Kurt Bolender
Encyclopedia
Schutzstaffel
The Schutzstaffel |Sig runes]]) was a major paramilitary organization under Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. Built upon the Nazi ideology, the SS under Heinrich Himmler's command was responsible for many of the crimes against humanity during World War II...
-Oberscharführer
Oberscharführer
Oberscharführer was a Nazi Party paramilitary rank that existed between the years of 1932 and 1945. Translated as “Senior Squad Leader”, Oberscharführer was first used as a rank of the Sturmabteilung and was created due to an expansion of the enlisted positions required by growing SA membership...
(Staff Sergeant) during the Second World War. In 1942 Bolender operated the gas chambers at Sobibor extermination camp
Sobibór extermination camp
Sobibor was a Nazi German extermination camp located on the outskirts of the town of Sobibór, Lublin Voivodeship of occupied Poland as part of Operation Reinhard; the official German name was SS-Sonderkommando Sobibor...
, thereby directly perpetrating acts of genocide
Genocide
Genocide is defined as "the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group", though what constitutes enough of a "part" to qualify as genocide has been subject to much debate by legal scholars...
against Jews and Gypsies during the Nazi operation known as Operation Reinhard
Operation Reinhard
Operation Reinhard was the code name given to the Nazi plan to murder Polish Jews in the General Government, and marked the most deadly phase of the Holocaust, the use of extermination camps...
.
After the war, Bolender was recognized in 1961 while working under a false identity as a doorman at a nightclub in Germany, and subsequently accused in 1965 of personally murdering at least 360 Jewish inmates and assisting in the murder of 86,000 more at Sobibor. He committed suicide in prison two months prior to the end of the trial.
Biography
Bolender was born in 1912 in DuisburgDuisburg
- History :A legend recorded by Johannes Aventinus holds that Duisburg, was built by the eponymous Tuisto, mythical progenitor of Germans, ca. 2395 BC...
and stayed in school until the age of 16 when he became a blacksmith apprentice. He joined the NSDAP in the 1930s.
In 1939 Bolender joined the SS-Totenkopfverbände
SS-Totenkopfverbände
SS-Totenkopfverbände , meaning "Death's-Head Units", was the SS organization responsible for administering the Nazi concentration camps for the Third Reich....
("Death's Head Unit"). He was attached to the Action T4
Action T4
Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's eugenics-based "euthanasia" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"...
euthanasia program and worked at Hartheim
Hartheim Euthanasia Centre
The Hartheim Euthanasia Centre was a Nazi killing centre that was part of their euthanasia programme, since also referred to as Action T4. It was housed in Hartheim Castle in the municipality of Alkoven near Linz in Austria.- Statistics :...
, Hadamar, Brandenburg
Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre
The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre , officially known as the Brandenburg an der Havel State Welfare Institute The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre , officially known as the Brandenburg an der Havel State Welfare Institute The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre , officially known as the Brandenburg an der...
and Sonnenstein killing centers where physically and mentally disabled Germans were exterminated by gassing and lethal injection. Bolender was involved in the cremation
Cremation
Cremation is the process of reducing bodies to basic chemical compounds such as gasses and bone fragments. This is accomplished through high-temperature burning, vaporization and oxidation....
(gasification
Gasification
Gasification is a process that converts organic or fossil based carbonaceous materials into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, carbon dioxide and methane. This is achieved by reacting the material at high temperatures , without combustion, with a controlled amount of oxygen and/or steam...
) process of disposing of victims, as well as "test" gassing procedures during the Action T4
Action T4
Action T4 was the name used after World War II for Nazi Germany's eugenics-based "euthanasia" program during which physicians killed thousands of people who were "judged incurably sick, by critical medical examination"...
. During this period he worked with Franz Stangl
Franz Stangl
Franz Paul Stangl was an Austrian-born SS commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited and tried in West Germany for the mass murder of 900,000 people, and in 1970 was found guilty...
and Christian Wirth
Christian Wirth
Christian Wirth was a German police and SS officer who was one of the leading contributors to the program to exterminate the Jewish people of Poland, known as Operation Reinhard....
. In 1941-1942 he was attached to an ambulance unit on the Eastern Front
Eastern Front (World War II)
The Eastern Front of World War II was a theatre of World War II between the European Axis powers and co-belligerent Finland against the Soviet Union, Poland, and some other Allies which encompassed Northern, Southern and Eastern Europe from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945...
in Russia along with the other T-4 workers.
Sobibor extermination camp
On April 22, 1942, SS-Obersturmführer (First Lieutenant) Franz Stangl was appointed commandant of SobiborSobibór
Sobibór is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Włodawa, within Włodawa County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It lies close to the Bug River, which forms the border with Belarus and Ukraine. Sobibór is approximately south-east of Włodawa and east of the regional capital...
. Stangl appointed SS-Oberscharführer
Oberscharführer
Oberscharführer was a Nazi Party paramilitary rank that existed between the years of 1932 and 1945. Translated as “Senior Squad Leader”, Oberscharführer was first used as a rank of the Sturmabteilung and was created due to an expansion of the enlisted positions required by growing SA membership...
(Staff Sergeant) Kurt Bolender as his deputy due to their prior work relationship and his extensive experience in the T-4 program. Bolender served as commander of Sobibor Camp III (gas chambers/crematoriums) from April until Autumn of 1942. He was one of the most feared men at the camp.
At Sobibor, Bolender actively participated in operating the gas chamber. SS-Scharführer Erich Fuchs, who served with Bolender, testified about him in 1966:
Part of Bolender's duties included supervision of the Jewish work details in Lager III. In his own words:
SS-Oberscharführer Erich Bauer
Erich Bauer
Hermann Erich Bauer , sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", was a SS-Oberscharführer . He participated in Nazi Germany's Action T4 program and later in Operation Reinhard, serving as a gas chamber operator at Sobibor extermination camp...
, who also served with Bolender at Sobibor, testified about him in 1966:
In 1965, Ada Lichtman, a Sobibor survivor, described Bolender and his dog:
In the Autumn of 1942, Bolender became the commander of all the Ukrainian camp guards at Sobibor.
Moshe Bahir, a Sobibor survivor, wrote about Bolender:
In December 1942, Bolender's duties at Sobibor were temporarily put on hold when he was convicted by a (Nazi) German court of inciting a witness for perjury during divorce proceedings with his wife. For this, he was sentenced to a short prison term in the Kraków SS prison camp Danzig Matzkau. After serving the sentence, he returned to Operation Reinhard. However, on 14 October 1943, there had been a successful uprising and escape of prisoners at Sobibor, which caused Operation Reinhard to come to an end. Therefore, Bolender instead returned to the operation at the SS labor camp at Dorohucza
Dorohucza
Dorohucza is a village in the administrative district of Gmina Trawniki, within Świdnik County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It lies approximately east of Świdnik and east of the regional capital Lublin.The village has a population of 753....
and subsequently to Trieste
Trieste
Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...
in Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
. On 18 January 1945, Bolender was awarded the Iron Cross
Iron Cross
The Iron Cross is a cross symbol typically in black with a white or silver outline that originated after 1219 when the Kingdom of Jerusalem granted the Teutonic Order the right to combine the Teutonic Black Cross placed above a silver Cross of Jerusalem....
2nd class. As the war came to a close, Bolender returned to Germany.
Arrest and trial
After World War II, Kurt Bolender assumed a fake identity, did not contact his family or his relatives, and after some time, had himself declared deceased. He was recognized in May 1961 working as a doormanBouncer (doorman)
A bouncer is an informal term for a type of security guard employed at venues such as bars, nightclubs or concerts to provide security, check legal age, and refuse entry to a venue based on criteria such as intoxication, aggressive behavior, or attractiveness...
at a nightclub in Germany and was immediately arrested. He was arrested under an assumed name Heinz Brenner which from German translates to "person who burns things" or "burner". It is probable that after the war he also went by the pseudonym
Pseudonym
A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...
Wilhelm Kurt Vahle while working as a doorman
Doorman
A doorman, also known as doorkeeper, is someone who is posted at, and often guards, a door, or by extension another entrance A doorman, also known as doorkeeper, is someone who is posted at, and often guards, a door, or by extension another entrance A doorman, also known as doorkeeper, is someone...
at the Erund Sie-Bar und im Hofbrauhaus in Hamburg
Hamburg
-History:The first historic name for the city was, according to Claudius Ptolemy's reports, Treva.But the city takes its modern name, Hamburg, from the first permanent building on the site, a castle whose construction was ordered by the Emperor Charlemagne in AD 808...
. At his residence police found a whip with the silver initials "KB", the inscription that was created at the camp by Sobibor survivor Stanisław Szmajzner.
In 1965, Kurt Bolender along with eleven former SS guards from Sobibor was tried in Hagen, West Germany. At the trial Bolender initially claimed that he had never been in Sobibor, but instead fought against partisans around Lublin
Lublin
Lublin is the ninth largest city in Poland. It is the capital of Lublin Voivodeship with a population of 350,392 . Lublin is also the largest Polish city east of the Vistula river...
, Poland. However, he broke down under cross-examination and confessed to being present at Sobibor.
Prior to the completion of the trial, Kurt Bolender committed suicide by hanging himself in his prison cell. In his suicide note, he insisted that he was innocent.