Kurt Franz (1917-1998)

Trained as a cook, member of the NSDAP and the SS from 1935. Took part in ‘Operation T4’, the so-called Euthanasia Programme. Employed at the extermination camp Belzec in 1942, then second in command (and later commandant) at the extermination camp Treblinka from September 1943. The prisoners feared Franz for his cruelly conducted murders that frequently happened at random. After the war Franz again worked as a cook in Germany, until he was arrested in 1959. Franz was found guilty of 139 individual murders and of assisting in at least 300,000 murders. He was sentenced to life + 7 years in prison. He was released in 1993 and died in 1998.