the extermination of the Jews, such as phenol and Zyklon B. This was during the mass murder of almost 400,000 Hungarian Jews. During his time at Auschwitz, Capesius stole valuables from the personal belongings of arriving Jews at the railhead and also secreted away gold pulled from the dental fillings of corpses. He had access to the gold since it was under the control of the camp's dentists, with whom he shared his pharmaceutical dispensary. Capesius sent the stolen gold to his sister for safekeeping until after the war. Post-War After the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, he went into hiding in Schleswig-Holstein and fell into British captivity from which he was discharged after one year. He then began to study electrical engineering at the Technical University in Stuttgart. During a visit to Munich in 1946, Capesius was recognized by a former Auschwitz political prisoner, Leon Czekalzki, and was arrested at the main train station, Hauptbahnhof, by American military police and interned in the camps of Dachau and Ludwigsburg. After U.S. occupation authorities deemed his case unfit for prosecution, he was released in August 1947. He then went through denazification proceedings. He was found to be a major offender but managed to get that overturned by omitting his service at Auschwitz. He found a job in a Stuttgart pharmacy. In October 1950, he used the gold he had stolen from Auschwitz to open a pharmacy in Göppingen and a beauty parlour in Reutlingen. Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials A camp survivor, Hermann Langbein, and Germany's first postwar Jewish prosecutor, Fritz Bauer, were persistent in trying to compile enough evidence to make a case against Capesius. As a result of their work, Capesius was arrested in Göppingen in early December 1959 and remained in custody without bail or bond. On 20 August 1965 he was indicted in the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials by the Landgericht Frankfurt am Main Community for aiding and abetting the murder of at least four cases of 2,000 people. He was convicted and sentenced to nine years in prison. Capesius served only two and a half years and was released from prison in January 1968. Death Capesius died from natural causes on 20 March 1985, in his home at Göppingen. He was unrepentant until his death. His wife, Friederike (Fritzi), died in 1998. References External links Literature by and about Victor Capesius in the catalog of the German National