The prisoners gave him the nickname ‘doll’ – because of his appearance. However, cruelty and sadism lurked in Kurt Franz. Despite committing cruel crimes at Treblinka, he died peacefully and in freedom.

The future German criminal was born on 17 January 1914. He was educated to become a butcher and a cook but never achieved education in either profession.

As a camp guard and Nazi cook

Kurt Franz served in the Wehrmacht and later in the SS before the outbreak of the Second World War. As part of his service in this formation, he became a guard at Buchenwald concentration camp in 1937, after which he was sent in 1939 to carry out Operation T4, which involved the elimination of mentally ill people whom the Third German Reich considered useless to society. There, he served as a crew cook.

When Aktion T4 was completed, in 1942, he was sent to occupied Poland, where he demonstrated his most cruel side.  Initially, he again worked as a cook, this time at the German extermination camp in Belzec. Soon, however, he began training guards.

A criminal with the appearance of a doll

His ‘career’ in the German apparatus of violence began to gain momentum. He gained further promotions and positions. Franz became deputy commandant of the German extermination camp at Treblinka. He dealt with Jewish prisoners who were not designated for liquidation as soon as the transport arrived. He discharged his task exceptionally scrupulously, showing cruelty in the process.

He was always neatly dressed in an ironed uniform and shoes polished to a shine. His flushed cheeks gave him the appearance of a doll – hence the nickname given to him by the prisoners.  He loved to see to the punishment of flogging. He made sure that it was carried out on the naked body. Franz ordered prisoners caught trying to escape to be hanged with their heads down and whipped. He shot the massacred ones with his own hands.

Franz’s cruelty and sadism

He had a particular hatred for Orthodox Jews, whom he treated extremely brutally. According to some witnesses, he also murdered small children and infants by banging their heads against the wall. For fun, he would take out Jews about to be gassed and shoot them with his gun. One day, together with another German criminal, he held a competition to shoot a Jew straight through the heart.

He was second to none in inventing more sadistic pastimes. He arranged a boxing competition in which he faced a prisoner in the ring, but the camp rules stipulated that only Franz had the right to strike.

The German was also keen to find people to liquidate who were not fit for work. A small bandage, a minor wound, was enough to be deemed by Franz to be useless to the Third Reich and sentenced to death.

How Kurt Franz influenced his dog

The criminal’s dog Barry was also a huge terror to everyone. The large animal attacked Jewish prisoners on his master’s orders. The attacks ended in deep wounds and even death – sometimes inflicted by Franz. The dog, however, behaved very differently when its master was not around. It was able to play and willingly allowed himself to be stroked.

Camp liquidation

During the German criminal’s absence from the camp, a revolt broke out by the inmates of the Treblinka extermination camp (2 August 1943). Some Jews escaped from it, but many met a tragic fate. After this event, Franz supervised the liquidation of the camp. The buildings were demolished to the bare ground and the last prisoners were shot in the nearby forest. The families of the camp’s Ukrainian guards were settled in that area. It is estimated that up to 900,000 Jews may have perished at Treblinka.

Franz leaves occupied Poland

Franz from Treblinka was sent to the German extermination camp at Sobibor. He was then transferred to the Adriatic coast, where he was in charge of training recruits, fighting anti-German partisans and protecting railway lines.

He was taken into American prison in Austrian territory. However, he managed to escape to Germany. There he was again caught by the Americans but soon released.

Trial of a German criminal from Treblinka

He continued to enjoy his freedom until 2 December 1959, when he was arrested as one of the main accused of committing crimes at the Treblinka camp. Franz and his defence lawyers denied everything and denied the crimes. They even accused the judges of a lack of objectivity, claiming that they were related to the victims of the Holocaust.

The defence line, however, could not withstand the crushing testimony of witnesses to Kurt Franz’s crime. Many recognised him and told of his cruelty. Gathering evidence incriminating Franz and his crew, however, was not made easy by the fact that much of it was destroyed during the camp’s liquidation. It seems that the German criminal had good memories of his time in charge of the German extermination camp at Treblinka. His album of photographs from Treblinka titled “Beautiful times” was attached to the evidence.

On 3 September 1965, Kurt Franz was sentenced to life imprisonment. However, he was released from prison in 1993 due to ill health. He died on 4 July 1998 in a nursing home in Wuppertal.