Willi Mentz

Willi Bruno Mentz (born April 30, 1904 in Schönhagen (today a district of Pritzwalk in Brandenburg ), † June 25, 1978 in Paderborn ) was a German SS sergeant and was sentenced by the Düsseldorf Regional Court on April 3 for his crimes committed in the Treblinka extermination camp . Sentenced to life in prison in the Treblinka Trials in September 1965 .

Life

Mentz attended an elementary school , which he left in the penultimate grade. Then he worked - like his father - in a sawmill. In 1922 he worked for a year and a half in a lignite mine in Lichterfelde near Finsterwalde in Niederlausitz . In 1923 he moved to Mecklenburg to train as a milker , which he completed with a journeyman's examination. He worked as a milker until 1926 and passed the master craftsman examination in this profession in 1929. Mentz married in 1929 and had four daughters. Mentz joined the NSDAP in autumn 1932 .

After 1933

From 1934 to 1940 he worked as a master milker . In early 1940, Mentz applied to the police without success. Thereupon the Chamber of Agriculture proposed him as master milker in the killing facility Schloss Grafeneck in Grafeneck near Münsingen . There he was responsible for the cattle and pigs there for a year and a half. He then came to the Nazi killing center in Hadamar near Limburg an der Lahn, where he worked in the nursery until early summer 1942 and was responsible for the institution's central heating. The mentally ill were murdered in Hadamar asylum and their corpses burned in crematoria.

At the end of June or beginning of July 1942 he was assigned to Lublin with August Rent , where he was promoted to SS- Unterscharführer . At that time Irmfried Eberl was the camp commandant and Otto Stadie was the administrative manager in the Treblinka extermination camp .

Mentz was later with August Rent and other SS men in the lower camp, where he was responsible for the 20 to 30-man agricultural command. Every two weeks, Mentz was responsible for the so-called “hospital” in the camp, in which sick and frail Jews were shot in the neck because they prevented the so-called “transport Jews” from being forwarded to the gas chambers. The Jews had to undress and sit on an earth wall. There Mentz shot the victims who fell into the hospital pit after the shooting, in which they were burned. If the number of those to be shot was too large, the camp's Trawniki men were called in .

The number of people Mentz killed by shooting in the neck in the hospital could not be precisely determined. The District Court of Düsseldorf stated in its judgment: "The only thing that is certain is that the number of transport Jews he personally killed is in the thousands and that he also liquidated several hundred working Jews."

Because of his appearance with a long brown face and sharp teeth, he was nicknamed Frankenstein among the camp inmates .

Mentz stayed until the camp was closed at the end of November 1943.

After 1943

At Christmas 1943, Mentz was assigned to the " Special Department Operation R " in Udine in northern Italy, where he fought against partisans and was used to secure traffic routes. In the spring of 1945 he was wounded and spent a few weeks in a hospital in Udin. He was taken prisoner by the English, from which he was released in the summer of 1945.

After 1946

From 1946 Mentz worked again as a master milker, which he had to give up in 1952 due to an illness of tuberculosis . From 1952 until his arrest in 1960 he lived on a disability pension.

Arrest and conviction

Mentz was arrested on June 23, 1960 in his place of residence in Niedermeien in the Kalletal in the Lemgo district . On September 3, 1965 he was sentenced to life imprisonment for aiding and abetting by the Düsseldorf Regional Court for the collective murder of at least 300,000 people and aiding and abetting murder of at least 25 people. He was released on March 31, 1978 and died on June 25, 1978.

literature

• Richard Glazar : The Trap with the Green Fence. Survival in Treblinka. With a foreword by Wolfgang Benz . Fischer publishing house. Frankfurt am Main 1992. ISBN 3-596-10764-4
• Samuel Willenberg : Treblinka Lager. Revolt. Escape. Warsaw Uprising. Pp. 95/96. Unrast-Verlag , Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-89771-820-3
• LG Düsseldorf, September 3, 1965 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XXII, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1981, No. 596, pp. 1–238 Subject matter of the proceedings: gassing of at least 700,000 predominantly Jewish men, women and children and, in a minority, also of gypsies. Fatal abuse, shooting, killing and hanging of individual prisoners as well as being mangled by 'Barry', the camp commandant's dog.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Death register of the Paderborn registry office No. 705/1978.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Düsseldorf Regional Court: Treblinka trial judgment of September 3, 1965, 8 I Ks 2/64 ( Memento of the original from March 21, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed October 2, 2009 
3. ^ Willenberg: Camp Treblinka. P. 29 (see literature)
4. ^ Willenberg: Camp Treblinka. Note 10, p. 218