by Chris Webb
Floss was to make a name for himself as the Aktion Reinhardt cremation expert, which he put to good effect at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka death camps during 1943. Floss was nicknamed Tadellos (“Perfect”) by the Jews at Treblinka—this was his favorite expression. Floss served mainly at Sobibor. He was one of the SS-men who took the victims’ last possessions before they entered the “tube” leading from Lager II (Camp II) to the gas chambers.
One week after the prisoners revolted at Sobibor on October 22, 1943, Floss was escorting a group of Ukrainian guards to the Trawniki training camp when he was killed by shots from his own machine gun by Trawnikimänner Wasil Hetmaniec, between Chelm and the village of Zawadowka.
FRANZ, Kurt Hubert. Born on January 17, 1914, in Dusseldorf. He attended elementary school from 1920 until 1928 in his home town. From 1929, he trained as a cook, firstly at the Hirschquelle restaurant, then in Hotel Wittelsbacher Hof in Dusseldorf, without taking his final examination.
Franz then served as a soldier between 1935 and 1937, and in October 1937 joined the Waffen-SS as part of the SS-Totenkopfstandarte Thüringen. As a member of the 6th battalion he served at the Buchenwald concentration camp, as part of the guard unit. At the end of 1939, Franz was summoned to the Führer’s Chancellery in Berlin and detailed for service as a kitchen chief in the T4 institutions at Grafeneck, Hartheim, Sonnenstein and Brandenburg.
During March 1942, he was ordered to the Generalgouvernment and reported to Odilo Globocnik, SSPF in Lublin, and was then posted to the Belzec death camp. In Belzec, Kurt Franz was responsible for supervising the Ukrainian guards and military training, and he was promoted to the rank of SS-Oberscharführer on April 20, 1942.
In August 1942, he was ordered to the Treblinka death camp as deputy camp commandant and took over control of the Ukrainian guard unit. After the revolt in August 1943, he was appointed as the last commandant of the camp, responsible for the liquidation of the death camp, from August 27, 1943, until November 1943.
Franz was one of the most brutal and murderous members of staff when it came to the day-to-day running of the camp. To the prisoners, Franz was the cruelest and most feared among the SS personnel. His physical appearance was extremely deceiving—he was handsome and had a round, almost babyish face, and was nicknamed Lalka (“Doll”) by the prisoners. He was accompanied on his rounds of the camp by Barry, a Saint Bernard cross, who attacked and maimed prisoners on Franz’s command. Franz is mentioned frequently in survivor accounts, and all paint the same evil picture.
When Treblinka closed down, he briefly relocatd to Sobibor, and then to Trieste and Goriza in Italy, where he was head of the Landeschutz school.
In May 1945, he was arrested by the Americans but escaped back to Germany, where he was re-arrested again but later released. He then lived undisturbed in Düsseldorf until his arrerst in 1959. He was tried as a war criminal in the Treblinka trial in Düsseldorf and sentenced to life imprisonment by the German Landesgericht on September 3, 1965. Kurt Franz died in an old people’s home in Wuppertal on July 4, 1998.
FUCHS, Erich. Born on April 9, 1902, in Berlin. After his education in an elementary school he trained to become a skilled motor mechanic and automative foreman. Before the Second World War, he was a driver in Berlin and joined the Nazi Party in the early 1930’s, becaming a member of the SA and later the SS.
He was drafted to T4 he worked as Dr. Eberl’s driver in the T4 institutions at Brandenburg and Bernburg, and was, as he expressed himself, “an interested spectator” at the gassing of 50 mental patients.
In the winter of 1941, Fuchs was selected at Bernburg by Christian Wirth and posted to the Belzec death camp. At Belzec, he installed “showers”—the disguised gassing facilties—and worked as a truck driver in the motor pool, transporting material to the death camp site. In April 1942, he collected a Russian water-cooled petrol engine from Lvov, which was to produce the lethal gas for exterminating the Jews at Sobibor. He installed the engine with Erich Bauer and ensured it worked with a trial gassing.
Erich Fuchs was then posted to Treblinka to assist with the installation of an engine in the gas chamber: “Subsequently I went to Treblinka. In this extermination camp I installed a generator which supplied electric light for the barracks. The work in Treblinka took me about three to four busy months. During my stay there transports of Jews who were gassed were coming in daily.”
In December 1942, Fuchs managed to arrange his release from T4, and from early 1943 worked for the German oil company Ostland-Öl-Vertriebsgesellschaft in Riga. In February 1945, he became a soldier and member of the Waffen-SS, where he served in a tank transport unit. In March 1945, he was wounded during a bombing raid. Fuchs was taken prisoner by the Russians, and then subsequently held as a prisoner of war by the Americans in western Germany. He was employed by the British Army as a driver / mechanic in Bergen Belsen, until his release in 1946.
Fuchs worked at a number of jobs as an assistant worker, locksmith, and truck inspector at the Technical Inspection Agency (Technischer Überwachungsverein, TUV) in Koblenz until 1962; he was arrested and held in custody from April 8, 1963. The Schwurgericht am Landgericht Hagen sentenced him to four years imprisonment on December 20, 1966, for being an accessory to the murder of at least 79,000 people. He died in Koblenz on July 25, 1980.
GIRTZIG, Hans. Born on April 23, 1905, in Berlin. Served in the canteen in the T4 Institutions of Grafeneck, Hadamar, and Hartheim. Transferred to Belzec in the middle of 1942. When Belzec was closed down, he served at the Poniatowa Jewish labor camp. After the war he returned to Berlin. Arrested to stand trial during the 1960’s, he was released due to ill health (multiple sclerosis).
GLEY, Heinrich. Born on February 16, 1901, in Rödlin, Mecklenburg. After completing elementary school education, he worked on a farm until 1919. From 1929 he worked as a male nurse. He joined the NSDAP in 1932 and entered the SS in 1934. He joined the T4 organization on January 4, 1940. He served at the T4 institutions at Grafeneck and Pirna-Sonnenstein. During the winter of 1941–42, he served in an Organisation Todt transportation unit for wounded soldiers.
In mid-August 1942 he was transferred to Belzec, where he worked in the Ramp and the Undressing barracks. When Belzec was closed down, he was transferred to Poniatowa Jewish Labor camp. He served in Italy, but was sent to Berlin in late 1944 due to ill health. He was discharged from prisoner of war status on December 29, 1947, and worked as a bricklayer in Munster. He was acquitted at the Belzec trial .
GRAETSCHUS, Siegfried. Born on June 9, 1916, in Tilsit, east Prussia. After extended elementary education, he became a farmer and a member of the NSDAP from 1936. He served at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, as confirmed by the War Crimes Group in 1947.
Graetschus was posted to Belzec and was involved in the early gassing experiments, including the conversion of a Post Office parcel van into a gas wagon. Graetschus was transferred to Treblinka in May 1942, until September 1942, when he was posted to Sobibor where he commanded the Ukrainian guards, replacing Erich Lachmann as their chief. He was killed during the prisoner revolt on October 14, 1943, by Jehuda Lerner.
GRINGERS, Karl. Born during 1898. Served at the T4 Institutions of Bernburg, Hadamar, and Hartheim. Served in Belzec. He was killed in active service in Italy during 1944. He was buried at the German military cemetery in Costermano, Italy.
GROTH, Paul Johannes. Born on February 9, 1922, in Holthausen, Schwein. Served at the T4 institute at Hartheim near Linz, Austria. Groth was posted to the Belzec death camp in January 1942. Christian Wirth transferred Groth to Sobibor in April 1942, where he supervised the sorting activities in Lager II. He was regarded by the prisoners as one of the worst sadists among the staff. However, Groth fell in love with a Jewish girl called Ruth, who was shot in Lager III. Groth was transferred back to Belzec death camp in December 1942. He was in charge of the transport that brought the last Jewish work-brigade from Belzec to Sobibor in May 1943 . In 1951 his wife declared that Groth had died, in order to cl
aim her widow’s pension.
HACKENHOLT, Lorenz Maria. Born on June 25, 1914, in the coal mining area of Gelsenkirchen, Northrhine-Westphalia, in the northern part of the Ruhr. After attending the local elementary school until the age of 14, he became an apprentice bricklayer and, on passing the trade examinations, worked on various building sites.
In 1934, he joined the 2 Totenkopfstandarte (Death’s Head Regiment) Brandenburg, stationed at Oranienburg, north of Berlin. In March 1938, he was transferred to the nearby Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where he was employed in the motor pool and as a driver for the camp Kommandantur and personnel.
In November 1939, he was one of a group of 10 SS NCOs summoned to the Führer’s Chancellery on Vosstraße in Berlin. During a meeting with SS-Standartenführer Viktor Brack, the head of Main Office II of the Chancellery, they were informed of the euthanasia program and their roles within it, mainly as bus-drivers conveying the patients, and as corpse incinerators. This duty was to be performed in civilian clothes. After the SS NCOs were sworn to secrecy, civilian clothes were brought for them, and Hackenholt drove them in a bus to Grafeneck Castle in the Swabian mountains south of Stuttgart. From the beginning of 1940, when Grafeneck became operational, until the summer of 1941, when the gassings were temporarily halted on Hitler’s orders, Lorenz Hackenholt served in all six T4 euthanasia institutions, both as a bus driver and as a so-called “disinfector / burner,” unloading the corpses from the gas chambers and incinerating them.
After the temporary halt in the T4 gassings, Hackenholt, together with a small group of SS NCOs from T4, was transferred in the autumn of 1941 to serve under SS-Brigadeführer Odilo Globocnik, the SS and Police Leader of the Lublin district in the Generalgouvernement. Hackenholt was assigned to Belzec, a remote village in the far southeastern corner of the Lublin district, on the main road and railroad between Lublin and Lvov.
Here, on the outskirts of the village, the first Aktion Reinhardt death camp was under construction. When the camp became operational on March 17, 1942, Hackenholt became the supervising mechanic who started the Russian tank engine that pumped its lethal exhaust fumes into three primitive gas chambers in a wooden shed. He rapidly became the gassing expert of Aktion Reinhardt, and a few months later designed and supervised the construction of a new and bigger gassing building with six chambers. It was named the Hackenholt Foundation (Stiftung Hackenholt) in his honor.
In August 1942, Hackenholt was ordered to Treblinka by Christian Wirth, by then the inspector of the three Aktion Reinhardt SS-Sonderkommandos operating at Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, to replace the original three gas chambers with a new and bigger building containing 10 chambers. He was assisted in this task by Erwin Lambert, the T4 construction expert. On completion of this task both men were sent by Wirth to Sobibor to construct new and bigger gassing facilities there.
Hackenholt then returned to Belzec, where, in the late autumn of 1942, he became involved in the exhumation and cremation of the hundreds of thousands of corpses buried in the mass graves. In the spring of 1943, Hackenholt returned to Treblinka on orders from Wirth to assist with the exhumation and cremation operations as one of the excavator drivers. Follwing the liquidation of Belzec duing May 1943, Hackenholt was transferred to the Old Airfield camp just outside Lublin, which was the main sorting, cleaning and storage depot for the vast amounts of belongings and valuables seized from the Jews murdered in the Aktion Reinhardt death camps.
Valuable furs were disinfected with Zyklon B in four specially constructed chambers. After Hackenholt arrived at the airfield, he used the chambers for killing prisoners who were unfit for work, instead of sending them to the gas chambers in the nearby Lublin concentration camp (Majdanek).
In the autumn of 1943, Hackenholt was transferred to Trieste in northern Italy, where he served in the R-I Sonderkommando of Einsatz R at San Sabba. In 1944, he was awarded the Iron Cross II Class for his dedicated service to Aktion Reinhardt. Shortly after Easter 1945, he was arrested and interned in San Sabba, awaiting execution for selling arms to partisans. However, Dieter Allers, the head of Aktion T4 and Einsatz R, who had replaced Christian Wirth after his assassination, realized that the war was all but over and released Hackenholt, who promptly disappeared. He was next seen driving a bus for a Trieste motor company.
Hackenholt was next seen during the retreat of the Einsatz R troops ino Austria. A convoy passed him on the road to Kirbach, driving a horse-drawn milk float. In the summer of 1945, his wife Ilse received news of him in Berlin from Rudolf Kamm, a former SS comrade from Belzec. He wanted to collect Hackenholt’s civilian clothing. In 1946, two former SS comrades from Sobibor, Erich Bauer and Wenzel Rehwald, claim to have met him near Ingolstadt in Bavaria, where he was living under an assumed name and employed in a motor accessories shop.
A year later, Hackenholt’s brother, Theo, believed he passed him driving a delivery van near their hometown of Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr. After that nothing more was heard of Lorenz Hackenholt. However, after a fruitless four-year hunt by the West German police, and intensive, and repeated interrogations of his wife Ilse and other family members, it seemed likely that Hackenholt could have been living under a false name in the area of Memmingen, in the Allgau region of southern Germany. His wife Ilse lived in the same area. The Allgau region was close to the border with Austria, a country that had no extradition treaty with West Germany. Lorenz Hackenholt, wanted for participation in the mass murder of at least 1.5 million people, has never been found.
HIRCHE, Fritz. Born on June 10, 1893, in Penzig, Oberlausitz. He was employed as a manual laborer, before becoming Assistant Detective (Kriminalobersekretär). He was a member of the NSDAP since 1933 and joined the T4 in 1939.
He was chief of the office and captain of the Schutzpolizei at Bernburg and then at Hartheim. He was transferred to Belzec. Committed suicide.
JIRMANN, Fritz. Born on January 11, 1914, in Barzdorf, Braunau. He served at the Buchenwald concentration camp before being recruited along with Kurt Franz and Erich Floss into the T4 organization. He was posted to the T4 euthanasia institute at Grafeneck. Later posted to Belzec, where he was feared as a brutal member of the camp staff, as recalled by Rudolf Reder. He was killed by Heinrich Gley, in an accidental shooting on March 1, 1943, involving two Ukrainian guards in the dark at the punishment bunker, near the Kommandantur. He was buried at the German military cemetery at Tomaszow Lubelski. In 1995 his remains were moved to the German military cemetery in Przemysl.
JUHRS, Robert Emil. Born on October 17, 1911, in Frankfurt am Main. Painter by profession, but he also worked as a laborer, caretaker, and usher at the Frankfurt Opera House, and as an office clerk. He served at the T4 institute at Hadamar, working as a male nurse, painter, and clerk until late 1941.
He was posted to Belzec in June 1942, where he served at the Ramp and at the Lazarett (field hospital), shooting the sick and disabled. In March 1943, he was posted to the Jewish labor camp at Dorohucza, where peat was dug, and he remained until early November 1943.
Juhrs escorted the working prisoners (Arbeitshaftlinge) from Dorohucza to Trawnki, where all of them were shot during Aktion Erntefest (Harvest Festival). Following the revolt in Sobibor in October 1943, Juhrs was sent to help with the dismantling of the camp and formed a guard cordon of the last prisoners to be killed at Sobibor, once they had finished with the clean-up of the death camp.
Juhrs was ordered to Italy in December 1943. He was acquitted at the Belzec trial at the Landgericht Munich in 1963, and he was also acquited at the Sobibor trial in Hagen on December 20, 1966, on charges arising from his involvement in the demolition of the camp.
KAMM, Rudolf. Born in 1905, in Sedenz, a village near Teplitz Schonau in the Sudetenland. He served at the T4 institute at Pirna-Sonnenstein as a “burner.”
He was posted to the death camp at Belzec in 1942, and records from the nearby hospital at Tomaszow Lubelski show that he was hospitalized on June 17, 1942, until June 25, 1942, and again on the December 30,
1942, until January 31, 1943, with typhus.[143]
He was transferred to Sobibor in 1943, where he supervised the sorting barracks. He was then posted to Italy. Franz Suchomel testified that he saw him for the last time after the end of the war, in a Gasthaus between Mauthern and Hermagor, Carinthia (Austria), the last lodgings of the former unit (R-1 in Trieste).
KLEMINSKY, Otto. Born during 1906, possibly in Berlin. After service in T4, he was posted to Belze, from July 1942 until the spring of 1943. He was then transferred to Udine in Italy. Post war fate unknown.
KLOS, Walter. Served as a T4 driver at the Bernburg and Pirna-Sonnenstein institutions. Also served at the Belzec and Sobibor death camps. He was transferred to the Lublin concentration camp, where he died in unknown circumstances.
KRASCHEWSKI, Friedrich. Served at Belzec until September 1942. Wirth transferred him. Later served in Trieste.
NIEMANN, Johann. Born on August 4, 1913, in Wollern Ostfriesland. Served at a number of concentration camps such as Oranienburg, Esterwegen, and Sachsenhausen between the years 1934–1941. He was a member of T4 and was employed as a “burner” at the Bernburg institute.
Niemann was posted to service in the east at the Belzec death camp, before being posted to Sobibor in January 1943. He was promoted to the rank of SS-Untersturmführer following Himmler’s visit to the camp on February 12, 1943, He was acting camp commandant when the prisoner revolt took place on October 14, 1943, and he was killed in the tailors’ barracks by a blow from an axe wielded by Alexander (Kalimali) Shubayev.
OBERHAUSER, Josef. Born on September 20, 1915, in Munich. Worked on farms after leaving school. In 1935 he joined the SS and the NSDAP. At the outbreak of the war he served with the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler. From 1940, worked in the T4 institutes at Bernburg, Brandenburg, and Grafeneck, burning corpses.
In November 1941, he was assigned to the SS- and Police Leader Lublin and was responsible for the construction of the Belzec camp that commenced in November 1941. Served at Belzec until August 1942, when he became Christian Wirth’s adjutant, as Wirth became inspector of the SS-Sonderkommandos Aktion Reinhard. Oberhauser was promoted to the rank of SS-Untersturmführer because of his service in Aktion Reinhardt.