Following a leaflet campaign by communists in Munich bringing to light the conditions in Dachau Concentration Camp, Wörl, a carpenter’s assistant, was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1934 and, a short time later, was himself sent to Dachau Concentration Camp, where he was to ultimately remain until June 10, 1942, interrupted by a few months in Flossenbürg Concentration Camp in 1939/40. Initially locked up in the detention barracks in Dachau for nine months, mostly confined in a darkened cell, he then headed the camp joinery and was later transferred to the inmate infirmary as a nurse, where his experiences in a Red Cross medical column prior to 1933 came in useful. There he continued his education, organized the training of inmate nurses and treated Kurt Schumacher, among others, with stolen medicines. Through his efforts, several other inmates were able to survive Dachau Concentration Camp.
In August 1942, Wörl was transferred to Auschwitz Concentration and Extermination Camp, where a typhus epidemic raged. As camp elder of the hospital barracks, Wörl falsified selection lists, hid inmates and – against the express orders of the SS – saved Jewish doctors from extermination by requesting them for the inmate infirmary. Wörl also stood up for the six hundred Jewish inmates in the Güntergrube Labor Camp near Auschwitz, protected them from being mistreated by ‘Kapos’ (camp inmates appointed by the SS to head a unit of other inmates), saw to it that they got their due share of food and clothing and exempted sick inmates from hard labor. Wörl was liberated from the Ebensee satellite camp of Mauthausen Concentration Camp in May 1945.
After the war, Wörl, 70% unable to work, lived in his hometown and operated a magazine kiosk. He kept the memory of the victims of concentration camps alive in the German population, headed the Organization of Former Auschwitz Prisoners in Germany (Organisation ehemaliger Auschwitzhäftlinge in Deutschland) and made himself available as a witness for Nazi trials. For example, he was one of the key witnesses during the Frankfurt Auschwitz trial in 1963. In March of that same year, Wörl was recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Israel Yad Vashem.
The long-term consequences of the eleven-year camp detention led to his early death at 61 years of age. It wasn’t until 1995 that a small path in Munich’s western district of Hadern was named after him.
