condemned, Franciszek Gajowniczek, was reprieved when a fellow prisoner, Franciscan priest Maximilian Kolbe, offered to take his place. After over two weeks of starvation, only Kolbe remained alive. The priest was killed in the underground bunker by lethal injection. Kolbe was later canonized by Pope John Paul II. Fritzsch was also fond of psychological torture. Former Auschwitz prisoner Karol Świętorzecki recalled the first Christmas Eve behind the camp barbed wire, in 1940, was also one of the most tragic. "The Nazis set up a Christmas tree, with electric lights, on the roll-call square. Beneath it, they placed the bodies of prisoners who had died while working or frozen to death at roll call. Lagerführer Karl Fritzsch referred to the corpses beneath the tree as 'a present' for the living, and forbade the singing of Polish Christmas carols." According to testimony of his superior, Rudolf Höss, it was also Fritzsch who came up with the idea of using Zyklon B for the purpose of mass murder. Fritzsch ordered the killing of Soviet POWs locked in cells in the basement of the Bunker while Höss was on an official trip in late August 1941. Fritzsch tested Zyklon B inside cells that were not air-tight, subjecting the victims to even more torturous death. He repeated the tests on additional victims in the presence of Höss. According to Höss, the preferred method for the mass murders in Auschwitz using Zyklon B was devised on site. On 15 January 1942, Fritzsch was transferred to KZ Flossenbürg as Schutzhaftlagerführer. From early August until October 1942 he was temporary substitute commander of the camp. In October 1943, he was arrested as a part of an internal SS investigation into corruption. An SS court charged him with murder. As a punishment he was transferred to front line duty (SS-Panzergrenadier-Ersatzbatallion 18). It is assumed that he fell during the battle of Berlin in May 1945. Disappearance It is commonly believed that Fritzsch perished in the Battle for Berlin but his final fate remained long unknown. Soviet sources claimed that MI-6 caught him in Norway. In his 2007 memoirs, For He Is an Englishman, Memoirs of a Prussian Nobleman, Captain Charles Arnold-Baker recorded that as an MI6 officer in Oslo he arrested Fritzsch: "We picked up, for example, the deputy commandant of Auschwitz, a little runt of a man called Fritzsch whom we naturally put in the custody of a