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BRUTAL Death of Siegfried Graetschus - Sadistic NAZI Officer at Belzec, Treblinka & Sobibor Camps. Siegfried Graetschus was born on the 9th of June 1916 in Tilsit then part of the German Empire. In 1935 he joined the SS and one year later he joined the Nazi Party. From 1939, the SS assumed responsibility for “solving” the so-called Jewish Question which then culminated in 1941, when the leadership planned, coordinated and directed the so-called Final Solution. This “solution” was the genocide of European Jews during World War II.; also known as the Holocaust. SS officers, such as Siegfried Graetschus, were directly responsible for the management of concentration camps, where millions of Jews were murdered by poison gas.
Graetschus first served in Sachsenhausen concentration camp which was located north of Berlin. The camp held Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma and Sinti people and, later, Soviet civilians. One of the camp’s most prominent prisoners was Yakov Dzhugashvili, Joseph Stalin's son, who died at Sachsenhausen in 1943 after his father refused to make a deal to secure his release.
After the Second World War began on the 1st of September 1939, Graetschus started to work for the Nazi Euthanasia Program, code-named T4, which was the systematic murder of institutionalized patients with disabilities in Germany. The patients were transported by bus or by rail into 6 killing centers where they were murdered. In these centers the Nazis gassed, shot, or killed by lethal injections those who were deemed “ unworthy of life “ such as residents of welfare institutions, some concentration camp inmates, the chronically sick, the mentally and physically disabled,
homosexuals, and even sick German soldiers. Graetschus worked in Grafeneck, Brandenburg and Bernburg killing centers.
His duties included moving the murdered victims from the gas chambers to the crematoria.
The T4 program predated the genocide of European Jewry, the Holocaust, by approximately two years. Historians estimate that the program claimed the lives of 250,000 men, women, and children.
In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany implemented a plan to systematically murder the 2 million Jews living in German-occupied Poland. This plan was codenamed Operation Reinhard and as part of this action, three killing centers were established: Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Siegfried Graetschus then briefly served in Treblinka extermination camp which was constructed in the summer of 1942. It was the third killing center, after . Belzec and Sobibor, established by Operation Reinhard authorities.
Deportations to Treblinka came mainly from the ghettos of Warsaw and Radom districts in the General Government and continued until the spring of 1943. Most prominent among the deportations were the approximately 7,000 Jews transported from the Warsaw ghetto after its liquidation following the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
In August 1942 Siegfried Graetschus was deployed in the Sobibor extermination camp. There he was promoted to SS- Untersturmführer and commander of the 90 to 120 Trawniki men composed of Eastern European collaborators trained in the SS camp in Trawniki.
These men who guarded the camp were considered difficult to manage and unreliable. Graetschus succeeded Erich Lachmann - an alcoholic, thief and mentally handicapped SS functionary.
German SS and police officials conducted deportations to Sobibor between May 1942, when the regular gassing operations began, and the fall of 1943. Most of the Jews brought to Sobibor were immediately gassed by carbon monoxide which had been piped into the gas chambers from an engine. About 250,000 victims were murdered in this killing center.
The Germans constructed Sobibor as a rectangle - 1312 by 1969 feet. A double barbed-wire fence, woven with tree branches, surrounded the perimeter of the
camp. This design was intended to hide the view of what was inside. It had two side-by-side gates, one for trains and another for foot traffic and vehicles. The Nazis paid special attention to the front compound which consisted of living quarters and recreational buildings for the camp personnel. The SS officers lived in cottages with colorful names which helped conceal the purpose of the camp from new arrivals, who would arrive on the adjacent ramp.
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