28 Facts About Karl Frenzel

Karl Frenzel's father had worked for the railroad and was a local official of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Karl Frenzel's brothers were in the army, and he felt left out of the action.

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

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

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

In that capacity, Karl Frenzel carried out genocide by taking part in the industrial-scale extermination of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children as part of Operation Reinhard for which he was tried and convicted in December 1966.

Karl Frenzel claimed that when he received his orders, he was told that Sobibor was merely a work camp, which he had to guard.

Karl Frenzel personally walked along the lines of the roll call and pulled the victims out of line to be shot at Camp III.

For instance, in spring 1943, when a worker prisoner tried to take his own life and was found dying, Karl Frenzel shouted that Jews had no right to kill themselves; only Germans had the right to kill.

Karl Frenzel whipped the dying man and killed him with a bullet.

Karl Frenzel wanted to be regarded as the perfect SS man by his superiors and fellow camp staff alike.

Karl Frenzel terrorized the prisoners, mocking them with his loud voice and deriving sadistic pleasure from thrashing them with his leather whip.

Karl Frenzel saw to it that the sick and disabled were taken from the Rampe to the Lazarett and duly executed.

Karl Frenzel was commandant of Lager 1, or the Arbeitsjudenlager, as well as the Bahnhofskommando, and formed the labour commandos after taking roll call.

Karl Frenzel did not dispute the fact that he had used his own discretion in executing his function, taking decisions of life and death without consulting camp commanders first.

Karl Frenzel later admitted that he had been harsh but insisted that he had always been fair.

Karl Frenzel was then sent to participate in Sondertruppe R in Trieste and Fiume, which confiscated the houses of deported Jews in Italy.

Karl Frenzel found work in Frankfurt as a stage lighting technician.

The official charge brought against Karl Frenzel was the personal murder of 42 Jews and participation in the murder of approximately 250,000 Jews.

On 20 December 1966, Frenzel was sentenced to life imprisonment for personally murdering six Jews and for his participation in the mass murder of a further 150,000 Jews as kommandant of Lager I He was released on a technicality in 1982, tried again and again sentenced to life imprisonment on 4 October 1985.

Karl Frenzel spent the last years of his life in a retirement home in Garbsen near Hannover, where he died on 2 September 1996.