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, Sobibor,
and Treblinka. The last commandant of Treblinka will become Kurt Franz.
Kurt Hubert Franz was born on the 17th of January 1914 in Düsseldorf,
then part of the German Empire. From 1920 to 1928, he attended public school in Düsseldorf and then
worked as a messenger. Franz’s mother was an observant Catholic and when Franz's father died,
his mother re-married to a man with a strong right-wing nationalist outlook. Franz joined
several right-wing national groups and served in the voluntary labor corps. He
also trained with a master butcher for one year. Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany on January
30, 1933, when he was appointed as the Chancellor of Germany by President Paul von Hindenburg. By
this time Franz was already a member of the Nazi Party, which he had joined one year earlier. After
performing the military service in October 1937, he joined the SS-'Death's Head Units.
The SS Death's Head Units named for the skull-and-cross-bones symbol worn on
the right collar of their uniforms was established in 1934 by Theodor Eicke,
the first commandant of Dachau and later inspector of concentration camps. It was an independent unit
within the SS responsible for administering the Nazi concentration and extermination camps
throughout Germany and later in occupied Europe. The units were trained to conduct themselves with
strict discipline and cruelty, and to view the prisoners under their guard as enemies of the
state who should be destroyed if possible. They were responsible for facilitating what
the Nazis called the Final Solution, known since the war as the Holocaust
which was the genocide of Jews in Europe. Having first received training with the Third
Death Head Regiment Thuringia at Weimar, Franz began his service at the Buchenwald
concentration camp as a cook and a guard. After the Second World War began on the 1st
of September 1939, Franz started to work for the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4, which was
the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany.
The original plan was to kill people by injecting narcotics until it was realized that these would
cause loss of consciousness, but death would not occur for some time. An alternative suggestion
was made to use carbon monoxide gas. Patients were transported by bus or by rail to one of
the central gassing installations for killing. Within hours of their arrival at such centers,
the victims were murdered in gas chambers. The gas chambers, disguised as shower facilities,
used pure, bottled carbon monoxide gas. T4 functionaries burned the bodies in crematoria
attached to the gassing facilities. Other workers took the ashes of cremated victims
from a common pile and placed them in urns to be sent to the relatives of the
victims. The families or guardians of the victims received such an urn, along with
a death certificate and other documentation, listing a fictitious cause and date of death.
The most infamous of the killing centers was the Hadamar facility.
When in the summer of 1941 the staff celebrated the cremation of their 10,000th patient,
they celebrated with beer and wine. Since the crematorium ovens were often filled with two
corpses at a time, the cremation process was less than perfect which often resulted in the thick,
acrid smog that hung over the town. The Euthanasia Program continued
until the last days of World War II and claimed the lives of 250,000 individuals.
On 20 April 1942, Kurt Franz was promoted to Oberscharführer or Staff Sergeant. In spring of
1942, Franz, along with other veterans of Action T4, went to German-occupied Poland, first to
Lublin concentration camp complex and then to the Bełżec extermination camp, where he stayed until
the end of August 1942 when he was sent to the Treblinka concentration camp. There he was quickly
promoted and from mid-August until November 1943 he served as the last camp commandant.
Treblinka was constructed in the summer of 1942 and 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. At Treblinka, the process of selection and murder was carefully planned and organized.
Incoming trains of about 50 or 60 cars bound for the killing center first stopped at the Malkinia
railway station. Twenty cars at a time were detached from the train and brought into the
killing center. The guards ordered the victims to disembark in the reception area, which contained
the railway siding and platform. One building erected on the platform was disguised as a railway
station, complete with a wooden clock, timetables, destination signs and even a fake ticket office.
German SS and police personnel announced that the deportees had arrived at a transit camp
and they were required to hand over all valuables. The reception area contained a
fenced-in "deportation square" with two barracks in which deportees—with men separated from women
and children—had to undress. It also contained large storerooms. This is where the possessions
relinquished by victims were sorted and stored before being shipped to Germany via Lublin.
A camouflaged, fenced-in path led from the reception area to the gas chamber,
located in the killing area. This was known as the “tube”. Victims were forced to run naked along
this path to the gas chambers, deceptively labeled as showers. Once the chamber doors were sealed,
a large diesel engine installed outside the building pumped in carbon monoxide exhaust
fumes. Within 25 minutes at the most, all lay stretched down dead or, to be more accurate, were
standing up dead since there was not an inch of free space as one Holocaust survivor remembered.
The dead bodies just leaned against each other. During all this time, the Germans would
compete with the Trawniki guards in brutality towards the people who were selected to die.
At each gas chamber there were 5 or 6 Germans besides the motorists with their dogs. Motorists
were the Trawniki guards who operated the gas chambers. With clubs and lashes they drove the
people into the corridor of the gas chambers. Franz had a baby-like face, and for this he was
nicknamed "Lalke" ("doll" in Yiddish) by the Treblinka prisoners. But Franz's appearance
did not accurately reflect his true nature and behind the innocent face there was a sick and
twisted individual with no moral compass. Kurt Franz reviewed the prisoner roll calls
and participated in meting out punishments. For instance, when seven prisoners attempted
to escape the camp, Franz had them taken to Lazarett and shot. He ordered a roll call and
announced that if there were further attempted escapes, and especially if they were successful,
ten prisoners would be shot for every escapee. He was an expert at whipping, twenty-five
or fifty lashes and did it with pleasure, without hurrying. He had his own technique
for raising the whip and striking it down. Kurt Franz also had experience as a boxer before
arriving at Treblinka and he used to use Jews as punching bags. He would use the heads of Jews, and
naturally there was no scarcity of those around. He would grab his victim’s lapel and strike with
the other hand. The victim would have to hold his head straight so that Franz could aim well
and indeed he did this expertly. On one occasion he would "challenge" a Jew to a boxing duel and
gave the prisoner a boxing glove, while keeping one for himself, to give the illusion of a fair
fight. But Franz kept a small pistol in the glove that he kept for himself, and he would proceed to
shoot the prisoner dead once the gloves were on, and they had assumed the starting boxing position.
Franz enjoyed shooting at prisoners or those still in the rail cars with his pistol or a
hunting rifle. He frequently selected bearded men from the newly arriving transports and asked them
whether they believed in God. When the men replied "yes", Franz told each man to hold up a bottle as
a target. He would then say to them, "If your God indeed exists, then I will hit the bottle,
and if He does not exist, then I will hit you." Then Franz would shoot at them.
He also “liked” to kill babies from incoming transports by kicking them. Sometimes in early
1943, in a place where Jewish women were undressing, Franz found 3 babies left there
by their mothers before they were headed to the gas chambers. Franz picked one of the babies up,
kicked it into the air and watched as its had smashed against the wall.
Kurt Franz was also among the German guards who would cut open pregnant Jewish women
after they were gassed to make sure 'the fruit of their wombs' were also dead.
He often made his rounds of the camp riding a horse, and would take his St. Bernard dog, Barry,
along with him. Barry was trained to follow Franz's command, which was usually to bite
the genitalia or buttocks of the prisoners. Barry would bite his victim wherever he could catch him.
The dog was the size of a calf so that, unlike smaller dogs, his shoulders would reach the
buttocks and abdomen of a man of average size. For this reason, he frequently bit his victims
in the buttocks, in the abdomen and often, in the case of male inmates, in the genitals,
sometimes partially biting them off. When the inmate was not very strong, the dog could knock
him to the ground and maul him beyond recognition. Oscar Strawczinski, a Holocaust survivor,
recalled how cruel and sadistic Kurt Franz was: ''Once Lalka was strolling along the platform with
a double- barreled shotgun in his hand and Barry in his wake. He discovered a Jew in front of him,
a neighbor of mine from Czestochowa, by the name of Steiner. Without a second thought, he aimed the
gun at the man’s buttocks and fired. Steiner fell amidst cries of pain. Lalka laughed. He approached
him, commanded him to get up, pull down his pants, and then glanced at the wound. The Jew was beside
himself with pain. His buttocks were oozing blood from the gashes caused by the lead bullets. But
Lalka was not satisfied. He waved his hand and said, “Damn it, the balls haven’t been harmed!”
He continued his stroll to look for a new victim.” Kurt Franz also wrote the lyrics to a song which
celebrated the Treblinka extermination camp. This song was taught to the few newly arriving Jews who
were not killed immediately and were instead forced to work as slave laborers at the camp.
These Jews were forced to memorize the song before nightfall of their first day at the camp. The
melody for the song came from an SS officer at Buchenwald concentration camp. The music
was written in a happy way, as though the deaths were a joyful process rather than one of mourning.
''Looking squarely ahead, brave and joyous, at the world. The squads march to work. All that matters
to us now is Treblinka. It is our destiny. That’s why we’ve become one with Treblinka in no time at
all. We know only the word of our Commander. We know only obedience and duty. We want to serve,
to go on serving until a little luck smiles on us again. Hurray!''
In early 1943 Jewish inmates organized a resistance group. When camp operations neared
completion, the prisoners feared they would be killed, and the camp dismantled. During the late
spring and summer of 1943, the resistance leaders decided to revolt. On 2 August 1943, Franz along
with four SS men and sixteen Ukrainians went for a swim in the nearby Bug River and this was a
chance for prisoners to quietly seize weapons from the camp armory and take over the camp.
However, they were soon discovered and hundreds of them stormed the main gate in an attempt to
escape. Many were killed by machine-gun fire but more than 300 did escape—though two-thirds of them
were eventually tracked down and killed by German SS and police, as well as by military units. After
the unsuccessful revolt Kurt Franz was instructed to dismantle the camp and eliminate every trace
of evidence that it had ever existed. Surviving prisoners were helping with the camp's dismantling
and after completion of this job they were all shot by the German SS and police authorities.
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. 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. After Treblinka, in late autumn 1943, Franz was
ordered to Trieste and northern Italy, where he participated in the persecution of partisans and
Jews until the war's end. He was wounded in late 1944 and, after recovery, employed as security
officer on the Görz-Trieste railway line. After the war, Kurt Franz first worked as
a laborer on bridges until 1949, before returning to his former occupation as
a cook and worked in Düsseldorf for 10 years before his arrest on the 2nd of December 1959,
after a search of his home found a photo album of Treblinka, which was titled ‘Beautiful Years”.
Franz, at the Treblinka Trials in 1965, denied ever killing a person or setting
his dog on any prisoner, claiming that he only ever beat one prisoner.
However, his lies did not help him escape justice. On 3 September he was found guilty of collective
murder of at least 300,000 people, 35 counts of murder involving at least 139 people,
and for attempted murder. He was sentenced to life imprisonment but was released in
1993 for health reasons. Kurt Franz was 84 years old when he died as a free man on the
4th of July 1998, in Wuppertal, Germany. There were no tears shed for Kurt Franz.
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