Kurt Bolender
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Heinz Kurt Bolender (21 May 1912 - 10 October 1966) was a German Holocaust perpetrator. He was an Oberscharführer in the SS-Totenkopfverbände and operated the gas chambers at Sobibor extermination camp.
Biography edit
Bolender was born in Duisburg, Germany, in 1912. He joined the Nazi Party in 1930, and the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death's Head Unit) in 1939. He was involved in the Action T4 euthanasia program, working at the killing centres at Hadamar and Hartheim. Bolender was in charge of gassing those with physical and mental disabilities to death and of the cremation of the dead. He worked alongside Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl.
In April 1942 Bolender was transferred to the Sobibor camp, where Jews and Romani were exterminated via gas chamber. His former colleague Franz Stangl was at the time serving as commandant of Sobibor and entrusted Bolender with the job of supervising the extermination area, making him personally responsible for operating the gas chambers. By Bolender's own admission he supervised the gassing of Jews and assigned the groups of Sonderkommando (working Jews) who emptied out the gas chambers and transported the victims to graves. According to Bolender's assistant Erich Fuchs, he and Bolender gassed about 30 - 40 people in each chamber.
Bolender was known for his violence and sadism. His colleague Erich Bauer testified in 1966 that Bolender had once forced two Sonderkommando to beat each other almost to death for his own amusement. Bauer also claimed that Bolender, Commandant Stangl, Hubert Gomerski, Karl Ludwig, Gustav Wagner and Karl Steubel frequently conducted mass rapes in the forester house in which they gang-raped female Jews. Bolender allegedly murdered at least two of these women named Ruth and Gisela. Sobibor survivors remembered that Bolender and fellow guard Paul Groth would roam the camp with Bolender's dog Barry looking for slave labourers who weren't working hard enough and set the dog on them. Other survivors remembered Bolender roaming the camp with his shirt off brutally lashing prisoners with a whip. He was often seen throwing children and the sick onto the trolleys taking them to the gas chambers the moment they got off the trains.
Bolender was temporarily relieved of his duties in December 1942 after being convicted of witness tampering for threatening a witness in his divorce. After serving his sentence he returned to Sobibor in 1943 only for SS chief Heinrich Himmler to order Sobibor shut down due to an uprising in October. Bolender assisted in shutting down the camp before being sent to serve in Italy.
After World War II, Bolender went into hiding under a false name and arranged for his family to declare him dead. He remained at large until May 1961, when a former Sobibor inmate recognised him working as a doorman in a nightclub. Bolender was arrested under the alias "Heinz Brenner". Police found a whip at his residence with the initials "KB" inscribed on it. Sobibor inmate Stanisław Szmajzner remembered Bolender forcing him to inscribe these initials onto his whip. Bolender and 11 other former camp staff were charged with mass murder at the Sobibor Trial in 1966. Bolender was charged with 360 counts of murder and acting as an accessory to 86, 000 counts of murder. His defence was that he had never worked at Sobibor and had served in an anti-partisan unit in Poland; however, this was easily disproven by the testimony of numerous inmates and his fellow defendants and Bolender was eventually forced to admit that he had worked at the camp. He hanged himself on 10 October 1966 before the conclusion of the trial.