He was responsible for the deportation of more than eighty thousand Jews from Westerbork to the extermination camps. Usually he personally, 'with a wave of the hand', gave the departure signal for the trains. Albert Konrad Gemmeker, commander of Camp Westerbork. After the war he got ten years. Due to good behavior he was released after six years: in 1951 he was back in his hometown of Dusseldorf. SS-Obersturmfuhrer Albert Gemmeker was charming. Ad van Liempt did extensive research into the 'gentleman commander', of whose reputation little remains. Gemmeker was a bureaucrat who blindly obeyed his superiors. He could not be found to have any empathy for the victims. Later he did everything to avoid his responsibility or to pass it on to others. He denied all his life that he knew what fate awaited the Jews in the East. After his return to De?sseldorf, the German judiciary tried for almost twenty years to correct his unsatisfactory trial in the Netherlands, without success. Van Liempt read all the often secret files in Dutch and German archives and spoke to numerous people involved in the Netherlands and Germany, even with two daughters of Gemmeker who are still alive. The result is a crushing biography of a cunning desk killer, a story full of cynicism and abuse of power, contrasted with the fathomless tragedy of Gemmeker's victims.