On this day in 1951, high-ranking Nazi and SS member, Oswald Pohl, was hanged.Pohl was born in June 1892 in Duisburg-Ruhrort, Germany. He enlisted as a soldier in the German navy in 1912 and served in the Baltic Sea region and the coast of Flanders during World War I.Pohl’s time at university did not last and he dropped out in 1918, to become a paymaster for the Freikorps “Brigade Löwenfeld.” In 1920, Pohl joined the Reichsmarine, the Weimar Republic's new navy. Four years later he was transferred to Swinemünde, Poland. He joined the SA, the paramilitary division of the Nazi Party, in 1925 and the re-founded Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party; NSDAP) in 1926. In 1933, Pohl met the future head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Himmler, who took Pohl under his wing. Pohl became increasingly involved in the administration of the SS, and in February of 1934, he was appointed as SS-Standartenführer. In this position, Pohl began to influence the management of the concentration camps.By 1939, he was moving up in rank in the SS, and in 1942 he was put in charge of the organization of the concentration camps. Pohl was responsible for economic decisions, such as deciding which detainees went to which camps and the use of other detainees for forced labor. He later divorced his wife and remarried Eleonore von Brüning, whose previous husband had been a founder of IG Farben, an industrial firm that utilized the labor of Auschwitz prisoners to create German economic self-sufficiency. Pohl was a member of the Catholic Church but left in 1935. However, he re-committed himself to the Catholic Church, and with the permission of the Church, published a book he wrote called Credo. Mein Weg zu Gott (‘Credo. My Way to God’) in 1950. Still asserting his innocence as a ‘simple functionary’, Pohl was hanged in Landsberg Prison on June 7, 1951.In 1944, Pohl was put fully in charge of concentration camps as the Chief of the Economic Section of the SS; he remained in that position until the end of World War II. Pohl fled after the War in 1945, hiding in Bavaria and then near Bremen. British troops captured Pohl on May 27, 1946. He was one of the last of the most important Nazis to be caught. Upon his capture, Pohl attempted to swallow vials of poison similar to those used by Himmler. An American military tribunal, after the Nuremberg Trials, sentenced Pohl to death on November 3, 1947, for crimes against humanity, war crimes, membership to a criminal organization, and being in charge of crimes committed in the concentration camps. Pohl insisted that he was innocent and ignorant of the conditions of the camps. He appealed his sentence multiple times.