Josef Schwammberger, 92

Hitler's dead, Stalin's dead, Saddam's dying from the cancer he got from the CIA. With the exception of our own dear leader, the world today looks pretty free of assholes. On Dec. 2, this firmament of the damned was joined by a lesser though no-less-worthy star: Josef Schwammberger, who died in a prison hospital in Hohenasperg near Stuttgart after 92 years of a life that wasn't worth shit.

Born in Austria early in 1912, Schwammberger led a typical post-WWI European life: the war shortages, economic disaster, deprivation, the rebirth of the pan-Germanic consciousness under the auspices of National Socialism. An early member of the Nazi party, Schwammberger rose through the ranks of the notorious SS to become a lieutenant in command of three forced labor camps—Przemysl, Rozwadow and Mielec, all in WWII Poland—between 1942 and 1944, though to be sure he always denied any wrongdoing.

Schwammberger was initially apprehended in the summer of 1945, in the French occupation zone of Innsbruck, Austria, but escaped (after his guard fell asleep) in January 1948. A few months later, he was permitted to enter fascist Argentina, where he lived under his own name. He became a citizen of Argentina in 1965 and worked for years at a petrochemical factory in La Plata, just south of Buenos Aires.

But West Germany wanted him. The government, desperate to right its image and record, actively sought Schwammberger's extradition beginning in 1973, when they let Argentinean officials know that he might be living there.

Schwammberger—long on Simon Wiesenthal's top-10 list of most-wanted Nazis—was finally tracked down in the winter of 1987 in an early-morning raid at Huerta Grande, some 500 miles northwest of Buenos Aires near a German-Argentine enclave that was long suspected to quarter war criminals. After two long years of internal and international appeals to fight his extradition, Schwammberger was given the Lufthansa treatment back to Germany in 1990.

Schwammberger was originally charged with murdering or helping to murder 3377 people, including more than 40 by his own hand. In the end, prosecutors reduced the number to 34 inmates killed by Schwammberger and at least 275 killed on his direct orders. In 1992 he was convicted in Stuttgart of seven counts of murder and 32 counts of accessory to murder. He was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a cell that was surely more private and accommodating than any barracks the SS in Poland ever had.

In 2002, Schwammberger appealed his incarceration, citing advanced age and claiming once again that he'd been following orders. The court responded with their own order: Die and die quickly. Schwammberger's "particularly cruel" crimes outweighed any concerns about his health.

He left no survivors, only a wound. o