Postscript

Dusseldorf, West Germany

1964 (Twenty-one years later)

Fifty-year-old Kurt Franz—agitated at being named in the indictment—was one of ten men who had been charged with war crimes at Treblinka.

I shouldn’t be at fault for anything! Franz thought. I was just following orders, and never hurt anyone. I didn’t even belong to the Nazi party!

Sitting through weeks and weeks of testimonies, everybody from a train dispatcher to a handful of Jewish witnesses who escaped, Kurt Franz was at a boiling point and wanted to share his side of the story. His attorney would not let him.

On one of the days, Samuel Rajzman testified about the Doll’s involvement in escorting prisoners to the Lazarette, and also lying to people entering the tube by telling them they were going to receive a shower. He further explained how Franz would have his attack dog Bari tear to pieces innocent Jews who just happened to come across their path.

“Lies!” Kurt Franz could not contain himself any further. He yelled aloud in the courtroom, “Pure lies! I’ve never killed another person!”

People at the trial howled their disapproval at the outburst. Did Franz really think anyone would believe the suggestion that he was innocent?

The judge told Franz to shut his mouth, and that there was to be no more outbursts. Rajzman continued, explaining that the Doll suspended Jews from their feet to whip and torture them before he pulled out his pistol to end their lives. More sadistic stories with incredible detail and poise were told. Rajzman was a very convincing witness.

The next person to testify was Richard Glazar, now a forty-four-year-old engineer from Prague. He methodically explained to the courtroom the deceit and lies propagated by the Doll—from the fake sick bay painted with a sign of the Red Cross to the assurances given to those supposedly walking toward the showers. Glazar grimly diagrammed the camp to the court and showed where everything was located, including the gas chambers, the mass graves, and the burning pits. He elaborated on the trains that would empty out and how the masses were herded into the tube toward their death.

Glazar spoke of his own fate, that only a handful of men from the masses arriving from the Theresienstadt Ghetto were allowed to survive. The rest were sent to their deaths often within minutes of arriving at the camp. He systematically discussed how Kurt Franz tortured and killed prisoners on a daily basis. His detailed analysis as an eyewitness was irrefutable, yet Franz continued to protest, saying he was barely ever at Treblinka and he did not partake in any of the violence.

Glazar specifically explained how, in November of 1942, Kurt Franz, in his gray deerskin gloves and skull and crossbones cap, shot seven prisoners with his pistol for trying to escape, and when he ran out of bullets he borrowed Miete’s pistol to finish the job. He also explained how Franz killed a worker with a shovel.

Another defendant, survivor Abraham Kolski from New York, testified how Kurt Franz and an unnamed guard each grabbed babies left outside the gas chambers by their mothers and smashed their heads against a wall. To this charge, Franz knew he must respond. He composed a letter and had it delivered to the judge. It read, “On this day, allow me to send this sworn statement that I have not killed a single person. Never on my orders was a Jewish worker harmed.”

Bronka Sukno, deposed in Israel, was also a witness for the prosecution about the camp and the guards. She recounted how Franz beat the camp doctor, Julian Chorazycki, to death, and then kept beating him even though the man was clearly dead.

While the transcript of her testimony was delivered, the Doll remained unfazed and maintained his innocence. “I was a true soldier,” Franz bemoaned. “I never intentionally hurt anyone.”

“Stop!” the judge demanded. “That is an insult to every person who was a decent soldier! Your behavior has nothing to do with being a soldier. No more outbursts!”

Karel Unger did not travel to West Germany, but a delegation of the court was sent to interview him at his home in Seattle, Washington. Like Glazar, Unger spoke on the conditions in the camp and of the atrocities of the Nazis, now sitting as defendants. He described Kurt Franz as a macabre man capable of the worst devilry imaginable.

“Kurt Franz was like an animal,” Unger shared. “When he saw blood he became wilder and wilder. I would describe him as a sadist.”

Unger went on to share about the death of Chorazycki, and spoke specifics about seven other people who Kurt Franz specifically killed in Unger’s presence. He shared in the same way as Glazar, matter-of-factly and precise, with testimony that corroborated what others had described.

When the transcript of Unger’s testimony was read in Dusseldorf, Kurt Franz threw a fit and made a public display. “Never in all my life have I harmed anyone!” he protested. “I do not know why these lies keep being told about me.”

At this, the judge nearly lost his composure. “Don’t act this way! Or is it your position that all the witnesses have it out for you, and that you are the most harmless and kindest of them all?”

No response from Franz.

During the trial, the defendants had been able to keep the semblance of a united front. They were not killers, they were acting as soldiers and following orders; that it really bothered them when they had to discipline one of the prisoners.

However, as the trial progressed, the coalition of Miete, Mentz, Suchomel, and Horn began to unravel. The lawyers for Miete and Mentz decided to argue that the defendants might have killed a few hundred workers, but it was only under duress. Suchomel flat out admitted he argued with Franz and Kuttner about them killing a specific male worker he wanted to keep alive, an obvious effort to show that he (Suchomel) was trying to side with the prisoners.

The lawyer for Kurt Franz did not admit to any killing. He held that Germany and its political society were to blame for what took place at Treblinka, and that Franz was simply a loyal instrument carrying out his orders but not hurting anyone intentionally. This failed tactic was attempted at the Nuremberg trials…with similar results.

On September 3, 1965, the verdicts were read at the Dusseldorf court. One of the ten men was acquitted, Mr. Otto Horn. Horn claimed he worked at Treblinka under duress from Odilo Globocnik and Christian Wirth, and that his frequent requests for reassignment were denied. He kept himself drunk to block out the evil. He would volunteer for the night shift and then sneak off to find a comfortable place to sleep and shirk his duties. Since there were no charges of brutality and murder attributed to him—in stark contrast to the other defendants—Horn was acquitted and did not serve time.

One Nazi named Heinrich Mathes, the guard in charge of the Camp 2 death and burial operations, was charged with the murder of at least one hundred thousand people and sentenced to life imprisonment. Franz Suchomel, along with four other Nazis, was charged with aiding and abetting murder. For this, Suchomel received a seven-year prison sentence.

Kurt Franz, August Miete, and Willi Mentz were charged with “murder in concert” of at least three hundred thousand people. Mentz, as Nazi overseer of the Lazarette, was additionally charged with aiding and abetting murder of twenty-five people and sentenced to life imprisonment. Miete, known in the camp as the Angel of Death, was additionally charged with the murder of nine people and sentenced to life imprisonment.

Unfortunately for Kurt Franz, his pleas of innocence did not endear him to the court. Besides “murder in concert,” he was additionally charged with the murder of 129 people and sentenced to life imprisonment. It especially outraged those in attendance when he claimed he intentionally assisted the revolt organizers by leaving a loaded machine gun for them on his bed when he departed for leave that August day.

A prevalent narrative had developed in the jurors’ minds throughout the trial and came to fruition when evidence was presented as a result of a pretrial police search. Authorities entered the Doll’s apartment following his arrest and searched his premises. The investigators found a photo album the Doll had created, which contained many scenes from Treblinka, such as the fake station, the zoo, the kommandant’s quarters, and several of the workers. Franz had labeled the album “Die Schonsten Jahre Meines Lebens” (“THE BEST YEARS OF MY LIFE”).

Adolf Hitler’s rise to power resulted in 18 million battle deaths, and an additional 20 million civilian deaths. When I think of these numbers, I am forced to pause and consider just how many human lives they represent, and how many families were torn apart. Nearly every country in Europe was devastated by Hitler’s ideological fanaticism. Poland itself lost 20 percent of its entire population during the war, and the German Reich killed outright over three million Russian POWs.

Hitler seethed in nationalistic ideals that held deep racism, bigotry, and hatred for others. Unfortunately this attitude was mimicked by many of his chief lieutenants, including Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Odilo Globocnik, and Franz Stangl: the first two men with their extermination planning; the last two who physically built and oversaw Operation Reinhard death camps.

Operation Reinhard was a code name given for several extermination facilities in Poland. Never before had German concentration camps been used to liquidate entire populations en masse. The operation was named by Himmler as a tribute to his deputy Reinhard Heydrich. Himmler’s chief lieutenant was murdered just as the three camps he envisioned at the notorious Wannsee Conference were becoming operational. This top-secret meeting at Wannsee, Germany, was organized by Heydrich and included plans for the industrial-scale use of poisonous gas (instead of shooting squads) to eradicate millions of European Jews. No more would the Nazis talk about shipping Jews to Madagascar. This top-secret Nazi plan was known as the Final Solution.

After Heydrich’s death, Himmler followed up as chief organizer and decided to use veteran SS police men such as Odilo Globocnik, Christian Wirth, and Franz Stangl—confidantes who had proven themselves as effective administrators in the German euthanasia program called T4. Stangl was first ordered to go to Sobibor by Globocnik in the spring of 1942, but this lasted less than half a year because Treblinka was in such desperate need of good leadership. Globocnik trusted Stangl, and the Austrian did not let him down. Soon after arriving to the camp, Treblinka became fully operational and able to process between five to ten thousand people during normal operations, with a peak capacity of eighteen to twenty thousand per day.

No one is certain how many people perished at Treblinka because no records were kept on those who died there. The numbers range from 900,000–1.2 million people. The sole eyewitness to all of the trains that passed through Treblinka was a railway dispatcher, Franciszek Zabecki, who worked for the Polish resistance. Zabecki swears to the fact that there were 1.2 million people whose lives ended at Treblinka. To better understand this number, it represents the current population of Dallas, TX, or the entire state of Rhode Island—wiped off the map in one year, at one small camp (Treblinka was approximately fifty to sixty acres in size).

Compared to the estimated 1.1 million lives lost at Auschwitz, Treblinka might have disposed of more bodies, and in a more compacted timeline. The loss of one innocent human life is tragic; the losses accumulated at Treblinka are too monstrous to comprehend. How can one account for such evil?

The inspiring part of the Treblinka story is the revolt.

On August 2, 1943,

without help from anyone outside the gate,

with no inside knowledge of current Nazi planning,

with just a few guns and hand grenades,

a group of men and women,

in a desperate attempt to seize onto life,

organized an insurrection against their Nazi overlords.

How their hearts must have burned that day! Of the approximately eight hundred workers left at Treblinka on August 2nd, it is estimated that half were killed during the revolt, one hundred surrendered, and of the two hundred to three hundred who broke out of the camp, most did not survive the first night. Of the 100–125 workers who were able to flee the area (August 1943), only a mere sixty-seven workers survived the entire war (May 1945).

Before the Russians retook Poland, the Nazis effectively made Treblinka disappear. Besides a few bone fragments left in the surrounding soil, there remained absolutely no trace that this insignificant-looking rail stop contained the location of the most efficient execution center during the Holocaust. Only because of the revolt, and the survivors who were fortunately able to testify at the war crimes trial (albeit twenty years later), were nine Nazis—the worst and most heinous at Treblinka—convicted of war crimes. Only one was acquitted.

In contrast, at the three-day Belzec trial there were eight defendants, but only one was convicted, and he for a mere four and a half years. Imagine, a sentence of less than five years at a location where five hundred thousand Jews were murdered. The reason is very plain: only one survivor from Belzec remained to give an eyewitness account to the atrocities there. At the Treblinka trial, there were dozens of surviving witnesses thanks to the revolt and the near seventy heroes who survived the war, such as Richard Glazar, Bronka Sukno, and Karel Unger.

Richard Glazar’s story is truly remarkable. As chronicled in his book Trap with a Green Fence, after he and Karel crossed the Vistula River the two men were arrested and held as prisoners for weeks in a cramped cellar. They finally convinced their captors they were workers in Albert Speer’s “Organization Todt” and were trying to return to Germany. Karel used the name Vladimir Frysak, and Richard used the name of his Treblinka friend, Rudolf Masarek. The two Czech men ended up back in their homeland but were forced to work as laborers, then transported to Manheim, Germany, to work in a factory.

After the war, Glazar studied in Prague and became an engineer in his homeland. During the Cold War, Glazar was looked upon with suspicion under Stalin’s iron curtain, and he was declared an undesirable. The Communists forced him to perform manual labor at a steel plant from 1951 to 1953. After this experience, Richard and his family escaped to Switzerland, where he lived for many years. Karel became a chemical engineer in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S.

Bronka Sukno spent the rest of her life in Israel. A delegation of the court consisting of judges, prosecutors, and defense counsel met with her in Tel Aviv in February 1965 to record her testimony. Thus the story of Suchomel shooting a mother to obtain a doll her child clutched was part of Bronka’s deposition.

Zelo Bloch, Tchechia Mandel, and Rudi Masarek (who went to Treblinka deliberately out of his love for Gisela) were all remembered fondly by both Jewish survivors and some of the Nazis who guarded them, such as Franz Suchomel. There was something in their spirit that embodied leadership, independence, and hope. Both Franz Stangl and Franz Suchomel remembered Tchechia with much respect. In interviews, Richard Glazar continually credited Rudi and Zelo with the success of the revolt. In a similar vein, the six Czech friends were looked upon by the rest of the camp with near adoration.

One of the Polish Jews, David Brat, told Richard Glazar, “You must survive; it is more important than that we should.” This elite status made the Czech men very uncomfortable, thinking it made them a target for Nazi retaliation, but there was nothing they could do to diminish that certain aura and esteem they held within the camp. Unfortunately the fate of David Brat remains a mystery; it is assumed he died in the revolt, along with Edek.

For the Nazis, at the conclusion of the trial in Dusseldorf, Franz Stangl’s whereabouts was still unknown. The Treblinka kommandant was apprehended in 1945 and investigated for his work in the euthanasia program at Hartheim. He disguised his duty assignment at Treblinka from the American investigators. After two and a half years, on May 30, 1948, Stangl broke out of prison in Linz, Austria, and escaped into Italy by foot.

Stangl eventually emigrated to Syria for three years, then to Brazil. He lived happily with his wife and daughters until he was found by Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal and extradited in 1967—twenty-two years after the conclusion of WWII. Stangl was charged with the mass murder of nine hundred thousand people. Due to some technicalities he was only on trial for his time at the Treblinka death camp, not Sobibor. The trial took place in West Germany from May 13 to December 22, 1970. Stangl was sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in prison on June 28, 1971, during his appeal, but only after concluding a remarkable series of interviews with journalist Gitta Sereny. After weeks of meeting together, Stangl finally confronted his guilt and verbalized it with Sereny: “But I was there…so, yes…in reality I share the guilt…because my guilt…my guilt…” Stangl died of heart failure just hours after uttering those words.

Incredibly Kurt Franz, similar to Stangl, lived for fourteen years unmolested in his native city after the conclusion of WWII before being apprehended. He began his life sentence at the trial’s conclusion in 1965, but he was released early from prison for health reasons in 1993. He lived for another five years, never acknowledging his many crimes. As the lead prosecutor at Dusseldorf, Alfred Spiess put it, “With Kurt Franz there was no remorse or inner realization.”

Kurt “Kiewe” Kuttner somehow survived his shooting during the revolt. He recovered from his wounds and went on to live for another two decades, without any retribution. He died in 1964, mere weeks before the commencement of the trial in Dusseldorf.

One aspect especially important to consider with Holocaust studies is the behavioral aberrations among both the Nazis and the Jews. For the Nazis, there were a few men who were particularly kind to the Jews in a betrayal from the dictates of Himmler, Globocnik, and Wirth. As described in this book, Franz Suchomel had his moments of kindness with the workers he supervised. Sadly, in a final summation, an evil apathy kept him at Treblinka, making him complicit in all the SS war crimes.

A more startling example of Nazi kindness was found within an SS man named Karl Ludwig, who spent time as a guard at both Treblinka and Sobibor. Two survivors, Joe Siedlecki from Treblinka and Ada Lichtman from Sobibor, recounted that Karl Ludwig was terribly kind, regularly bringing the workers gifts of food, which no doubt saved many Jewish lives.

On the other side, there was this type of betrayal in the Jewish community as well. Some of the Jewish men and women betrayed their fellow workers to the Nazis. These people gave away countless innocent lives to an evil regime ever hungry to learn of a potential uprising, whether true or not. These two aspects are rarely covered, yet eerily present within the camps.

One very noteworthy element of the Operation Reinhard trials was the emotional struggle of the survivors. First, they had to willingly cooperate with the officials by providing their historical accounts to investigators. And second, most of them physically showed up and were present to testify against their tormentors, who were also physically present, staring back at them from the dock inside the courtroom.

In one instance, a man named Moses Rapaport, who arrived at Treblinka in a sealed railcar, testified about his pregnant wife and eleven-year-old son. After exiting the railcar, Moses escorted his slow-moving, very-pregnant wife to her line. All of a sudden two shots rang out, dropping Rapaport’s wife and his son onto the unloading platform. Apparently they were not moving fast enough.

While Rapaport shared his personal account to the hushed assembly, Kurt Franz stared at him with a broad grin. At one point, Rapaport looked up into the crowded courtroom and laid eyes on Franz. He leapt to his feet and then fell backward, down into his chair, unconscious. He was rushed out of the courtroom in a wheelchair and taken to a hospital, the victim of a circulatory collapse.

Before Rapaport had finished his testimony, another survivor named Abraham Bomba bolted from the courtroom, sobbing with hands over his eyes. He, too, had arrived at Treblinka with his wife and four-week-old baby. His family encountered a similar fate. Those who testified must have certainly been traumatized, having to relive their experiences in front of their tormentors, now sitting as defendants. I am in awe of their bravery.

The emotional trauma inflicted by their Treblinka experiences affected the survivors long after the war ended. Two of the men who outlived the revolt tragically took their own lives years after the war. One Jewish worker who revolted was Hershl Sperling. After the uprising, Sperling survived multiple other concentration camps, including Auschwitz, and was eventually liberated by U.S. soldiers at Dachau in 1945. However, while living in Scotland in 1989, he jumped off a Glasgow railroad bridge and into the Clyde River.

The other suicide victim was Richard Glazar. Unable to cope with the loss of his wife, Glazar jumped out of a high apartment window in Prague on December 20, 1997. Six months later the man who Glazar’s testimony helped put behind bars, Kurt Franz, died of natural causes.

The destruction people can do to others is a great evil. Amidst the worst of these circumstances, however, there is something deeper happening, concealed inside the individuals themselves. The Nazis, driven by evil, and exhaustive in their efforts to abolish a distinct people group, consequently lost themselves, and in fact lost their own identity and became a people morally obsolete.

The Jews, even while heavily persecuted, resisted within Warsaw, at Treblinka, and in other cities and camps throughout Europe. This fight for survival and justice gained for them a remarkable authoritative presence, a presence that allowed them to bravely stand against the Nazi defendants’ outright lies and blame-erasing tactics at the Nuremberg and Dusseldorf trials. It also empowered them to make a new life, often without relatives, starting completely over, and usually in a new land, where they knew no one. But they did it.

I wrote Trains to Treblinka to unveil an incredible resilience innate to the human spirit. This fountain, elucidated and empowered by divine presence, forever stands against impossible adversities, fights against the greatest of odds, and contains hope for even the slightest of victories, of light over darkness, and of good over evil. As David Brat encouraged Richard Glazar moments before the Treblinka revolt, “‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me…’”

THE END