Wilhelm Simon

Wilhelm Simon
Wilhelm Simon in US custody, 1947
Nickname	"Simon Legree"
Born	23 April 1900
Died	27 September 1971(1971-09-27) (aged 71)
Place of birth	Wuppertal, German Empire
Place of death	Bochum, West Germany
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service/branch	Schutzstaffel
Rank	SS-Hauptscharführer
Unit	SS-Totenkopfverbände
Battles/wars	World War II

Wilhelm Simon (April 23, 1900 – September 27, 1971) was a German SS-Hauptscharführer. During World War II he held administrative posts at the Nazi concentration camps of Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora and was convicted of war crimes by the United States in 1947.

Biography

Wilhelm Simon was born in the city of Wuppertal in the Ruhr district of Germany on April 23, 1900. Between 1919 and 1935 he was employed primarily as a clerk in the textile industry. Simon became a member of both the Nazi Party and the SS in August, 1932 and served as head of the accounting department for the Medical Association of the Rhineland from 1935 to 1939. Following the outbreak of World War II, he worked for the district branch of the Reich Food Office in Wuppertal.

In January, 1941 Simon was transferred to the SS-Totenkopfverbände and was assigned to the guard battalion at the Buchenwald concentration camp. He would eventually be promoted to the position of Assistant Labor Allocation Manager for Buchenwald in the summer of 1942. In this capacity Simon organized the provision of camp inmates as slave-laborers for the German war economy.

In December, 1943 Simon was appointed Arbeitsdienstführer (Labor Service Leader) for the newly established Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. As Labor Leader he managed the assignment of the camp’s prisoners to various forced labor details in the Mittelwerk armaments facility, where they performed much of the complex assembly work required to produce Germany’s V-2 ballistic missiles. Among other things, Simon was responsible for the introduction of a bonus system used to reward inmate laborers with special privileges and also accompanied the eminent German rocket-scientist Wernher von Braun on a trip to Buchenwald to select prisoners there for work at Dora.

During his time as Labor Service Leader, Simon acquired a reputation for brutality among the inmates of Mittelbau-Dora, who gave him the nickname "Simon Legree" after the character of the cruel slave-master in the book "Uncle Tom’s Cabin". In one particular incident during the summer of 1944 Simon was reported to have assigned a group of severely Hungarian Jews, who had recently arrived on a transport from Auschwitz, the grueling task of building their own barracks, leading to numerous deaths from exhaustion. Afterward, Simon ordered SS guards to bludgeon to death several children from the same transport. The survivors were then sent to work in the tunnels at Mittelwerk.

Mittelbau-Dora was evacuated shortly before the arrival of American troops in April, 1945. During the evacuation, Simon led a transport of 350 prisoners to the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. Following his arrival at Ebensee, Simon was drafted into a local Wehrmacht unit. He was captured by American forces on May 8, 1945 but managed to escape from custody the following day. Simon was later rearrested in Germany and was a defendant in the Dachau-Dora war crimes trial, held by US occupation authorities in 1947. Simon pled not guilty to all charges. He was, however, convicted of war crimes on December 30, 1947 and sentenced to life imprisonment and interned in Landsberg prison.

Simon’s sentence was eventually commuted to time served and he was released from captivity in 1954. He would later work as a salesman and died of natural causes in Bochum, West Germany on September 27, 1971.