![]() ![]() “I was no anti-Semite, but we had to do our duty. Just as you dream about it at night.”īlatt asked Frenzel if he carried out his actions due to anti-Semitism or orders. I dream about it at night for sixteen years in prison. You don’t understand the circumstances in which we found ourselves,” Frenzel responded. “You don’t know what went on inside of us. He noted that Frenzel not only did not prevent any of it from happening but actively took part in the mass murder. ![]() I was greatly bothered by it all.”īlatt collected himself and began pressing the former death camp supervisor. “Not only am I beside myself now, no, back then, too. “I can only say it now in tears,” Frenzel replied. But I would like to extend my personal apologies to you.”īlatt still couldn’t quite comprehend what Frenzel had said: “You would like to apologize?” he asked again. “I would like to apologize,” Frenzel repeated. ![]() “You want to apologize to me?” he asked incredulously. “I would like to apologize to you,” Frenzel responded. At least a quarter-million Jews were murdered at Sobibor.”īlatt asked Frenzel why he wanted to meet him. Besides me, nobody survived not my father, not my mother, not my brother, none one of the two thousand Jews from my town, Izbica. I survived because you made me your shoeshine boy. You ranked third in the chain of command at the extermination camp of Sobibor…I was fifteen years old. With that smile on your face you could be anybody’s neighbor, anybody’s fellow sporting-club member. He had a more personal agenda.īlatt began the meeting by pointing out the enormity of the crimes Frenzel had committed: “Here you are drinking beer. Frenzel, however, saw the meeting very differently. To tolerate meeting with the murderer, Blatt tried to distance himself emotionally, to act only as an objective writer carrying out important historical research. Blatt agreed to meet to discuss details of the camp for the history of Sobibor he was writing. Blatt met Frenzel in a hotel room, the only time a Nazi death camp supervisor was ever interviewed by a death camp survivor. During his second trial, he agreed to speak with Toivi Blatt, one of the few survivors of the death camp, who had arrived in West Germany and testified against Frenzel. I was shocked that just during the war, when I wanted to serve my homeland, I had to be in such a terrible extermination camp.” 1įrenzel served 16 years in prison, was released on a technicality and then retried. ![]() To my regret, I was then convinced of its necessity. In his defense Frenzel stated: “As I already pointed out, under the prevailing war conditions, which are now difficult to comprehend, I unfortunately believed that what was going on in Sobibor was lawful. “If he didn’t like somebody, he shot them.” 2Īnother survivor testified that one time Frenzel grabbed an abandoned baby in an incoming transport, smashed its skull and threw it aside, like a dead rat. His whip was very loose.” 1 “Frenzel was really one of the bad ones – if he could kill people he did,” survivor Chaim Engel stated. He then whipped the dying man and shot him with his pistol.Īnother SS man said of Frenzel: "He was one of the most brutal members of the permanent staff in the camp. He often whipped prisoners and, one time when a prisoner tried to commit suicide, Frenzel shouted that Jews had no right to kill themselves. In one incident, Frenzel ordered the deaths of 20 Jews as punishment for the escape of two prisoners. Most defendants denied they had carried out any crimes or claimed they were only “following orders.” One of the few who did express remorse was SS Staff Sergeant Karl Frenzel, one of the top commanders at the Sobibor Death Camp.Īt the Sobibor trials in 1965, Frenzel was charged with personally murdering 42 Jews and participating in the murder of roughly a quarter of a million at the camp. Nazi War Crimes Trials: Table of Contents| Sobibor Trials| Dachau TrialsĪfter World War Two, Nazi war criminals were tried in courts around Europe. ![]()
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