January 24th, 1947 in Bgrade. Wilhelm Fuks was hanged. He did not die because he lost a battle, nor from a gunshot wound on the field. His death stemmed from his direct role in operating a mechanism that caused approximately 150,000 human beings to vanish using nothing but lists, ratios, and signatures.

 6 years earlier in Serbia in 1941, it was Fuks who operated a formula of revenge that was cold to the point of being nakedly brutal. A coldblooded formula one for 100. No trials, no investigations, no exceptions. This was not the chaos of war. It was an administrative mechanism enacted in writing and executed steadily on the ground.

 In this system, human beings were no longer victims. They became quotas needed to fill a number. In late 1941 alone, more than 30,000 Jews in [music] Serbia disappeared following that exact procedure. Lists were drawn up, ratios were applied, orders were signed, and violence [music] occurred as a technical consequence, requiring no hatred, no agitation.

The most dangerous [music] element did not lie in the numbers. It lay in the fact that the operator of this mechanism [music] was not an outofcrol maniac at the front, but a doctor, a highly trained SS officer, believing he was correctly fulfilling [music] his duty in an order where the law had been suspended.

 This video does not ask how many died. It poses a harder question. How can mass execution be operated so orderly and normalized that the operator believes he is innocent right up until the [music] day he stands before justice? Wilhelm Fuks from World War I officer to [music] SS race official. Wilhelm Fuks was born in 1898 in Mannheim.

 When the First World War broke out in 1914, [music] he joined the Imperial German Army and served continuously until the war ended in [music] 1918. During this time, Fuks was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, reflecting his early adaptation to military discipline and strict chains of command. But the interesting part lies in the post-war [music] period.

 Not descending into street violence like many other veterans, Fuks chose the academic path. In 1929, [music] he received his PhD in agricultural sciences from the University of Leipzig. [music] This is a key detail. the mindset of an aronomist accustomed to classifying plant varieties, breeding the good, and weeding out the bad shaped fuks’s [music] technocratic worldview.

 He began to view human beings not as individuals, [music] but as subjects to be planned and screened. In April 1932, Fuks joined the [music] Nazi party. Later that year, he became a member of the SS before Adolf Hitler officially took power in January [music] 1933. After the Nazi regime was established, Fuks worked under Walther Dar and was assigned to the SS race and settlement [music] main office.

 Here he participated directly in implementing racial classification policies where administrative decisions could lead [music] to forced displacement, disenfranchisement or exclusion from the national [music] community. In this phase, violence did not yet need to be overt, but the consequences [music] of the decisions were irreversible.

In 1936, [music] Fuks moved to the SD, the intelligence agency of the SS under Reinhard Hydrish. This was a shift from ideological work to enforcement. During his command tenures in Dresdon and Brownvag from 1936 [music] to 1938, Fuks handled security control and political suppression duties. Here, lists were no [music] longer tools for surveillance.

 They became prerequisites for arrest and elimination. In April [music] 1938, he was promoted to SS Standardenfura, giving him the authority to directly deploy [music] orders in the field. When the Second World War broke out on September 1st, [music] 1939, Fuks was not sent to the front lines. Officers like him were kept back to follow the army, manage occupied territories, identify hostile subjects, [music] and apply punitive measures.

 It was this chain of functions that brought Fuks to Serbia in 1941. Serbia 1941, [music] systematic terror and the policy of retaliation. On April [music] 6th, 1941, Nazi Germany launched the invasion of Yugoslavia. Only 11 days later, on April 17th, the Yugoslav army surrendered. Serbia became a critical occupation zone in the [music] strategy to protect the southern flank before the attack on the Soviet Union.

 In this context, Wilhelm Fuks was appointed commander of the security police and SD in Serbia directly responsible [music] for pacification. Under Fuks was Enzat’s group Serbia. This was not a frontline combat [music] unit, but a mobile execution squad following the army. Their mission was clear. cleanse the territory by [music] destroying ideological enemies, Jews, Roma people, and communists.

Fuks began the purge not with guns, [music] but with paperwork. The first order, all Jews in Belgrade must register. The rule, register or be shot. [music] This measure allowed folks to capture the lists and addresses of victims without wasting a single bulleton a manhunt. Simultaneously, the policy [music] of collective punishment was deployed.

 When partisan activities increased from June to July 1941, [music] folks did not focus on investigating specific perpetrators. Villages were burned and civilians were taken as hostages to answer for acts [music] of sabotage. The center of the system was not justice or investigation, but the sewing of permanent fear. On September [music] 16th, 1941, Field Marshal Wilhelm Kitle issued the retaliation order.

 One dead German soldier for 100 hostages, one wounded German soldier for 50 hostages. In Serbia, Fuks turned this order into an operating procedure. When casualty reports of German troops came in, he did not need to investigate. The next step was simply to cross reference the numbers and sign [music] execution orders to meet the quotota.

 What made the system operated by Wilhelm Fuks particularly dangerous was that it did not require the constant presence [music] of direct violence. Once the list was made, the retaliation ratio established and the [music] chain of command cleared. Execution became an inevitable consequence. No longer a decision to be reconsidered [music] each time.

 Violence at this point did not explode from emotion, but was triggered by condition. A partisan [music] attack, a wounded soldier, a German corpse. From September to December 1941, sites like Jajjinsi and Buban became regular [music] firing ranges. Thousands were executed not for individual actions, but for their position on a [music] hostage list.

 By the end of 1941, the Jewish community in Serbia [music] was almost completely wiped out. Fuches had proven a terrifying reality. [music] Violence does not need chaos to be effective. It only needs to be organized. But Serbia was not the stopping point. This [music] brutal efficiency was the ticket that took Fuks to larger scale killing missions in the east.

Not stopping at Serbia, the path of killing [music] continues. In early 1942, Wilhelm Fuks was replaced in Serbia by Emanuel Schaefer. This was not a disciplinary [music] decision. In internal assessments, Reinhard Hydrish felt that the level of terror was not [music] yet sufficient to completely strangle the resistance movement.

 This reflects a dangerous paradox of the SS [music] apparatus. Failure was not measured by the number of victims, but by whether the level of terror was sufficient [music] to eliminate all resistance. Within 1942, Fuks was promoted to [music] SS Oberfura and deployed to the Baltic region centered in Ria within the Oland occupation [music] zone.

 Here he was attached to execution units like Enzat Commando 3 and later Enzuts [music] Grouper A. These units conducted large-scale shooting operations [music] targeting the Jewish communities in Latvia and Lithuania. Fuks’s mission now shifted to a new level, the management of destruction. Because German SS manpower was limited, Fuks utilized [music] his administrative skills to mobilize and coordinate Latvian and Lithuanian auxiliary police [music] units to participate directly in executions. This method saved German

manpower while creating a cover of ethnic conflict for the [music] massacres. Fuks sat in his office like a conductor, ensuring campaigns were deployed regularly without needing [music] to hold a gun himself. He had industrialized killing, outsourcing the [music] action but retaining total control. During the 1943 [music] to 1944 period, when the Red Army counteratt attacked, Fukes directed [music] the dismantling of concentration camps and the concealment of crimes.

 Slave laborers were liquidated. Mass graves [music] were erased. At this point, Fuches was no longer a punitive officer. He became an eraser of evidence, a stable and [music] cold part of the genocidal structure. By late 1944, when the tide [music] of war had turned, Fuks was still utilized as the commander of Einat’s [music] grouper E in Croatia.

 In this short period, campaigns suppressing civilians, partisans, [music] and Jews continued, contributing to the deaths of tens of thousands even as the Third Reich was on the brink of collapse. The fact that Fuks continued to be assigned tasks at [music] this time shows that the priority of the SS machine was not to salvage military strategy, [music] but to race to complete the predetermined goals of destruction.

 From Serbia to the Baltics [music] and then Croatia, Fuches’s path reflects a consistent rule of the Nazi system. [music] The more effectively collective violence is organized, the more the person operating it is valued. Only when the war ended was that principle reversed. And for the first time, [music] Fuks had to face a different metric, personal responsibility before the law.

Wilhelm [music] Fuks, the trial, the sentence, and the noose. After the collapse of the Third [music] Reich in May 1945, he was captured by Allied forces [music] and quickly identified, not because of the testimony of others, but because his role was tooclear within the security, police, and [music] SD apparatus in Yugoslavia.

 In late 1946, a fateful train took Fuks [music] back to Belgrade. But this time, he did not arrive as a conqueror sitting in a luxury car. [music] He returned to the place where he had swn death as a prisoner stripped of all power. This return [music] carried a grim symbolism. The predator was now fully inside the trap [music] he had set himself.

Before the Yuguslav military court, what Fuks [music] once considered operational statistics were read as an indictment. The prosecution held him [music] responsible for approximately 150,000 victims, including 35,000 Jews, murdered or deported in [music] retaliation campaigns and collective repression.

 The charges did not revolve around a single order, but focused on Fuks’s role as the designer, maintainer, [music] and supervisor of a systematic killing mechanism, creating lists, applying ratios, signing [music] execution orders, and ensuring the process ran continuously. In the courtroom, [music] Fuks did not see blood.

 He only saw work efficiency. He did not deny the signatures. [music] He did not deny the system. He calmly admitted his role as an architect of destruction, making lists, [music] applying ratios, signing orders. He viewed himself as a clean cog in a dirty machine. I only executed orders in the context of war. That was the only shield Fuks raised.

 An old argument of an entire generation of Nazi criminals. But in Belgrade, that [music] shield shattered. The court delivered a historic verdict, tearing away his bureaucratic [music] mask. They were not trying a soldier pulling a trigger at the front. They were trying a man who turned administrative [music] power into the scythe of death.

 Fuks’s crime did not lie in obedience, but in systematic enthusiasm. He did not just follow orders. He optimized the killing so it would occur most smoothly, most effectively. When a man holding a pen can [music] kill faster than a regiment, he no longer has the right to hide behind orders.

 [music] The sentence was pronounced briefly, coldly, like the very orders Fuks once [music] signed. Death, no commutation, no exceptions. January [music] 24th, 1947, Bgrade. Wilhelm Fuks, 48 [music] years old, stepped onto the gallows. No crowd, no speeches, no [music] symbols. There remained only a cold symmetry. The man who once decided the deaths of tens of thousands through paperwork and [music] signatures ended his life via illegal procedure over which he had no control.

The noose tightened, ending the breath of [music] Wilhelm Fuks. The death sentence closed the responsibility of an individual, but it could not [music] automatically erase the evil that produced him. Legally, justice found a stopping point. Historically, the machine behind Fuches [music] remained intact in its operational logic.

 His death closed a file, but it could not completely bury the mechanism [music] that allowed violence to be deployed coldly, legally, and systematically. And the final unavoidable question is [music] when crime can be operated as a legal administrative process shielded by paperwork, [music] stamps, and orders, is hanging the operator truly complete justice or just the final stop of a machine that has completed [music] its historical role.

Why could a man of education, discipline, and a structured career like Wilhelm Fuks oversee collective execution on the scale of tens of thousands and still believe he was innocent? [music] That question does not seek a personal deviation, but forces us to look straight at the human who operated that machine from the inside.

Wilhelm Fuks was not an outofcrol violent man or acting in a fit of hysteria. He was a product of military discipline, of academic classification thinking, and of a power apparatus [music] that glorified absolute obedience. From Serbia in 1941 to the Baltics and Croatia in the years that followed, he always acted within the framework of legalized orders in the name of security, retaliation, and occupation order.

 Violence [music] did not take place in chaos, but in strictly organized order. The core of the issue lies not in Fuks’s individual personality, but in the mechanism that gave him power and legitimized how he used that power. The Nazi apparatus combined three key elements: exclusionary racial ideology, a dehumanizing bureaucracy, and the diffusion of responsibility through chains of command.

 In that structure, collective execution was no longer viewed as a personal crime, but became an administrative task that needed to be completed to the right quoter, the right ratio, and the right [music] deadline. When this mechanism runs smoothly, the moral question is no longer whether to kill, but how many is enough.

 The line between the person giving the order and the person pulling the trigger is blurred. Violence is directed from an office, and personal responsibility dissolves into procedure. When the war ended, Justice was forced to choose aspecific stopping point. Wilhelm Fuks became the person standing closest to the noose, but he was not the only one who contributed to operating that machine.

The Belgrade trial of 1947 closed the fate of Wilhelm Fuks, but it could not automatically end the logic that created him. History shows that genocide does not begin with madness, but with organized obedience from decisions considered rational within a flawed system. And the final question remains, if a machine can turn collective execution into daily work, and a bureaucrat can manage the death of tens of thousands with just files and signatures, then what truly guarantees that personal responsibility will not

disappear once again behind the legal procedures and orders of today?