Paul Otto Radomski - Command of Haidari Concentration Camp

Command of Haidari Concentration Camp

On November 28, 1943, Radomski was appointed commandant of Haidari concentration camp, near Athens, Greece. The previous German commandant, sergeant Rudi Trepte, and his two Greek interpreters had been arrested by the Gestapo, for reasons as yet unknown.

Under Radomski, the camp inmates were put to labour in two four-hour shifts each day except Sundays. The inmates were divided into groups of 100 men, with a hecatontarch in charge of each. However, the labour was not intended for any productive purposes, but merely to break the prisoners' morale: they were made to dig holes and then refill them, build walls and then break them down.

The first execution in the camp was carried out on 7 December, when Radomski personally executed a Greek Jewish man named Levi in front of the prisoners because he "attempted to escape during his arrest". This execution was to serve not only as a warning to the others, but, according to post-war psychological research, to "put the inmates in constant fear of their lives". In total, in the camp's one year of operations, about 1,800 people were executed, while another 300 died as a result of torture either at Haidari or in the Gestapo headquarters at Merlin street in central Athens. These numbers included 30 women, 104 invalids, and 230 students.

Radomski was relieved of his post in February 1944, after he threatened to shoot his own adjutant while drunk, and was replaced by Lieutenant Karl Fischer.

After the war track of Radomski was lost.

Read more about this topic:  Paul Otto Radomski

Famous quotes containing the words concentration camp, command of, command and/or camp:

    If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.
    Arthur Miller (b. 1915)

    I had now formed a clear and settled opinion, that the people of America were well warranted to resist a claim that their fellow-subjects in the mother-country should have the entire command of their fortunes, by taxing them without their consent.
    James Boswell (1740–1795)

    But as some silly young men returning from France affect a broken English, to be thought perfect in the French language; so his Lordship, I think, to seem a perfect understander of the unintelligible language of the Schoolmen, pretends an ignorance of his mother-tongue. He talks here of command and counsel as if he were no Englishman, nor knew any difference between their significations.
    Thomas Hobbes (1579–1688)

    Men consort in camp and town
    But the poet dwells alone.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)