Georg Konrad Morgen Georg Konrad Morgen ( 8 June 1909 – 4 February 1982 ) was an SS judge and lawyer who investigated crimes committed in Nazi concentration camps . He rose to the rank of SS - " Sturmbannführer " ( major ) . After the war , Morgen continued his legal career and died on 4 February 1982 . Life . Born to a railwayman in Frankfurt , Morgen graduated from the University of Frankfurt and the Hague Academy of International Law , before becoming a judge in Stettin . Considered a pacifist by many , Morgen published the book " War Propaganda and the Prevention of War " in 1936 , a year after first meeting Adolf Hitler , arguing against the militarization of Germany . It was published by the Reich . As a SS - " Sturmbannführer " ( major ) , he was ordered to serve in the Wiking Division on the Eastern Front as punishment for insubordination . In 1943 , now a Judge - Advocate in the " Hauptamt SS - Gericht " while retaining his military rank , Morgen was sent to investigate other SS members on charges of corruption . He had no difficulty gaining access to the concentration camps in eastern Germany , which held primarily anti - Nazi Germans and other political prisoners , but during a mid - 1943 attempt to enter the Jewish extermination camp at Treblinka in central Poland , he and his associates were thrown out . During October – November 1943 , Morgen looked into rumors that SS - General Odilo Globocnik , former commandant of Jewish labor camps in the Lublin district of eastern Poland , had assembled an enormous personal trove of valuables confiscated from the inmates . Though unable to bring charges , he became in the course of this investigation an accidental eyewitness to part of Operation Harvest Festival : the liquidation of three large ( Majdanek , Poniatowa , and Trawniki ) and several smaller Jewish labor camps in the Lublin area . The operation was ordered by " Reichsführer - SS " Heinrich Himmler as a pre - emptive security measure after learning that the inmates had obtained weapons and made contact with communist partisans active in the surrounding forests . Though forewarned by several days , the Jews in each camp were disarmed with negligible resistance and no casualties ; during the mass executions which followed , carried out on the spot over a two - day span , some 43 , 000 male and female prisoners had to be shot . At Poniatowa on November 4 , Morgen witnessed the entire drama , as the camp inmates - " " 6 , 000 Jews and 9 , 500 Jewesses " " - reported to the execution site , surrendered their personal effects and clothing , then went naked to self - prepared trenches where they were shot one - by - one : " " the men went first , filing into one trench , and later the nude women had their own separate trenches . . . all passed silently and methodically through the trenches , so the executions went very quickly " . " When Walter Toebbens , owner of the factories at Poniatowa , arrived during the operation and attempted to protest the liquidation of his workforce , he was " stopped by Morgen and ordered not to interfere " , and the executions continued without incident . Though he discovered early on that the Final Solution of the Jewish problem through physical extermination was beyond his jurisdiction , and discovered no legal objections to large - scale , centrally - authorized anti - Jewish operations like Harvest Festival , Morgen went on to prosecute so many Nazi officers for individual violations that by April 1944 , Himmler personally ordered him to restrain his cases . Nonetheless , he went on to investigate Auschwitz camp commandant Rudolf Höss on charges of having " unlawful relations " with a beautiful Jewish woman prisoner , Eleanor Hodys ; Höss was , for a time , removed from his command and these proceedings gained Hodys a brief stay of execution ; sent to Berlin by Morgen , then transferred to Buchenwald , she was shot by the SS shortly before the end of the war . During the same period of the investigation , though , Morgen ' s assistant Gerhard Putsch disappeared . Some theorized that this was another warning for Morgen to ease up on his activities as the building where the evidence was stored was burned down shortly thereafter . Among others he investigated was the commandant of Buchenwald and Majdanek , Karl - Otto Koch , husband of Ilse Koch , as well as the Buchenwald concentration camp ' s doctor Waldemar Hoven , who was accused of murdering both inmates and camp guards who threatened to testify against Koch . Koch was also accused of embezzlement of at least 100 , 000 marks . Morgen later testified at the Nuremberg trials where he claimed the stories of Koch ' s fetish with lampshades made of human skin were merely a legend . Indeed , he kept denying this while being threatened with beatings and while actually being beaten twice by his Allied investigators after the war . Later Morgen stated that he fought for justice during the Nazi era , and cited his long list of 800 investigations into criminal activity at concentration camp s during his two years of activity . Morgen ' s " tenacity " in prosecuting corruption and murder earned him the nickname " The Bloodhound Judge " during the war . Post - War . After the war , Morgen was a witness at the trial of Nazi war criminals at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg ; also the trial of SS WVHA members , and the 1965 Auschwitz trial in Frankfurt – am – Main . Thereafter , he continued his legal career in Frankfurt . He died on 4 February 1982 .