Karl Frenzel

Karl August Wilhelm Frenzel (20 August 1911 – 2 September 1996) was an SS noncommissioned officer in Sobibor extermination camp.

After the Second World War, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes, but he was ultimately released after serving 16 years in prison.

Frenzel was born in Zehdenick, Templin, on 20 August 1911.

His father had worked for the railroad and was a local official of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Karl completed primary school from 1918 to 1926 in Oranienburg and then apprenticed as a carpenter.

Meanwhile, he was a member of the socialist carpenter's union.

In 1929, at the age of 18, Frenzel met his first girlfriend, who was Jewish.

Their relationship dissolved after two years when her father heard that Frenzel was a Nazi Party member.

However, after passing the qualifying carpentry exam in 1930 he found himself unemployed.

Later, he found work for a short time as a butcher.

The Nazi Party promised that there would be more jobs after its seizure of power, a reason that motivated Frenzel to join both the party and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in August 1930.

His brother, a theology student, had joined the party the previous year.

Frenzel served in the auxiliary police force as part of the SA, during the summer of 1933.

Through his party connections, he then obtained positions first as a carpenter and later as a custodian.

His father joined the party in 1934.

Frenzel claimed that anti-Semitism was an aspect of the politics to which they were indifferent.

He later claimed that he was appalled by the early persecution of Jews in Germany.

She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1934.

In 1934, Frenzel married his wife; both were Christians.

They married in a church and went to church "if not every Sunday, at least every other or third Sunday".

All of their five children were baptized.

They bought the furniture for their new home from a Jewish merchant.

Along with other T4 recruits, Frenzel reported to the Columbia Haus in late 1939, where he was first checked for political reliability and then watched a film on the supposed degeneration of handicapped people.

He first worked in the laundry and as a guard at Grafeneck Castle and worked in construction at Bernburg Euthanasia Centre, and he finally became a stoker at Hadamar Euthanasia Centre.

As a stoker, he was responsible for removing the dead bodies from the gas chambers, breaking out gold teeth and burning the bodies, as well as various other tasks around the gas chambers and crematoria.

It has been speculated that Frenzel helped in the design of the gas chambers at Hadamar.

Like his colleagues, that was Frenzel's first experience with gassing and burning people, which proved useful later in the extermination camps.

On 20 April 1942, he was assigned to Operation Reinhard and sent to Sobibor extermination camp.

Frenzel served at Sobibor for the duration of its operation and assisted in both its construction and its demolition.

At Sobibor, he served as commandant of Lager I, the area in which Jewish prisoners lived and performed forced labour.

He also commanded the Bahnhofkommando which greeted arriving transports.

He served as Gustav Wagner's replacement as the quartermaster-sergeant of the camp when Wagner was attending to duties elsewhere or was on leave.

Frenzel selected prisoners from the newly arrived transports to work inside and outside the camp and, in effect, also selected the vast majority, which would go to the gas chambers.

Towards the end of the war, in 1945, Frenzel's wife was raped by Soviet soldiers.

She developed abdominal typhus and died soon afterward.

At the start of the Second World War, Frenzel was drafted into the Reich Labour Service.

However, he was soon released because he had many children to support.

His brothers were in the army, and he felt left out of the action.

Responding to an appeal to loyal party members, Frenzel applied for special service in the military through his SA unit but instead was assigned to Action T4, the Nazi program to kill people with disabilities.

When the Wehrmacht later called for his service, T4 prevented his transfer.