by Chris Webb
After the invasion of Russia, Thomalla was also in charge of constructing SS Strongpoints in the Ukraine, with branch offices in Zwiahel and Kiev. He was recalled by Globocnik to Lublin at the beginning of 1942 to take over supervision of constructon of the first Aktion Reinhardt death camp at Belzec. Thereafter, he also oversaw construction of the other Aktion Reinhardt camps at Sobibor and Treblinka; as such, he was the senior SS officer at each site until the camps became operational.
In 1943, he headed Waffen-SS construction offices in Riga, the capital of Nazi–occupied Latvia, and Mogilev in Belorussia. Later, during 1943–44, Thomalla also played a role in the “pacification” operations of the SS and the police in Zamosc district.
He was last seen in Zamosc in June 1944, a few weeks before the entry of the Red Army into the town the following month. He was arrested by the Russians near Jicin, on the Czechoslovakian side of the Czech-Polish border. He was held nearby, in a special prison for members of the SS and Nazi Party officials at Karthaus-Walditz. On May 12, 1945, Thomalla was “ordered out of his cell, with all his belongings.” This was a typical order by the Soviet NKVD immediately before the prisoner was executed.
Christian WIRTH
Belzec Death Camp Commandant & Inspector of SS-Sonderkommandos Aktion Reinhard
Born on November 24, 1885, in Oberbalzheim, a small village in the Upper Swabian part of Württemberg in southwest Germany. After completing elementary education at the age of 14, he was employed as an apprentice carpenter with the Bühler brothers’ timber firm in Oberbalzheim. From 1905 to 1907, he served his two-year draft with Grenadier Regiment 123 in Ulm, and, after a short break, re-enlisted for another two years as an army instructor.
After honorable discharge from the army in 1910, Wirth joined the Württemberg state police as a uniformed constable in Heilbronn, and in the same year married Maria Bantel, with whom he had two sons. In 1913, Wirth transferred to the Kriminalpolizei (Kripo)—the plainclothes detective squads—at their headquarters on Büchsenstraße near the city center in Stuttgart.
In October 1941, two months after the outbreak of World War I, he volunteered to serve in the army of Kaiser Wilhelm II and saw action on the Western Front in Flanders and northern France in the ranks of Reserve Infantry Regiment 246. He received a field promotion to Offiziersstellvertreter (acting officer) and was awarded several medals and decorations for bravery, including the Iron Cross I and II Class, and the Gold Württemberg Military Service Medal. At the end of 1917, Wirth was transferred back to Stuttgart as an officer in the military police, guarding a supply depot for Reserve Infantry Regiment 119. During this duty, he won high praise for defending the depot against the Spartakists, the forerunners of the German Communist Party, who attempted to raid the depot for weapons and ammunition.
Wirth rejoined the Kripo in 1919 and by 1923 was the head of Precinct II (Dienststelle II) on Büchsenstrasse in Stuttgart. He earned a reputation for solving difficult crimes that had defeated other officers, often through brutal interrogation. His “dedication and zealous methods” finally led to questions being asked about him in the Württemberg Regional Parliament (Landtag).
In 1937, Wirth was the deputy head of all police and party organizations, not only in Stuttgart, but the whole of Württemberg, which resulted in his recruitment by Reinhard Heydrich’s Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst-SD) as a “V-Mann” (Vertrauensmann)—a confidential agent spying and informing on his party and police comrades.
By 1939, Wirth had reached the rank of Kriminalinspektor, in charge of Kommissariat 5, a special detective squad for investigating serious crimes, including murder. Wirth then carried out special police duties in Vienna, Austria, and in Olmütz, Czechoslovakia. In the spring of 1939, a special remark was inserted into his personal file: “At the disposal of the Führer (‘z.V. Führer’).” He had been earmarked for future “special tasks.”
In the autumn of 1939, Wirth began the first “special task” as a founding member of the euthanasia planning team in Hitler’s private Chancellery. His well-known reputation for “meticulous administration and organization” was put to use in setting up the bureaucracy. In mid-January 1940, he was among a group of high-ranking Nazi officials who witnessed the first test gassing of psychiatric patients in the abandoned prison in Brandenburg-an-der-Havel. Among this group were Reichsleiter Philipp Bouhler, head of the Chancellery, Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s escorting physician, Dr. Leonardo Conti, secretary of state for health and SS-Standartenführer Viktor Brack, chief of Head Office II. Brack was soon to be in charge of the daily running of the euthanasia operation under the code designation T4, named after its headquarters in a villa at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin-Charlottenburg.
At the beginning of February 1940, Wirth arrived at the first T4 euthanasia institute established in Grafeneck castle in the Swabian mountains, 60 kilometers south of Stuttgart, in charge of administration and security. In May 1940, he was appointed “roving inspector” of the euthanasia institutions to tighten-up discipline among the staff, which had deteriorated alarmingly, improve security, and streamline the killing process and ensuing paperwork. He spent much of his time in the euthanasia instituton in Hartheim castle, near Linz in Upper Austria. It was here that he encountered the police officer Franz Stangl, the future commandant of the Aktion Reinhardt death camps at Sobibor and Treblinka. At Hartheim castle, Stangl was in charge of administration and security, and his first meeting with Wirth made a profound impression on him:
Wirth was a gross and florid man. My heart sank when I met him. He stayed at Hartheim for several days that time and often came back. Whenever he was there he addressed us daily at lunch. And here it was again this awful verbal crudity: when he spoke about the necessity for this euthanasia operation, he was not speaking in humane or scientific terms ... he laughed. He spoke of ‘doing away with useless mouth’s, and that sentimental slobber about such people made him puke’.[142]
Just before Christmas 1941, Wirth arrived in Bełżec where the first Aktion Reinhardt death camp was under construction, and in the new year returned to the T4 euthanasia institution at Bernburg to select the first group of 15 men to staff the camp.
Between mid-January and the beginning of March 1942, he experimented with different methods of gassing, including, in the early days, using the exhaust fumes from a Post Office parcel delivery van converted into a mobile gas chamber. He also tried pumping the exhaust fumes from army trucks into three primitive gas chambers, before trying Zyklon B, a pesticide issued to all German military units in the field, and bottled carbon monoxide (CO) gas. This was the method used in the T4 euthanasia institutes.
He finally decided that CO gas produced from engines was the most efficient and had a Russian tank engine brought from a depot of captured Russian vehicles in Lemberg (today Lvov in the Ukraine). This method was then applied in the other two Aktion Reinhardt death camps Sobibor and Treblinka.
In time, Wirth also perfected the “conveyor-belt” method of mass murder, in which the Jews themselves carried out most of the tasks in the extermination process, working permanently at specific points to ensure its smooth continuity. This method, too, was also adopted at Sobibor and Treblinka. Wirth ran the Belzec death camp with an iron fist, feared not only by Jews, but also by his own staff—Germans and Ukrainians alike.
After ensuring that Belzec was operating efficiently, on August 1, 1942, SS-Brigadeführer Globocnik appointed Wirth to the post of inspector of the three SS-Sonderkommandos operating at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka “Abteilung Reinhard—Inspekteur der SS-Sonderkommandos Aktion Reinhard” with his office at first in the Julius Schreck Barracks, the headquarters of Aktion Reinhardt in Lublin. At the end of the year, Wirth’s inspectorate was moved to a building on the Old Airfield just outside Lublin, close to Lublin concentration camp (Majdanek).
From mid-August 1942, Wirth played a leading role in the re-organization of Treblinka, including the construction of the new gas chambers, and thereafter visited the camp
frequently. Wirth was also present when Reichsführer-SS (RFSS) Heinrich Himmler visited Sobibor death camp on February 12, 1943.
On September 20, 1943, Globocnik, Wirth, Stangl, and several Ukrainian guards from the Aktion Reinhardt death camps were transferred to Trieste in northern Italy, where Globocnik had been appointed the Higher SS and Police Leader for the Adriatic coastal region. Wirth was given command of three special units formed from former Aktion Reinhardt personnel, including many of the Ukrainian guards, most of whom had arrived in Trieste by the end of the year.
Based in the buildings of an old rice-husking factory in the San Sabba suburb of Trieste, their task was rounding-up and deporting the remaining Italian Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and confiscating their property. Under the code designation Einsatz R (Operation “R”) these tasks were merely an extension of Aktion Reinhardt, albeit on a far smaller scale.
Wirth, however, turned the San Sabba factory into an interrogation center and mini-death camp for Jews and captured Italian and Yugoslav partisans. Executions were carried out by shooting, hanging, or beating to death with a mallet. For a time, a gas van was also used. Erwin Lambert, who had constructed the gas chambers at the T4 euthanasia institutions and supervised construction of the new and bigger gas chambers at Treblinka and Sobibor, converted a basement heating furnace into a crematorium to dispose of the bodies of the victims. The charred and burnt human bones and ashes were dumped into the Adriatic from a boat or a jetty in the harbor.
Christian Wirth returned to Lublin and, on behalf of Globocnik, played a leading role in the mass murder of the Jewish workers employed in a number of labor camps within the Lublin district, in Lublin itself, and at Poniatowa and Trawniki. The mass murder of 18,000 Jews alone at Lublin, 15,000 at Poniatowa, and 10,000 at Trawniki, was the last mass killing of the Jews within the Generalgouvernement. Wirth’s involvement in these mass killings was revealed during postwar interrogations with Jakob Sporrenberg, SSPF Lublin, who had taken over this post from Globocnik.
By the spring of 1944, Globocnik was aware that the tide of the war was turning against Germany and became concerned about the mass murders in Poland and Italy, for which he was ultimately responsible. He therefore forbade Wirth to carry out any more killing of prisoners in San Sabba. Wirth’s special units were switched instead to anti-partisan duty on the Istrian peninsula, where they committed atrocities against the Yugoslav and Italian population under the guise of “pacification operations.”
Christian Wirth was ambushed and killed by Yugoslav partisans of the First Battalion of the Istrska (Istrian) Division on May 26, 1944, near Kozina, just outside Trieste. He was on his way by car to inspect one of his SS units in Fiume (today Rijeka, in Croatia) on the other side of the peninsula.
Wirth was buried with full military honors in the German military cemetery in the small village of Opicina, up on the Karst above Trieste. During the late 1950s and early 1960s, the remains of all German war dead in Italy were exhumed from their widely-scattered graves and reinterred in a new and big German military cemetery at Costermano, on the southeastern shore of Lake Garda, near Verona in northern Italy. For many years, the presence of Wirth’s grave at Costermano has been a matter of bitter dispute, although his SS rank has been erased from his gravestone and his name removed from the Roll of Honor in the Propyleum.
Gottlieb Jakub HERING
Second Commandant Belzec
August 1942-May 1943
Temporary Commandant Sobibor
Born on June 2, 1887, in Warmbronn, near Leonberg, Württemberg. After leaving school, he worked as an agricultural laborer on estates in the Leonberg area. In 1915, he was conscripted into a machine gun company of Grenadier Regiment 123. He fought on the Western Front in northern France and was awarded the Iron Cross I Class among other medals. Discharged from the army in 1918, he joined the police at the end of December and served in the Kripo office at Goppingen, Württemberg. He later worked for the Stuttgart CID, where he became acquainted with Christian Wirth.
From December 1939 until December 1940, he served in a team of Kripo officers in Gotenhafen (Gdynia), dealing with the resettlement of ethnic Germans on the Baltic coast. In 1941, Hering was drafted into T4 and served in Bernburg, then later at Hadamar, Pirna-Sonnenstein, before arriving in Belzec in July 1942. One month later, in August 1942, he was appointed commandant of Belzec, when Wirth became the inspector of SS-Sonderkommandos Aktion Reinhard.
After the liquidation of Belzec in May 1943, he became the commandant of the Jewish labor camp at Poniatowa, until its liquidation on November 4, 1943, as part of Aktion Erntefest (Harvest Festival). Hering was temporary commandant of the Sobibor death camp, during its dismantling and closure in November 1943. In 1944, he was ordered to Italy, where he again replaced Christian Wirth as chief of Kommando R1 in Trieste, after Wirth was killed by partisans. On October 9, 1945, Hering died under unknown circumstances in the patient’s waiting room of the Katherinen Hospital in Stetten-in-Remstal, Württemberg, while under investigation by the French military authorities.
Belzec Death Camp Garrison
Listed in Alphabetical Order
BAER, Rudolf. Born on March 28, 1906 in Leipzig. He was a carpenter from Halle-an-der-Saale in Saxony-Anhalt. He worked for T4 institution as a cook at Bernburg. Served at Belzec and Treblinka death camps in the administration office. He served at the Old Airfield camp in Lublin, and later in Trieste In May 1945, he was interned in a POW camp near Kircbach, Austria. He escaped and has never been traced.
BARBL, Heinrich. Born on March 3, 1900, in Sarleinsbach, Austria. He worked at the T4 institution at Hartheim before being sent to the Belzec death camp in Poland, where he helped install the gas pipes. He referred to himself as the Hausklemper (plumber) and worked with Erich Fuchs on the installation of pipes in the gas chambers in Sobibor.
BLAUROCK, Emil. Born on January 25, 1897. He was a male nurse at Pirna-Sonnenstein. Served in Sobibor death camp. He was detained by the US Army in Bad Aiblingen, Bavaria. He was discharged from internment on April 19, 1946.
BOROWSKI, Werner. Born on October 23, 1913, in Sprottau in the Prussian province of Lower Silesia. Served at the Bernburg T4 institution as head of the economics office. Posted to the Belzec death camp in early 1942, and then to Treblinka death camp. Because he fell victim to the typhus epidemic in the camp, he was sent back to Bernburg after recovering. He joined the Luftwaffe and was reported “missing in action, presumed killed.”
BREE, Max. Born during 1914 in Lübben im Spreewald. Following service in T4 he served in Belzec from June / July 1942 until September 1942, when he was transferred to Treblinka. In the spring of 1943, he was transferred to Sobibor. He was killed during the prisoner revolt on October 14, 1943.
DACHSEL, Arthur. Born during 1890, in Böhlen, Sachsen. Arthur Dachsel worked at the T4 institution at Pirna-Sonnenstein, where he incinerated bodies. Served at the Belzec death camp in Poland and in July 1942 was transferred to the Sobibor death camp, where he supervised the Waldkommando. Promoted to the rank of Oberwachtmeister in March 1943. He was remembered by Thomas (Toivi) Blatt as one of the least brutal SS-men.
DUBOIS, Werner. Born on February 26, 1913, in Wuppertal-Langenfeld. He was brought up by his grandmother. After school he worked as a joiner, brushmaker, printer and on a farm. Joined the SS in January 1937 and worked as a driver for the Gruppenkommando Oranienburg. Also served as a driver and a guard at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
In August 1939, he was transferred to the T4 organization where he drove buses and worked as a burner in a number of T4 institutions in Bernburg, Brandenburg, Grafeneck, and Hadamar. Following a brief spell in Russia working for the Organisation Todt, he was transferred to the Belzec death camp in April 1942, where he admitted shooting Jewish prisoners. In the summer of 1943, he was transferred to the Sobibor death camp, after Belzec was closed.
At Sobibor, he was in charge of the Waldkommando and was attacked in the armory on the day of the prisoner revolt on October 14
, 1943, and suffered serious wounds. Dubois was acquitted at the Belzec trial in August 1963. However, he was sentenced to three years imprisonment at the Sobibor trial in Hagen in 1966.
FEIX, Reinhold. Born on July 3, 1909, in Neundorf / Oberschwarzbrunn, Sudetenland, and settled in Gablonz on the Neisse River. Following his time in the SS training camp at Trawniki, he served in the Belzec death camp. At Belzec, he was one of the most brutal and feared SS-men on the camp’s staff.
He accompanied the last Jewish workers to the Sobibor death camp in May 1943. He was then appointed commandant of the Jewish labor camp in Budzyn. He left Budzyn, during August 1943, and disappeared. He survived the war and died at his home in Amberg, Bavaria on May 30, 1969.
FICHTNER, Erwin. Born on January 12, 1912, in Trachenberg. Served as a cook at the T4 institution at Bernburg. At Belzec, he was the camp quartermaster. Killed by Polish partisans on March 29, 1943, near Tarnawatka, 17 kilometers north of Belzec, on the road to Zamosc. He was buried in the German military cemetery in Tomaszow Lubelski, and his remains were exhumed in 1996 and re-buried in the German military cemetery in Przemysl.
FLOSS, Erich Herbert. Born on August 25, 1912, in Reinholdsheim. Attended elementary school. After graduating, he trained in textile dyeing but could not secure a position in this line of work and consequently worked in several other jobs.
From April 1, 1935, he served in the 2 Totenkopfsturmban Elbe (Death Head Unit Elbe), saw service in the Buchenwald concentration camp, and also served at the T4 institution at Bernburg.