English research edition
Walter Pelzhausen
Walter Pelzhausen served as commandant of the Radogoszcz police prison in Łódź. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Łódź and Radogoszcz through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- Pelzhausen commanded the Radogoszcz prison during the final period of the occupation.
- Brutal conditions, beatings, torture and executions formed part of the prison’s everyday machinery of repression.
- On the night of 17–18 January 1945 the staff began liquidating the prison, shooting detainees and setting the building on fire.
Place in the chain of responsibility
The case connects routine prison violence with the final attempt to destroy prisoners and evidence. The commandant’s responsibility is described alongside the acts of identified guards, not in place of them.
Key events and mechanisms
- terror in the Radogoszcz prison
- the liquidation of the prison and massacre in January 1945
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
Pelzhausen was tried in Łódź in 1947, sentenced to death and executed in March 1948.
Limits of the evidence
The number of people inside the building and the precise course of the fire are reconstructed from testimony and trial records. Divergent totals are not used to rank perpetrators.
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.