by Yitzhak Arad
The motive to murder did not originate with him. He “only” carried out the order he had received in the best possible way. Looking at the situation in this way relieved his conscience and enabled him to oversee the death factory in which hundreds of thousands of people were murdered. To him they were only “a mass of rotting flesh.”
In 1967 Stangl was caught in Brazil, extradited, and stood trial in 1970 in Düsseldorf, Germany. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and died in prison a few months later.
SS Hauptsturmführer Gottlieb Hering
Hering replaced Wirth as commander of Belzec at the end of August 1942. Like his predecessor, Hering was a officer in the criminal police and had been attached to the euthanasia program. He was an old acquaintance of Wirth, as they had served together in the criminal police of Stuttgart. SS Scharführer Heinrich Unverhau, who served in Belzec, testified that “Hering and Wirth were definitely wicked people, and the whole staff of the camp was afraid of them. . . . I heard that Hering shot two Ukrainian guards who expressed their dissatisfaction with what was going on in Belzec.9
Rudolf Reder wrote about Hering:
We knew that in the most beautiful house close to the station of Belzec lived the commander of the camp. He was an Obersturmführer [sic]. . . . He seldom was present in the camp and came only in connection with some event. He was a tall bully, broad shouldered, age around forty, with an expressionless face. He seemed to me as if he were a born bandit. Once the gassing engine stopped working. When he was informed, he arrived astride a horse, ordered the engine to be repaired and did not allow the people in the gas chambers to be removed. He let them strangle and die slowly for a few hours more. He yelled and shook with rage. In spite of the fact that he came only on rare occasions, the SS men feared him greatly. He lived alone with his Ukrainian orderly, who served him. This Ukrainian submitted to him the daily reports.10
Gottlieb Hering (right), the commander of Belzec, and Heinrich Gley, of Operation Reinhard.
Tadeusz Miziewicz, a Pole who lived in Belzec and worked at the train station, testified about Hering:
Once the major [sic], the commander of Belzec death camp, invented a new type of entertainment: he tied a Jew with a rope to his car; the Jew was forced to run behind the car and behind them ran the major’s dog and bit the Jew. The major rode from the camp to the water pump, which was in Belzec on Tomaszowska Street, and back. What happened with this Jew I do not know. This event was witnessed by the people of Belzec.11
Regarding the other members of the SS staff in Belzec and their relationship and treatment of the Jews there, almost no evidence exists. Except for Reder, there were no survivors among the prisoners there.
Hauptsturmführer Franz Reichleitner
Franz Reichleitner was the commander of the euthanasia institution in Hartheim, and he knew Wirth from that period. He replaced Stangl as commander of Sobibor when Stangl was transferred to Treblinka. Reichleitner had little contact with the prisoners, and they saw him seldom. Even in the survivors’ testimonies he was rarely mentioned. Moshe Bahir, one of the camp inmates, wrote about him:
Reichleitner, a man in his late forties, with an Austrian accent, was dressed always with great elegance and wore gloves. He did not have direct contact with the Jews and the transports. He knew that he could rely on his subordinates, who were very frightened of him. He ran the camp with German precision. During his time the Aktionen went smoothly, and all the transports that arrived on a certain day were liquidated. He never left them for the following day. . . .12
Once there was an old Jew who was brought in a transport of thousands and who did not allow the SS to drag him forcibly, so they threw him into the freight car. By chance, Franz Reichleitner was present. The Jew declared that he did not believe the lies that had been told to the arrivals about a “hospital, light work, and good living conditions.” By his own effort he got out of the car, bent down, and in his trembling hands scooped up two fistfuls of sand. He turned to Karl Frenzel, the SS man, and said, “You see how I’m scattering this sand slowly, grain by grain, and it’s carried away by the breeze? That’s what will happen to you: this whole great Reich of yours will vanish like flying dust and passing smoke.” The old man went along with the whole convoy, reciting “Hear, O Israel,” and when he said the words, “the Lord is One,” he again turned to Frenzel and slapped him with all his might. The German (Frenzel) was about to attack him, but Reichleitner, who was standing by enjoying the whole performance, said to Frenzel, “I’ll settle the account with him. You go on with your job.” The camp commander took the old man aside and killed him on the spot, in front of his family and all the people in the convoy.13
As officially announced by the SS authorities, Reichleitner was killed by partisans in the Trieste area.
Untersturmführer Kurt Franz
Kurt Franz was born in 1914 in Düsseldorf. He completed elementary school and from the age of fifteen began working as a cook. In 1935 he was drafted into the army and served as a cook in an artillery regiment. After the completion of his military service, he joined the SS and served for a time in Buchenwald. At the end of 1939, he was transferred to the euthanasia program. In April 1942, having attained the rank of SS Oberscharführer (quartermaster-sergeant), he was sent to Belzec and served there until the end of August/beginning of September 1942, when, with the change of command at Treblinka, he was transferred to Treblinka and appointed deputy commander of the camp.
Kurt Franz was the dominant personality in Treblinka when it came to the day-to-day running of the camp, and especially with regard to the prisoners. To the prisoners Franz was the most cruel and most frightening among the SS personnel in the camp. His physical appearance was extremely deceiving: he was nice-looking; he had a round, almost baby, face; and he was younger than most of the other SS men. He was therefore nicknamed Lalke (“doll” in Yiddish) by the prisoners. Franz, however, was a murderer and a sadist who made the prisoners’ lives a nightmare.
As he would make his rounds of the camp, often riding a horse, he would take his enormous, frightening dog Barry along with him. Barry had been trained to obey Franz’s command. And the command was usually to attack Jews—to snap at their bodies and, especially, to bite their genitals.
Kurt Franz frequently toured the camp, visiting the work sites in the Lower Camp and the extermination area. It was he who reviewed the prisoner roll call and took part in meting out the punishments. He especially enjoyed shooting at the prisoners or the people in the transports with his pistol or a hunting rifle. He would usually remove bearded men from the transports and ask them whether they believed in God. After he received the expected affirmative answer, he would tell each man to hold up a bottle as a target and said: “If your God indeed exists then I will hit the bottle, and if He does not exist then I will hit you.”
Before coming to Treblinka, Kurt Franz had been a boxer, and in the camp he used his knowledge of the sport for sadistic torture of the prisoners. He would choose prisoners, give them boxing gloves, and force them to box him. But heaven help the prisoner who took Franz seriously; his real intention was to set up the prisoner as a punching bag. One Sunday, toward the end of 1942, Franz “asked” a young Jew from Cracow who had been a boxer to compete with him. He gave him two boxing gloves, but took only one, the right one, for himself. Inside he had hidden a small pistol. As the two squared off in the starting position, Franz shot his opponent through the glove and killed him.
When Franz and his dog Barry would approach a group of prisoners, they would all instantly be on their guard, for they knew his tours always ended with someone being victimized. Oscar Strawczinski writes:
He walked through the camp with great pleasure and self-confidence. Barry, his big, curly-haired dog, would lazily drag along behind. . . . “Lalke” would never leave the place without leaving some memento for somebody. There was always some reason to be found. And even if there were no reason—it made no difference. He was an expert at whipping, twenty-five
or fifty lashes. He did it with pleasure, without hurrying. He had his own technique for raising the whip and striking it down. To practice boxing, he would use the heads of Jews, and naturally there was no scarcity of those around. He would grab his victim’s lapel and strike with the other hand. The victim would have to hold his head straight so that Franz could aim well. And indeed he did this expertly. The sight of the Jew’s head after a “training session” of this sort is not difficult to imagine. Once “Lalke” was strolling along the platform with a double-barreled shotgun in his hand and Barry in his wake. He discovered a Jew in front of him, a neighbor of mine from Czestochowa, by the name of Steiner. Without a second thought, he aimed the gun at the man’s buttocks and fired. Steiner fell amidst cries of pain. “Lalke” laughed. He approached him, commanded him to get up, pull down his pants, and then glanced at the wound. The Jew was beside himself with pain. His buttocks were oozing blood from the gashes caused by the lead bullets. But “Lalke” was not satisfied. He waved his hand and said: “Damn it, the balls haven’t been harmed!” He continued his stroll to look for a new victim. . . .14
On the platform where the women undressed, three babies were discovered after one of the transports had arrived in the beginning of 1943. Their mothers had lost them in the mayhem as they were made to run to the gas chambers. Franz, who was on that platform, picked up one of the babies, tossed him up with his foot, hurled him through the air and watched as the baby’s head shattered against a wall. Another time, on that same platform, underneath the pile of clothing that the women had left behind were two babies, one six months and the other a year old. Franz and another SS man kicked and killed them in the same way.15
In 1965 Kurt Franz was put on trial and sentenced to life imprisonment.
SS Oberscharführer Kurt Küttner
Kurt Küttner was in charge of the Lower Camp in Treblinka. His nickname in the camp was “Kiva.” He had served for many years in the German police, and in Treblinka he was one of the most hated and feared of the SS men. He would follow people around, stop them and search them for money, pictures, or any family mementos that the prisoners would try to hide on their person. If he caught someone carrying anything, he would beat him cruelly and send him to the Lazarett. In his capacity as commander of the Lower Camp and over the Jewish prisoners, he wanted to know exactly what was going on throughout his jurisdiction. He therefore exploited the weakness or baseness of some of the prisoners and turned them into informers.
From one of the transports that arrived in October 1942, Küttner removed ten or twelve young boys and put them to work at various service tasks in the camp. One of the boys he appointed capo of the group. After about three weeks, the boy was caught giving gold coins to one of the Ukrainians, and Küttner had him, along with all the other boys in the group, taken to the gas chambers. Küttner was also in charge of punishing the prisoners at the evening roll call and at “sports,” which were a never-ending nightmare for the Jews in the camp.16
Küttner’s fate after the war is unknown.
Oberscharführer Gustav Wagner
The man who actually supervised the routine and daily life at Sobibor was Gustav Wagner. He was the quartermaster-sergeant of the camp. Moshe Bahir described him:
He was a handsome man, tall and blond—a pure Aryan. In civilian life he was, no doubt, a well-mannered man; at Sobibor he was a wild beast. His lust to kill knew no bounds. I saw such terrible scenes that they give me nightmares to this day. He would snatch babies from their mothers’ arms and tear them to pieces in his hands. I saw him beat two men to death with a rifle, because they did not carry out his instructions properly, since they did not understand German. I remember that one night a group of youths aged fifteen or sixteen arrived in the camp. The head of this group was one Abraham. After a long and arduous work day, this young man collapsed on his pallet and fell asleep. Suddenly Wagner came into our barrack, and Abraham did not hear him call to stand up at once before him. Furious, he pulled Abraham naked off his bed and began to beat him all over his body. When Wagner grew weary of the blows, he took out his revolver and killed him on the spot. This atrocious spectacle was carried out before all of us, including Abraham’s younger brother.17
Wagner’s ruthless behavior toward the Jews is mentioned in some other testimonies of Sobibor survivors. Ada Lichtman writes that on the fast day of Yom Kippur, Wagner appeared at the roll call, took out some prisoners, gave them bread and ordered them to eat. As the prisoners ate the bread, he laughed loudly; he enjoyed his joke because he knew that the Jews he had forced to eat were pious.18
Gustav Wagner escaped after the war to Brazil, where he lived openly. The Brazilian Supreme Court refused to extradite him. In October 1980 his attorney announced that Wagner had committed suicide.
Oberscharführer Karl Frenzel
Karl Frenzel was born in 1911, in Zehdenick, Templin district. He finished primary school and by profession was a carpenter. In 1930 he became a member of the Nazi party and the SA, and from the end of 1939 he served in the euthanasia program. In the spring of 1942, he was assigned to Operation Reinhard and sent to Sobibor.
Frenzel was in charge of Camp I in Sobibor and replaced Wagner as quartermaster-sergeant of the camp when the latter was out of the camp or on vacation. SS Scharführer Erich Bauer, who served with him in Sobibor, said that “He [Frenzel] was one of the most brutal members of the permanent staff in the camp. His whip was very loose.”19
Frenzel himself testified that he tried to avoid personal participation in the dreadful actions that took place in the camp. Regarding his appointment as the SS man in charge of the trolley that took the Jews to the gas chambers, he said:
After the disembarking of the train, the children and the feeble Jews were forcibly thrown onto the trolley. Terrible scenes happened then. The people were separated from their families, pushed with rifle butts, lashed with whips. They cried dreadfully, so I could not cope with this task. Reichleitner complied with my request, and he appointed [Paul] Bredow to escort the trolley.20
Frenzel justified his activity in Sobibor by claiming:
As I already pointed out, under the prevailing war conditions, which are now difficult to comprehend, I unfortunately believed that what was going on in Sobibor was lawful. To my regret, I was then convinced of its necessity. I was shocked that just during the war, when I wanted to serve my homeland, I had to be in such a terrible extermination camp. But then I thought very often about the enemy bomber pilots, who surely were not asked whether they wanted to carry out their murderous flights against German people in their homes in such a manner.21
In 1966 Frenzel was put on trial and was sentenced to life imprisonment. He was recently released from prison.
Oberscharführer Kurt Bolender
Kurt Bolender was born in 1912 in Duisburg-Beeck. He remained in school until the age of sixteen. In 1939 he joined the SS Totenkopfstandarte “Death’s Head” unit and was assigned to the euthanasia program. He served in Brandenburg and other euthanasia institutions. In the winter of 1941/42, he was sent to the eastern front in Russia with other euthanasia members and was attached to an ambulance unit. In spring 1942 he was appointed to Operation Reinhard and posted to Sobibor.
SS Scharführer Erich Bauer, who served with Bolender in Sobibor, testified about him:
Bolender was in charge of Camp III. In Sobibor there was a working Jew whom Bolender ordered to box with another working Jew, and for his pleasure they hit each other almost until death. Bolender had a big dog, and when he was in charge of the platform workers he set the dog at the Jews who did not work quickly enough.22
Moshe Bahir wrote about him:
It is hard to forget Oberscharführer Kurt Bolender, with his athletic body and long hair, who used to go walking half naked, clad only in training breeches, carrying a long whip with which he brutally lashed the camp prisoners whom he came upon on his way. He also “worked” in Camp III in the gas chambers. On his way to lunch he was in the habit of passin
g by the main gate and swinging a whip with all his strength upon the heads of the Jews who went through—this to increase his appetite for the meal which awaited him. Once, when I was still working in the platform commando, the group was accused of carelessness because we had left a window open on one of the train cars. Each one of us was punished with 100 lashes. Bolender was very active in this task. More than once I saw him throwing babies, children, and the sick straight from the freight cars into the trolley with the load that went to the Lazarett. He was the one who chose the ten men to deliver the food to the workers in Camp III. When he had a yen to accompany the group, not one of them would return to us when the task was done.23
In December 1965, a trial of the Sobibor criminals was held in Hagen, West Germany, and among them was Kurt Bolender. Bolender committed suicide by hanging himself in his detention cell.
SS Scharführer Heinrich Matthes
Heinrich Matthes was born in 1902 near Leipzig. He attended elementary school and then became a tailor. When he was older, he worked as a male nurse in various hospitals. He was married and had one daughter. At the beginning of 1934, he joined the Nazi party and became a member of the SA. When war broke out, he was drafted into the army, but was released after about two years. In August 1942 he was drafted into the SS, dispatched to Operation Reinhard, and sent to Treblinka. There he was appointed commander of the extermination area with the rank of Scharführer (sergeant).