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37 Litig. 51 (2010-2011)
The Sobibor Revolt

handle is hein.journals/laba37 and id is 193 raw text is: Legal Lore The Sobibor Revolt by Robert and Marilyn Aitken 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 east- ern 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 dar- ing escape, a rare successful revolt that cost many their lives but brought free- dom 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 desig- nated for immediate death and ordered to forfeit their valuables, undress, and go directly to the gas chambers. Their bod- ies were cremated. The remaining Jews were assigned as temporary workers and divided into those with skills, those with Robert Aitken is co-author with Marilyn Aitken of Law Makers, Law Breakers and Uncommon Trials recently published by ABA Books. He is an associate editor of LITIGATION and is a lawyer in Palos Verdes Estates, California. Marilyn Aitken is a freelance writer. Spring 2011 5 1 Volume 37 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 extermina- tion program. The camps were forerun- ners 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 secu- rity guards. D. Freiberg, Sobibor (1988). Sobibor consisted of the SS admin- istration area with a railway ramp and staff living quarters; Camp 1 had work- shops and workers' barracks; Camp 2 was the Reception where the trans- ports were unloaded and Jews were pro- cessed; 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 when Sobibor was expanded during the sum- mer and early fall of 1942. The Jews called him the Idiot, because that was what he called them. His office assis- tant, Johann Niemann, rode around the camp on horseback. Gustav Wagner, known as the Human Beast, became a roving supervisor of the Jewish work- ers. SS Sergeant Karl Frenzel was placed in charge of Camp 1 and filled in for Wagner when he was absent. The Nizkor Project, www.nizkor.org; Axis History Forum, http://forum.axishistory .com; Aktion Reinhard Camps, www .deathcamps.org; Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Eighty of the 2,000 Jews who arrived at Sobibor in September 1943 were Red Army POWs, including Lt. Aleksandr (Sasha) Pechersky and Lt. Semyon Rozenfeld. They soon met Leon Feldhandler, a Polish Jew who was LITIGATION Number 3

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