Kurt Bolender
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Kurt Bolender
Heinz Kurt Bolender (21 May 1912 – 10 October 1966) was an SS sergeant during the Nazi era. In 1942, he operated the gas chambers at Sobibór extermination camp, perpetrating acts of genocide against Jews and Romani people during Operation Reinhard. After the war, Bolender was recognized in 1961 while working under a false identity as a doorman at a nightclub in West Germany, and subsequently accused in 1965 of personally murdering at least 360 Jewish inmates and assisting in the murder of 86,000 more at Sobibór. He committed suicide in prison two months prior to the end of the trial. Biography Bolender was born in 1912 in Duisburg and stayed in school until the age of 16 when he became a blacksmith apprentice.Yitzhak Arad. ''Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka – The Operation Reinhard Camps'', p. 193. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1987, . He joined the NSDAP in 1930. In 1939, he joined the ''SS-Totenkopfverbände'' ("Death's Head Unit"). He was attached to the Acti ...
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Duisburg
Duisburg () is a city in the Ruhr metropolitan area of the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Lying on the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers in the center of the Rhine-Ruhr Region, Duisburg is the 5th largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia and the 15th-largest city in Germany. In the Middle Ages, it was a city-state and a member of the Hanseatic League, and later became a major centre of iron, steel, and chemicals industries. For this reason, it was heavily bombed in World War II. Today it boasts the world's largest inland port, with 21 docks and 40 kilometres of wharf. Status Duisburg is a city in Germany's Rhineland, the fifth-largest (after Cologne, Düsseldorf, Dortmund and Essen) of the nation's most populous federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Its 500,000 inhabitants make it Germany's 15th-largest city. Located at the confluence of the Rhine river and its tributary the Ruhr river, it lies in the west of the Ruhr urban area, Germany's larges ...
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Nazi Party
The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor, the German Workers' Party (; DAP), existed from 1919 to 1920. The Nazi Party emerged from the Extremism, extremist German nationalism, German nationalist, racism, racist and populism, populist paramilitary culture, which fought against the communism, communist uprisings in post–World War I Germany. The party was created to draw workers away from communism and into nationalism. Initially, Nazi political strategy focused on anti–big business, anti-bourgeoisie, bourgeois, and anti-capitalism, anti-capitalist rhetoric. This was later downplayed to gain the support of business leaders, and in the 1930s, the party's main focus shifted to Antisemitism, antisemitic and Criticism of ...
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Erich Bauer
Erich Bauer (26 March 1900 – 4 February 1980), sometimes referred to as "Gasmeister", was a low-level commander in the ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS) of Nazi Germany and a Holocaust perpetrator. He participated in Action T4 program and later in Operation Reinhard, when he was a gas chamber operator at Sobibór extermination camp. Biography Erich Bauer was born in Berlin on 26 March 1900. He served as a soldier in World War I and was captured as a prisoner of war by the French. After returning to Germany, Bauer finally found work as a tram conductor. In 1933, he joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) and ''Sturmabteilung'' (SA).Dick de Mildt. ''In the Name of the People: Perpetrators of Genocide'', pp. 381-383. Brill, 1996. Action T4 In 1940, Bauer was assigned to the T4 Euthanasia Program, in which physically and mentally disabled people in institutions were killed by gassing and lethal injection. In the beginning, he worked as a driver, sometimes collecting and transporting people from ...
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Erich Fuchs
Erich Fuchs (9 April 1902 – 25 July 1980) was an SS functionary who worked for the Action T4 mass-murder program, and for the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. Fuchs was charged with war crimes at the Bełżec Trial in 1963–64, for which he was acquitted. As more evidence came to light, Fuchs was rearrested and tried at the Sobibor Trial in Hagen. He was charged with participation in the Holocaust and on 20 December 1966, found guilty of being an accessory to the mass murder of at least 79,000 Jews. Fuchs was sentenced to four years imprisonment. Life Fuchs was born Erich Fritz Erhard Fuchs in Berlin. He began his career as a motor mechanic. He joined the Nazi Party and the SA in May 1933. Following the outbreak of World War II, in 1940 Fuchs was assigned to the clandestine Action T4 euthanasia program. He served as Dr. Irmfried Eberl's driver while Eberl was Medical Director of the T-4 killing centers at Brandenburg and Bernburg. Klee, Ernst, Dressen, Willi, Rie ...
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Eastern Front (World War II)
The Eastern Front of World War II was a Theater (warfare), theatre of conflict between the European Axis powers against the Soviet Union (USSR), Polish Armed Forces in the East, Poland and other Allies of World War II, Allies, which encompassed Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Northern Europe, Northeast Europe (Baltic states, Baltics), and Southeast Europe (Balkans) from 22 June 1941 to 9 May 1945. It was known as the Great Patriotic War (term), Great Patriotic War in the Soviet Union – and still is in some of its successor states, while almost everywhere else it has been called the ''Eastern Front''. In present-day German and Ukrainian historiography the name German-Soviet War is typically used. The battles on the Eastern Front of the Second World War constituted the largest military confrontation in history. They were characterised by unprecedented ferocity and brutality, wholesale destruction, mass deportations, and immense loss of life due to combat, starvation, expos ...
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Christian Wirth
), Christian the CruelZenter, Christian and Bedürftig, Friedemann (1991). '' Encyclopedia of the Third Reich'' (pg. 1053), New York: Macmillan; , allegiance = , branch = Schutzstaffel , serviceyears = , rank = Sturmbannführer (Major) , servicenumber = NSDAP #420,383 SS #354,464 , unit = SS-Totenkopfverbände , commands = Action T4Inspector of Operation Reinhard camps Bełżec, December 1941 — end of August 1942 , awards = Christian Wirth (; 24 November 1885 – 26 May 1944) was a German SS officer and leading Holocaust perpetrator who was one of the primary architects of the program to exterminate the Jewish people of Poland, known as Operation Reinhard. His nicknames included Christian the Cruel (german: Christian der Grausame), Stuka, and The Wild Christian due to the extremity of his behaviour among the SS and Trawniki guards and to the camp inmates and victims. Wirth worked within the Action T4 program, in which people with disabilities were murdere ...
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Franz Stangl
Franz Paul Stangl (; 26 March 1908 – 28 June 1971) was an Austrian-born police officer and commandant of the Nazi extermination camps Sobibor and Treblinka. Stangl, an employee of the T-4 Euthanasia Program and an SS commander in Nazi Germany, became commandant of the camps during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust. He worked for Volkswagen do Brasil and was arrested in Brazil in 1967, extradited to West Germany and tried for the mass murder of one million people. In 1970, he was found guilty and sentenced to the maximum penalty, life imprisonment. He died of heart failure six months later.Sobibor – The Forgotten Revolt


Early life and Nazi affiliations

Stangl was born in 1908 in

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Cremation
Cremation is a method of Disposal of human corpses, final disposition of a Cadaver, dead body through Combustion, burning. Cremation may serve as a funeral or post-funeral rite and as an alternative to burial. In some countries, including India and Nepal, cremation on an Pyre, open-air pyre is an ancient tradition. Starting in the 19th century, cremation was introduced or reintroduced into other parts of the world. In modern times, cremation is commonly carried out with a Crematorium, closed furnace (cremator), at a crematorium. Cremation leaves behind an average of 2.4 kg (5.3 lbs) of remains known as "ashes" or "cremains". This is not all ash but includes unburnt fragments of bone mineral, which are commonly ground into powder. They do not constitute a health risk and may be buried, interred in a memorial site, retained by relatives or scattered in various ways. History Ancient Cremation dates from at least 17,000 years ago in the archaeological record, with the ...
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Ernst Klee
Ernst Klee (15 March 1942, Frankfurt – 18 May 2013, Frankfurt) was a German journalist and author. As a writer on Germany's history, he was best known for his exposure and documentation of medical crimes in Nazi Germany, much of which was concerned with the Action T4 or involuntary euthanasia program. He is the author of ''"The Good Old Days": The Holocaust Through the Eyes of the Perpetrators and Bystanders'' first published in the English translation in 1991. Life and work Klee was first trained as a sanitary and heating technician. Afterwards, he caught up on his university entrance requirements and then studied theology and social education. As a journalist in the 1970s, he looked at socially excluded groups, such as the homeless, psychiatric patients and the disabled. During this period, he collaborated with Gusti Steiner, who laid the foundation for the federal German emancipatory movement of the disabled at that time. In 1997, he received the ''Geschwister-Scholl-Preis ...
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Sonnenstein Euthanasia Centre
The Sonnenstein Euthanasia Clinic (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Sonnenstein; literally "National Socialist Killing Institution Sonnenstein") was a Nazi euthanasia or extermination centre located in the former fortress of Sonnenstein Castle near Pirna in eastern Germany, where a hospital had been established in 1811. In 1940 and 1941, the facility was used by the Nazis to exterminate around 15,000 people in a process that was labelled as euthanasia. The majority of victims were suffering from psychological disorders and intellectual disability, but their number also included inmates from the concentration camps. The institute was set up after the beginning of the Second World War as part of a Reich-wide, centrally coordinated and largely secret programme called ''Action T4'' for the "Elimination of life unworthy of life" (''Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens'') or the killing of what the Nazis called "dead weight existences" (''Ballastexistenzen''). Today, the Pirna Sonnenstein Memori ...
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Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre
The Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Brandenburg), officially known as the Brandenburg an der Havel State Welfare Institute (''Landes-Pflegeanstalt Brandenburg a. H.''), was a killing centre established in 1939 as part of the Nazi "euthanasia" programme, known after the war as "''Aktion T4''". Nearly 10,000 people were murdered there during its operation, primarily those with mental and physical disabilities. Overview The killing centre was located in Brandenburg an der Havel in the old gaol in ''Neuendorfer Straße'' 90c. Brandenburg Concentration Camp was housed in these buildings from August 1933 to February 1934. A concentration camp, one of the first in Germany, was located on ''Neuendorfer Straße'' in Brandenburg Old Town. After closing this inner city concentration camp, the Nazis used the Brandenburg-Görden Prison, located in Görden, a suburb of Brandenburg. Later the old gaol became the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre where the Nazis killed ...
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