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HANS LORITZ LETTER Signed in blue pencil.”Konzentrationslager Esterwegen” administration letterhead, 1p. 4to., Esterwegen, Apr. 20, 1935 appointing Osterwald an SS-Sturmmann, signed by camp commandant SS-Standartenfuhrer HANS LORITZ (1895-1946) formed and commanded the SS Standarte at the Dachau concentration camp, and in July 1934, commanded KZ Esterwegen. In December 1939, Loritz was transferred to KZ Sachsenhausen. He selected prisoners unable to work, who were killed in June 1941 in Sonnenstein Euthanasia Center. In the same year, he organized the shooting of at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war. He would command four other camps before committing suicide at war’s end. The Esterwegen concentration camp was an early Nazi concentration camp within a series of camps first established in the Emsland district of Germany. It was established in the summer of 1933 as a concentration camp for 2,000 so-called political Schutzhauftlinge (protective custody prisoners) and was for a time the second largest concentration camp after Dachau. After 1936, it was used as a prison camp holding political prisoners and so-called Nacht und Nebel prisoners.

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