Josef Kramer (10 November 1906 – 13 December 1945) was and the Commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau (from 8 May 1944 to 25 November 1944) and of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (from December 1944 to its liberation on 15 April 1945). Dubbed the Beast of Belsen by camp inmates, he was a German Nazi war criminal, directly responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. He was detained by the British Army after the Second World War, convicted of war crimes, and hanged on the gallows in the prison at Hamelin by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. Early life Josef Kramer, an only child, was born and raised in Munich in a middle-class family. His parents, Theodore and Maria Kramer, brought him up as a "strict Roman Catholic". In 1915, the family moved from Munich to Augsburg, where Josef Kramer attended school. He began an apprenticeship as an electrician in 1920. From 1925 to 1933, except for working in a department store and as an accountant, he was mostly unemployed. Career He joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and the SS in 1932. His SS training led him into work as a prison guard and, after the outbreak of war, as a concentration camp guard. In 1934, Kramer was assigned as a guard at Dachau. His promotion was rapid, obtaining senior posts at Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps. Kramer became assistant to Rudolf Höss, the Commandant at Auschwitz in 1940. He accompanied Höss to inspect Auschwitz as a possible site for a new synthetic oil and rubber plant, which was a vital industry for Nazi Germany, given its shortage of oil. Natzweiler-Struthof Kramer was named Commandant of Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp in April 1941. Natzweiler-Struthof was the only concentration camp established by the Nazis on present-day French territory, though there were French-run transit camps, such as the one at Drancy. At the time, the Alsace-Lorraine area in which it was established had been annexed by Nazi Germany. As commandant at Natzweiler-Struthof, Kramer personally carried out the gassings of 80 Jewish men and women, part of a group of 87 selected at Auschwitz to become anatomical specimens in a proposed Jewish skull collection to be housed at the Anatomy Institute at the Reich University of Strasbourg under the direction of August Hirt. Ultimately, the 87 inmates were transported to Natzweiler-Struthof; 46 of these individuals were originally from Thessaloniki, Greece. The deaths of 86 of these