The 1st of September 1939. After a false accusation that the Poles attacked a German radio
station, Nazi Germany launches a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland triggering World War 2.
After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppress the Poles whom they consider
to be racially inferior and, in the weeks, following the German attack on Poland, German SS,
police, and military units shoot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the
Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia. In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany begins to
implement a plan codenamed “Operation Reinhard” to systematically murder almost two million Jews
living in the German-administered territory of occupied Poland, called the General Government.
Three killing centers are established as part of this plan: Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor.
The most fearful officer of Sobibor will become Gustav Wagner.
Gustav Franz Wagner was born on the 18th of July 1911 in Vienna, then part of Austria-Hungary,
and was a mechanic by profession. From 1928 he served as a soldier in the Austrian army and his
main political goal was the annexation of Austria to the German Reich. He shared this goal with the
German Nazi Party which he joined in on January 19, 1931. Beginning in May 1933, the Austrian
Nazis waged a propaganda and terror campaign which was encouraged and funded by Germany.
The Nazi goal was to undermine the regime of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss
by making it look incompetent. They staged disruptive protests and brawled with political
opponents and the police. Austrian Nazis set off explosives and tear gas bombs in public
places and Jewish-owned businesses. In June 1933, in response to a fatal Nazi bombing,
the Dollfuss regime banned the Austrian Nazi Party and its affiliates. Although the Nazi movement
became illegal in Austria, the Austrian Nazis continued to operate illegally within the country.
In 1934, Wagner fled to Nazi Germany after serving his time in prison for daubing Swastika graffiti
and putting up Nazi posters. There he joined the SA, a paramilitary organization protecting
Adolf Hitler and his party in the yearly years of the Nazi regime and in the late 1930’s he became
a member of the SS under Heinrich Himmler. After the Second World War began on the 1st
of September 1939, Wagner started to work for the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4, which was
the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany.
The patients were transported by bus or by rail into 6 killing centers where they were murdered.
In these centers the Nazis gassed, shot, or killed by lethal injections those who
were deemed “unworthy of life “such as residents of welfare institutions,
some concentration camp inmates, the chronically sick, the mentally and physically disabled,
homosexuals, and even sick German soldiers. Wagner worked at Hartheim killing center near
Linz and his duties included cremating the bodies of murdered victims.
The T4 program predated the genocide of European Jewry, the Holocaust, by approximately two years.
Historians estimate that the program claimed the lives of 250,000 men, women,
and children. In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the
2 million Jews living in German-occupied Poland. This plan was codenamed Operation Reinhard and
as part of this action, three killing centers were established: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Because of his experience in the T4 program in March 1942 he was
sent to the Sobibor concentration camp where he worked as a deputy commandant.
German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sobibor between May 1942, when
the regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943. Most of the Jews brought to Sobibor were
immediately gassed by carbon monoxide which had been piped into the gas chambers from an engine.
About 250,000 victims were murdered in this killing center.
The Germans constructed Sobibor as a rectangle - 1312 by 1969 feet. A double barbed-wire fence,
woven with tree branches, surrounded the perimeter of the camp. This design was intended to hide the
view of what was inside. It had two side-by-side gates, one for trains and another for foot traffic
and vehicles. The Nazis paid special attention to the front compound which consisted of living
quarters and recreational buildings for the camp personnel. The SS officers lived in cottages with
colorful names which helped conceal the purpose of the camp from new arrivals,
who would arrive on the adjacent ramp. When the transport of 40 to 60 freight
cars arrived at the Sobibor railway station, only 20 cars at a time were taken into the camp,
while the rest of the victims remained locked in the rail cars. The victims were then brought into
the so-called arrival area where an SS man would give a speech welcoming them saying that they had
reached a transit camp on their way to the labor camps. They were also told that before embarking
on the next part of their journey, they were to take showers, have their clothes disinfected and
get a meal. The men and women were then separated, and the children were sent with the women. The
Nazis ordered the victims to remove their clothing and hand over their valuables. The Jews were then
marched on the run to the gas chambers. The honking of the geese would obscure the cries
of victims from those still sitting in the locked rail cars as they were being beaten, screamed at,
and having warning shots fired at them. About 450-550 Jews were forced into the
chambers at a time. The gas chambers were then sealed once the maximum number of victims was
inside. Poisonous gas was then piped in. Within 20-30 minutes, all those inside were dead. Those
who were too ill, weak, or elderly to make the walk to the gas chambers were shot in an open pit.
The SS personnel working at Sobibor enjoyed a number of privileges such as higher pay
and regular visits home – every three months they could visit their families for 2 weeks.
The SS also stole possessions of the victims such as gold, food, hair and other
valuables. The guards would even take toys from murdered children back home to their families.
Wagner handled day-to-day operations in the camp and soon he would become the most feared and hated
man in Sobibor. He was considered by inmates as a brutal, unpredictable animal-like sadist,
who needed blood and the moment he was seen prisoners knew that someone was going to die.
He was almost 2 meters tall, weighed more than a hundred kilograms and was as strong as an ox.
He had extremely long arms, which went down to his knees, in a ridiculously disproportionate
way. He also had a severe deformity in one of his shoulders, which was much narrower than the other,
and this made him walk with a strange gait, always leaning towards the right. The Sobibor survivors
recalled that his way of swinging his body right and left gave him the appearance of an orangutan.
According to the Sobibor survivors, such as Thomas Blatt, Wagner did not kill the same
way as other Germans did. He would use an ax, a shovel, whip or even his bare hands. He would
pick up a shovel and simply split a man’s head in two for a triviality and after he killed someone,
he would become very calm, happy and with a smile on his face he would chat to people.
On one occasion, Wagner was looking through a window checking how prisoners were sorting the
suitcases. He then saw a boy steal a can of sardines. He grabbed the boy and called all
inmates out, put them in a half-circle and shot the boy right in front of everybody.
Then he said this would happen to every one of them if they touched
anything. Erich Bauer, an SS officer who was in charge of Sobibor’s gas chambers,
once overheard a conversation between Gustav Wagner and some of his fellow SS
officers how they were discussing the number of victims in the death camps of Treblinka,
Belzec and Sobibor and expressed their regret that Sobibor ‘’came last’’ in the competition.
Gustav Wagner along with other SS guards and officers exercised absolute authority over
the prisoners and treated them as a source of entertainment. They forced prisoners to
sing while working, while marching, and even during public executions. They were
forced to sing demeaning songs such as "I am a Jew with a big nose’’. Inmates
also had to perform mock cockfights for the SS, with their arms tied behind their backs.
Wagner’s favorite activity was to shoot a father and son with one bullet. He would force the father
and son to lean their heads together and then killed them with a single shot. Another time he
found a woman who smuggled her baby in a knapsack into the camp. He then brought the woman and baby
outside, made the mother kneel and he shot the baby first. After the woman started screaming,
he shot her as well. Due to his brutality, Wagner was known as "The Beast" and "Wolf".
Gustav Wagner was also a sexual deviant. At a postwar trial, the previously mentioned SS officer
Erich Bauer, who worked at Sobibor together with Wagner testified that Wagner and others had been
involved in sexual orgies with Jewish women. According to his testimony on one occasion
Wagner with other SS men would visit Ruth and Gisela, two women from Austria, who were film and
theater actresses, in a forester house, gang rape them and then have them shot. Because he lived in
a room above, Bauer complained that because of the noisy sex parties that were conducted
in the forester house, he was not able to fall asleep after coming back from a long journey.
In summer 1943 rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease operations
and the prisoners understood that this meant certain death for all of them.
The Sobibor prisoners knew this since the Belzec prisoners, who did the same work as they did,
had sewn messages into their clothing before they were killed by Sobibor guards who had shot them
the same day they arrived in the camp. The next day the Sobibor prisoners found all their clothes
full of blood. Chaim Engel, a Polish Jewish prisoner, found a note in a pocket which said:
“We worked at Belzec for one year and did not know where we would be sent next. They said it
would be Germany. Now we are in Sobibor and know what to expect. Be aware that you will
be killed also! Avenge us! “ And they did! In September 1943 twenty Jewish Red Army
prisoners of war, the soldiers who had the necessary expertise to pull off an escape,
arrived at Sobibor on a transport from the Minsk Ghetto and were selected for labor.
One of them, Alexander Pechersky, would become a leader of the revolt which began around 4:00
in the afternoon of October 14, 1943 and one hour later, a total of 11 SS officers
were killed by the rebels. Chaos then took over. The prisoners had to escape by climbing over a
barbed wire fence or by running out the main gate through a mine field under heavy machine gun fire.
Some stepped on mines. Some gave up and did not run at all.
Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape,
but most of those were chased down and killed. But some 50 of the escapees did survive the war.
Wagner was not present at the camp on the day of the Sobibor revolt,
having taken a holiday with his then wife Karin to celebrate the birth of a daughter, Marion.
The inmates knew of Wagner's absence and believed that it would improve their chances of success.
Wagner was considered the strictest in terms of prisoner supervision at the camp.
After the successful revolt, Wagner was ordered to aid in closing the camp. He
helped to dismantle and remove evidence of the camp by ruthlessly commanding the
Jewish prisoners who performed this task. After the Jews destroyed every building,
removed the minefields and tore down the barbed wire, Wagner killed them.
For his work at the camp Gustav Wagner was rewarded with War Merit Cross Second Class
and Heinrich Himmler described him as one of the most deserving men of Operation Reinhard.
After Sobibor, Wagner was transferred to Italy, where he participated in the
deportation of Jews with other staff from the extermination camps and T4 program.
Wagner ended the war in an American prisoner-of-war camp but after several
weeks he was released. In 1948, while working on a building site in Graz, Austria, Franz Stangl,
a friend and former commandant of Sobibor, passed by. Stangl had escaped from prison
and supported by an underground Nazi escape group, was on route to Vatican.
Wagner immediately joined his former commandant and together fled to Italy. On arrival in Rome,
they went to the priest confessor at the German Catholic community, Bishop Alois Hudal, who after
the end of the war helped establish the ratlines, which were systems of escape routes for German
Nazis and other fascists fleeing Europe from 1945 onwards in the aftermath of World War II.
Hudal arranged Red Cross passports for Wagner and Stangl and, three weeks later,
they sailed for Beirut, Lebanon, and eventually in 1952 they fled to Brazil. Neither then, nor
in the next 26 years did anybody in Brazil ever inquire of Wagner's past who married a Brazilian
woman and built a solid Bavarian-style house in the isolated wooded hills outside Sao Paulo.
Back in Germany, some of the former SS officers at Sobibor were caught and tried but for decades
German prosecutors believed that Wagner was out of their reach and was hiding in Egypt.
When Stangl was put on trial in Germany, he testified that Wagner was living in Brazil.
Wagner was finally arrested on 30 May 1978 after an investigation by Simon Wiesenthal, a Jewish
Austrian Holocaust survivor and Nazi hunter. There were several countries who wanted to
prosecute Wagner including West Germany, Austria, Poland or Israel. Wagner,
who after the war sentenced to death in absentia, was growing mentally unstable and suicidal.
While in Brazilian jail he attempted suicide by smashing his reading glasses and eating
the broken glass. Then he was taken to a prison hospital where he tried to commit suicide 2 more
times. First by cutting his wrists in a bathtub and second by bashing his head against the wall.
The supreme court of Brazil, however, decided that for a technical reason they
would not allow the extradition of Wagner and the Brazilian authorities allowed him to go home.
In a 1979 BBC interview, Wagner showed no remorse for his activities in running the camp, remarking:
“I had no feelings. ... It just became another job. In the evening we never discussed our work,
but just drank and played cards.” On the 3rd of October 1980, Wagner,
then 69 years old, was found dead at his house with a knife in his chest. His attorney
reported his death as a suicide, but many believe there might be more to the story.
There were no tears shed for Gustav Wagner.
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