Erich Bauer[1] (26 March 1900 – 4 February 1980), sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", was a low-level commander in the Schutzstaffel (SS) of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator.

[2] In 1940, Bauer was assigned to the T4 Euthanasia Program, in which physically and mentally disabled people in institutions were killed by gassing and lethal injection.

Erich Bauer testified to one of his first mass murders:[3] A pipe connected the exhaust of a car to a bricked-up laboratory in the asylum.

This killed the patients in eight minutes.In early 1942, Bauer was transferred to the office of Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader of Lublin, Poland.

The resistance almost postponed the uprising since Bauer was at the top of the "death list" of SS guards to be assassinated prior to the escape that was created by the leader of the revolt, Alexander Pechersky.

When he discovered that SS-Oberscharführer Rudolf Beckmann was dead, Bauer started shooting at the two Jewish prisoners unloading his truck.

[10] Bauer was arrested in 1949 when two former Jewish prisoners from Sobibór, Samuel Lerer and Esther Raab, recognized him during a chance encounter at a Kreuzberg fairground.

During the course of his trial, Bauer maintained that at Sobibór he worked only as a truck driver, collecting the necessary supplies for the camp's inmates and the German and Ukrainian guards.

His primary witnesses, former Sobibór guards SS-Oberscharführer Hubert Gomerski and SS-Untersturmführer Johann Klier, testified on his behalf.