.

Power, in a place like Buchenwald, did not need speeches. It lived in small gestures. A guard pointing with two fingers. A prisoner ordered to step aside. A door closing. A clerk making no eye contact while recording a transfer. A witness pretending not to witness because witnessing could become a death sentence.

This is how a man becomes more than a man inside a system of terror.

He becomes a rumor with a uniform.

And yet, if you walked into an office and pulled out Sommer’s file, you would not see the full horror. Files are clean. They reduce lives to dates, ranks, assignments, numbers. They do not carry the smell of barracks in winter. They do not show the trembling hands of prisoners. They do not preserve the silence that falls when a feared man enters the yard.

That is why survivors matter.

They remembered what paperwork could not hold.

They remembered how some men enforced rules, and others enjoyed inventing suffering around them. They remembered how Buchenwald trained the body to expect pain, but Sommer trained the mind to expect something worse: unpredictability.

Because predictable cruelty is terrifying.

Unpredictable cruelty is another prison.

By the early 1940s, the war had expanded, and so had Buchenwald’s machinery. Prisoners arrived from across Europe. Political opponents, Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, prisoners of war, men accused of being “asocial,” men whose only crime was existing outside Nazi definitions of worth.

The camp grew crowded. Hunger deepened. Forced labor consumed bodies faster than records could explain. Death became so common that the living had to step around it and keep moving.

In such a place, a person could vanish in layers.

First from his home.

Then from his country.

Then from his name.

Then from the concern of ordinary men.

Sommer’s role existed inside that disappearance.

He did not create Nazism. He did not invent Buchenwald. He was not the highest-ranking architect of the camp system.

That is the uncomfortable twist.

The horror of Martin Sommer is not that he was some rare, mythical monster unlike anyone else.

The horror is that he was ordinary enough to be recruited, promoted, assigned, and used.

A farmer’s son became a camp guard because a political movement gave him a uniform, a bureaucracy gave him authority, and a prison system gave him helpless people on whom to practice power.

The system did not need every man to be a genius of evil.

It only needed men willing to stop seeing others as human.

Sommer went further. He did not merely stop seeing. He made others look away.

That is the moment where his story becomes more than biography. It becomes a warning.

There were people around him. Fellow guards. Superiors. Clerks. Drivers. Men who signed papers. Men who opened doors. Men who heard rumors. Men who saw bruises and bodies and sudden absences.

Some feared him. Some tolerated him. Some used him. Some later claimed they knew nothing.

But inside the camp, the prisoners knew.

They knew the difference between a man obeying orders and a man enjoying them.

They knew the difference between a guard shaped by the machine and a guard who made the machine more intimate, more personal, more sadistic.

And in Buchenwald’s winter silence, that difference could mean life or death.

Years later, after the war had ended and Germany lay in ruins, many former SS men tried to shrink themselves into ordinary explanations. They had been soldiers. They had followed orders. They had suffered too. They had families. They had wounds. They had documents that did not say enough.

Sommer would also try to move through the aftermath as something less than what he had been.

Not the “Hangman of Buchenwald.”

Not the feared figure from the bunker and the camp.

Just a damaged man from a defeated army.

But history has a way of keeping witnesses alive long enough.

A name whispered in terror does not disappear simply because the uniform is removed. A face seen in a place of death does not become innocent because time has passed. And the snow that once covered Buchenwald could never cover what happened beneath it.

Martin Sommer’s life began in an ordinary village.

That is exactly why it must be remembered.

Because the most dangerous men are not always born looking dangerous. Sometimes they are made step by step, salute by salute, silence by silence — until one day, the world realizes that the boy nobody feared has become the man everyone should have stopped.