Karl Frenzel (SS member)

Karl August Wilhelm Frenzel (born August 28, 1911 in Zehdenick , † September 2, 1996 in Garbsen ) was SS-Oberscharführer and commandant of Camp I in the Sobibor extermination camp .

Life

Frenzel, a carpenter and butcher by trade, joined the SA and the NSDAP in 1930 ( membership number 334,948). As part of the T4 campaign , he was deployed to the Grafeneck , Hadamar and Bernburg euthanasia centers from January 1940 .

From August 28, 1942 until the prisoner uprising on October 14, 1943, he worked in the Sobibor extermination camp . There he was involved in the “ Final Solution ”, the systematic, industrial murder of a total of millions of Jews as well as Sinti and Roma as part of Aktion Reinhardt .

It was in the late 1943 surgical zone Adriatisches Küstenland for special department use R to Trieste added that the "extermination", the confiscated Jewish property and the antipartisan served.

After the end of the war he was arrested by the US Army and interned in a POW camp near Munich , from which he was released at the end of November 1945. He later worked in a film studio in Göttingen.

On December 20, 1966, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Hagen district court in the Sobibor trial for the murder of six Jews and for his further participation in the murder of 150,000 camp inmates as commandant of the extermination camp of Sobibór No. I. In 1982, his life imprisonment was initially overturned due to a formal matter after an appeal. In 1983 the Sobibór survivor Thomas Blatt confronted him with his past and tried to investigate Frenzel's motives in a conversation.

In 1943, one prisoner tried to take his own life by cutting his wrists, but he was unsuccessful and was dying in the barracks. Frenzel decided that no Jew had the right to kill himself and whipped the prisoner. Then he shot him.

In 1985 Frenzel was again sentenced to life imprisonment. However, due to his poor health, the sentence was waived. Frenzel lived in a nursing home near Hanover until his death in 1996 .

Movies

In the British-Yugoslav film Escape from Sobibor Escape from Sobibor Karl Frenzel was played by Kurt Raab .
In the Russian film SOBIBOR (2018), Karl Frenzel was played by Christopher Lambert .

literature

Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 (= Fischer 16048 The time of National Socialism ). Updated edition, 2nd edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
Jules Schelvis : Sobibór extermination camp. Translated from the Dutch by Gero Deckers (= Center for Research on Antisemitism : Series of Documents, Texts, Materials; Vol. 24) . Metropol, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-926893-33-8 .

Web links

Sobibor. In: deathcamps.org. September 15, 2006.; accessed on June 15, 2019

Individual evidence

↑ ^a ^b cf. Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 164.
^ Yitzak Arad: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard death camps. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN et al. 1987, ISBN 0-253-34293-7 , pp. 191f.
^ Sobibor Perpetrators: Frenzel, Karl SS Oberscharführer. In: deathcamps.org. September 23, 2006, accessed June 15, 2019 .
↑ ^a ^b Thomas Toivi sheet: Sobibor, The Forgotten Revolt: Murderers. In: sobibor.info. Archived from the original on May 4, 2008 ; accessed on June 15, 2019 .
↑ Waltraud Schwarz: A former inmate of the Nazi extermination camp tells of his difficult fate in St. Georgen. The survivor of Sobibór . In: Südkurier , June 12, 2009.
^ Thomas Toivi sheet: The Forgotten Revolt - Confrontation: The Confrontation with a Murderer. In: sobibor.info. 1984, archived from the original on December 9, 2013 ; accessed on June 15, 2019 (English, interview with Karl Frenzel).
^ Thomas T. Blatt: Conversation with Karl A. Frenzel . In: Franz-Josef Hutter, Carsten Tessmer (Hrsg.): Human rights in Germany: history and present . Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-406-42008-5 , pp. 116 .

personal data
SURNAME	Frenzel, Karl
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Frenzel, Karl August Wilhelm (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	German SS Oberscharführer and camp commandant of the Sobibor I extermination camp
DATE OF BIRTH	August 28, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH	Zehdenick
DATE OF DEATH	September 2, 1996
Place of death	Garbsen

[Klee164-1] . Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 164.

[2] Yitzak Arad: Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka. The Operation Reinhard death camps. Indiana University Press, Bloomington IN et al. 1987, ISBN 0-253-34293-7 , pp. 191f.

[3] Sobibor Perpetrators: Frenzel, Karl SS Oberscharführer. In: deathcamps.org. September 23, 2006, accessed June 15, 2019 .

[sobibor.info-4] Thomas Toivi sheet: Sobibor, The Forgotten Revolt: Murderers. In: sobibor.info. Archived from the original on May 4, 2008 ; accessed on June 15, 2019 .

[5] Waltraud Schwarz: A former inmate of the Nazi extermination camp tells of his difficult fate in St. Georgen. The survivor of Sobibór . In: Südkurier , June 12, 2009.

[6] Thomas Toivi sheet: The Forgotten Revolt - Confrontation: The Confrontation with a Murderer. In: sobibor.info. 1984, archived from the original on December 9, 2013 ; accessed on June 15, 2019 (English, interview with Karl Frenzel).

[7] Thomas T. Blatt: Conversation with Karl A. Frenzel . In: Franz-Josef Hutter, Carsten Tessmer (Hrsg.): Human rights in Germany: history and present . Beck, Munich 1997, ISBN 978-3-406-42008-5 , pp. 116 .