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I would like to apologize to you.
-Commandant Karl Frenzel
Karl August Wilhelm Frenzel was a World War II commandant at Sobibor, the Jewish extermination camp near the Bug River in German-occupied eastern Poland. Frenzel was found guilty in 1966 of participating in the killing of 250,000 Jews and for several "excess" individual murders.
Frenzel was at Sobibor in October 1943 when Jewish inmates made a daring escape, a rare successful revolt that cost many their lives but brought freedom for survivors and an end to the camp.
In 1983, after his release from prison, Frenzel met with Thomas Toivi Blatt, a Jewish witness who had escaped and later testified against him in his war crimes trial. During this conversation, Frenzel apologized but defended his actions. He had been a family man who attended church regularly. Except for a few years in an unfortunate situation, it seems, Frenzel considered himself an ordinary citizen.
Revolt
Trains rolled into the Sobibor railway station almost daily in 1942 and 1943, crammed with Jews. Survivors of the trip were ordered to leave the train and go down a ramp where life-and-death selections were made. Most were designated for immediate death and ordered to forfeit their valuables, undress, and go directly to the gas chambers. Their bodies were cremated. The remaining Jews were assigned as temporary workers and divided into those with skills, those with duties such as kitchen workers, and an unskilled labor force.
The Sobibor, Treblinka, and Belzec camps were named Aktion Reinhard in honor of Reinhard Heydrich, who had presided over the Wannsee Conference, which mandated the Jewish extermination program. The camps were forerunners of the massive Birkenau/Auschwitz facilities. When Sobibor opened in April 1942, the staff included 20 to 30 SS officers in command and 90 to 120 Ukrainians who had been recruited in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps as security guards. D. Freiberg, Sobibor (1988).
Sobibor consisted of the SS administration area with a railway ramp and staff living quarters; Camp 1 had workshops and workers' barracks; Camp 2 was the "Reception" where the transports were unloaded and Jews were processed; and Camp 3, the most isolated area, was where the gas chambers and burial pits were located.
Nazi SS officer Franz Reichleitner became camp commandant...