Karl August Wilhelm Frenzel was an SS non-commissioned officer at the Sobibór extermination camp. As commander of Camp I, he was responsible for a Sonderkommando—a unit made up of prisoners, predominantly Jews, who were forced to perform a range of tasks within the camp, including herding newly arrived victims towards the gas chambers.
After the war, Frenzel claimed that he had always been fair when administering punishment.
The surviving evidence tells a very different story.
On one occasion, a fifteen-year-old boy was caught stealing a can of sardines. Frenzel took the boy to Lager III, the camp’s extermination and cremation area, and shot him.
In the spring of 1943, two Jewish prisoners from Chełm escaped from Sobibór. Frenzel announced that, as a reprisal, every tenth prisoner at the morning roll call would be executed. He personally walked along the lines, selecting the victims. Twenty prisoners were subsequently taken to Camp III and shot—not because they had committed any offence, but because two other prisoners had escaped.
Another survivor testified that, on one occasion, Frenzel seized an abandoned baby from an incoming transport. According to the testimony, he smashed the infant’s skull and threw the child’s body aside.
This was the man who later described himself as fair.
After the war, Frenzel was arrested by American troops at a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich, but was released. He eventually found work in Frankfurt as a stage-lighting technician. For years, he lived an ordinary life while the crimes committed at Sobibór remained largely behind him.
That changed on 22 March 1962. While taking a break at work, Frenzel was recognised, arrested and eventually brought before the court in the Sobibór trial, which began on 6 September 1965. He was charged with personally murdering 42 Jews and was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment for his crimes.
Yet even that sentence did not last for the rest of his life. After serving approximately sixteen years, Frenzel was released.
He died on 2 September 1996, aged 85.
There is something particularly bitter about Frenzel’s claim that he had always been “fair.” The word becomes almost grotesque when placed beside the fate of the prisoners over whom he held power: a fifteen-year-old boy executed for stealing food; twenty men murdered because two others had escaped; an infant whose life was extinguished without hesitation.
Frenzel’s victims received no trial, no appeal and no second chance.
Frenzel received all three.
In the end, perhaps the cruelest irony is that the man who claimed to be fair was allowed to grow old.
Sources:
https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn720354
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Frenzel
https://www.sobiborinterviews.nl/en/extermination-camp/biographies-of-ss-men
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