Walter Quakernack

Biography

Quakernack was born in Bielefeld, Germany. He served as a secretary in the Politische Abteilung at Auschwitz concentration camp beginning in June 1940, where he participated in mass murders using the Genickschuss method of firing one bullet into the back of the neck, established by SS-Untersturmführer Ernst Grabner.

Quakernack worked as a team leader in the crematorium at Auschwitz and participated in the gassing of Soviet POWs at the end of 1941. In September 1942, he was promoted to Oberscharführer and awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz (War Merit Cross), in September 1943. He was further promoted camp commandant in April 1944 at Arbeitslager Laurahütte, a subcamp of Auschwitz in Siemianowice Śląskie. He also worked at Auschwitz III, known as Monowitz. During his time in Auschwitz, he was known to personally kill prisoners in the following way: the prisoners were led to a big warehouse, Quackernack would then also enter under the influence of alcohol with an MP-40 machine pistol and fire at the prisoners continuously to the moment when they were all dead. Former member of Sonderkommando unit, tasked to get the bodies on trucks and take them to crematorium recalled, that Quackernack was staying in the middle of the warehouse, surrounded by dead bodies, holding an overheated gun, with his uniform entirely red from blood laughing loudly. Quackernack notoriously abused alcohol, so he was barely walking and had numerous outbursts of anger.

On January 23, 1945, he accompanied a death march of 500 prisoners from Auschwitz to the Mühlenberg suburb of Hanover, arriving around February 3, 1945. On April 8, 1945, he was part of a death-march evacuation from Mühlenberg to Bergen-Belsen. On trial during part of the 2nd Belsen Trial, held at Celle and Lüneburg, he was sentenced to death in June 1946 and hanged on October 11, 1946.

Quakernack is mentioned several times in the account of Filip Müller, who worked in a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz and was an eye witness.