The 30th of January 1933, Germany. Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party,
is appointed chancellor of Germany and aims to lead the German “master race” to victory
in the "racial struggle" against those deemed as “inferior” peoples, especially the Jews. The Nazi
regime quickly begins to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jewish people and gradually
excludes them from professions, businesses, and public spaces. The first concentration
camp – Dachau – is established less than 2 months after Hitler becomes the chancellor.
Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its European allies would establish more than
44,000 camps and other incarceration sites, including ghettos. The perpetrators would use
these locations for forced labor, detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and
the mass murder of millions. One such perpetrator is a German SS functionary Siegfried Graetschus.
Siegfried Graetschus was born on the 9th of June 1916 in Tilsit then part
of the German Empire. After attending elementary school, he worked as a farmer.
Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933. A key part of Nazi ideology was
to define the enemy and those who posed a threat to the so-called “Aryan” race. Nazi propaganda was
essential in promoting the myth of the “national community” and identifying who should be excluded.
Jews were considered the main enemy. However, Jews were not the only group excluded from the
vision of the "national community." Propaganda helped to define who would be excluded from the
new society and justified measures against the "outsiders." These so-called outsiders included
Jews, Roma and Sinti people, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Germans viewed as
genetically inferior and harmful to the "national health" such as people with mental illnesses,
intellectual or physical disabilities, epileptics, congenitally deaf and blind persons,
chronic alcoholics, drug users, and others. While most Germans disapproved of anti-Jewish
violence, dislike of Jews, easily stirred up in hard times, extended far beyond the Nazi
Party faithful. The majority of Germans at least passively accepted discrimination against Jews.
During periods preceding new measures against the Jews, propaganda campaigns created an atmosphere
tolerant of violence against them. Propaganda that demonized Jews also served to prepare the
German population, in the context of national emergency, for harsher measures, such as mass
deportations and, eventually, genocide in which Siegfried Graetschus played an important role.
In 1935 he joined the SS and one year later he joined the Nazi Party. From 1939, the SS
assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question which then culminated in 1941,
when the leadership planned, coordinated and directed the so-called Final Solution.
This “solution” was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.; also known as the Holocaust.
SS officers, such as Siegfried Graetschus, were directly responsible for the management
of concentration camps, where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
Graetschus first served in Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was located north
of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses,
Roma and Sinti people and, later, Soviet civilians. One of the camp’s
most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son,
who died at Sachsenhausen in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
After the Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, Graetschus 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.
Graetschus worked in Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Bernburg killing centers.
His duties included moving the murdered victims from the gas chambers to the crematoria.
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.
Construction of Belzec, the first killing center to implement Operation Reinhard,
began in November 1941. During the "experimental
phase" of the camp's operation, it was probably Graetschus who, together with Lorenz Hackenholt,
transformed the confiscated post-office vehicle into a mobile gas chamber which was used to murder
people. However, the killing process often failed to be completed quickly, inflicting horrific
suffering on the victims as they suffocated to death. Ultimately, Commandant Christian Wirth
decided not to use it more widely, deciding that stationary gas chambers would be opened in Belzec.
Beginning in March 1942, Jews from various parts of the General Government, which was
an annexed territory of Poland run by German authorities, were deported to Belzec, where
they were murdered in gas chambers with carbon monoxide gas generated by large diesel engines.
The authorities at the Belzec killing center consisted of a small staff
20-30 of German SS and police officials. Between March and December 1942,
when the last transport of people arrived, the Germans deported approximately 434,500
Jews and an undetermined number of Poles and Roma people to Belzec, where they were killed.
When the camp was liquidated in June 1943, the Jewish forced laborers were either shot
or deported to the Sobibor killing center to be gassed. It was the third-deadliest extermination
camp, exceeded only by Treblinka and Auschwitz. Only seven Jews performing slave labour with the
camp's Sonderkommando – special detachments working in the killing area - survived World
War II. The lack of viable witnesses able to testify about the camp's operation is
the primary reason why Belzec is little known, despite the victim number count.
After the Belzec camp was dismantled, the Germans ploughed over the site. They built
a manor house and planted trees and crops to disguise the area as a farm. A former auxiliary
police guard was placed on the site to farm the property in order to further camouflage the site.
Siegfried Graetschus then briefly served in Treblinka extermination camp which was
constructed in the summer of 1942. It was the third killing center, after . Belzec and Sobibor,
established by Operation Reinhard authorities. Deportations to Treblinka came mainly from the
ghettos of Warsaw and Radom districts in the General Government and continued until the
spring of 1943. Most prominent among the deportations were the approximately 7,000
Jews transported from the Warsaw ghetto after its liquidation following the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
By the time the Treblinka killing center was dismantled in the fall of 1943, the camp
personnel had murdered an estimated 925,000 Jews, as well as an unknown number of Poles,
Roma people, and Soviet prisoners of war. As with Belzec, all traces of the camp’s existence
were destroyed. Lupine flowers were sown on the grounds, and an ethnic German farmer was
installed on the property to camouflage the reality of what had occurred at this site.
In August 1942 Siegfried Graetschus was deployed in the Sobibor extermination camp.
There he was promoted to SS- Untersturmführer and commander of the 90 to 120 Trawniki men composed
of Eastern European collaborators trained in the SS camp in Trawniki.
These men who guarded the camp were considered difficult to manage and unreliable. Graetschus
succeeded Erich Lachmann - an alcoholic, thief and mentally handicapped SS functionary.
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.
Approximately 50 German and Austrian personnel served at the site,
and they were generally of lower-middle-class backgrounds. According to the survivors,
female local civilians from the village of Sobibor were often employed in the camp as housekeeping
staff and cooks. These civilians not only had economic incentives of the camp’s existence,
but it is believed that they also knew what was going on inside the camp.
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 transports 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 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 were 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.
The camp commandant Franz Reichleitner tolerated this plunder with his SS men,
but not with camp inmates and Trawniki men. In one case, Reichleitner investigated a theft and
then had three Jews and two Trawniki men shot. The man who shot them was Siegfried Graetschus.
Between the transports the SS personnel were not only drinking but also playing
music as well as enjoying card and board games. All of this was going
on in a camp where thousands of people were being murdered.
The camp’s personnel consisted of barbers, butchers, one guard had a photo store in
Weimar and there was even a champion boxer who counted how many whiplashes it took for
him to kill a Jew. He had a special, heavy whip especially made for him.
As an award, they even had an official trip to Berlin and Potsdam.
During the year and a half that Sobibor was operational,
several attempts were made by the prisoners to escape.
On one such occasion when 72 Dutch Jews were organizing an escape and were betrayed by
the kapo, they were executed on the order of Johann Niemann, the camp’s deputy commander.
Afterward in the summer of 1943, rumors began to circulate that Sobibor would soon cease
operations and the prisoners understood that this would mean 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 late in the afternoon on the 14th of October 1943.
The targets were carefully selected and the first person to be assassinated by the prisoners was
deputy commander of Sobibor Johann Niemann who was the highest-ranking SS officer on duty that day.
Another man executed was Siegfried Graetschus, commander of the Trawniki guards.
On the 14th of October 1943, the conspirators lured Graetschus to a tailor's workshop. The camp
prisoner Arkady Wajspapir, a former sergeant in the Red Army and Pole Jehuda Lerner had
been instructed by the military head of the underground committee, Alexander Pechersky,
to eliminate Graetschus. When Siegfried Graetschus entered the workshop, he stopped at the door and
tried on a coat that the tailors had made for him. Arkady Wajspapir stepped from behind the curtain,
walked past Graetschus to the door, turned around and hit him on the head with the sharp edge of an
axe. Graetschus let out a scream but because the blow was obviously not forceful enough,
he did not immediately fall to the ground. Then Lerner came at him and buried the axe into his
scull splitting it open. Graetschus was dead before he hit the floor.
Wajspapir then took the gun from his holster and pocketed his papers. The
tailors dragged the body away from the door and covered it with clothes.
At that moment the Ukrainian guard Rai Klatt entered the workshop. He bumped
into the pile of clothes under which Graetschus was lying, bent down and asked what that was.
The tailors panicked but Lerner and Wajspapir kept their cool and
killed the guard with their axes as well. Lerner took his pistol and they reported
to military leader Alexander Pechersky that they had completed their assignments.
Another of the targets was Rudolf Beckmann who was to be killed by 2 inmates, but at the last moment
one of them got scared and did not want to go. Chaim Engel, the previously mentioned Polish
prisoner, knowing that there was no turning back because too many Germans were dead,
volunteered to kill Beckmann in his office. Chaim and a kapo named Pozyczki went to the
administration building where they found Beckmann behind his desk. While Pozyczki restrained
Beckmann, Engel stabbed their overseer with a bread knife and with every stab he cried, "This
is for my father, for my brother, and for all the Jews you killed." When Beckmann was dead, the two,
not having enough time to better hide his body, pushed Beckmann under his desk and took his rifle.
In total 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 didn't run at all.
Approximately 300 prisoners were able to escape, but most of those were chased down
and killed. Those prisoners who had not joined the escape were killed,
as well. But some 50 of the escapees did survive the war.
Among them were Arkady Wajspapir and Yehuda Lerner. After the war Lerner recalled how a Polish
train worker told them they were bound for Sobibor to be cremated. However, nobody believed him.
The occupants of Lerner's railcar had opened a hole in the bottom of the car to use as a toilet,
and they could have escaped through it, yet nobody did because they could not believe that
they would all be killed. But when they arrived at the camp labeled Sobibor, it was too late.
After the prisoner revolt, the SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered that the Sobibor camp be closed.
There were no tears shed for Siegfried Graetschus.
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