On September 6, 1965, eleven
of the SS men who had served at the Sobibor Extermination Camp were brought to trial, accused of crimes
against humanity for the atrocities committed at the camp.
The proceedings took
place in Hagen, West Germany, and concluded on December 20,
1966. Six of the defendants were found guilty, one committed
suicide during the trial, three were acquitted and the remainder were
sentenced to various terms of imprisonment:
Karl Frenzel: Life Imprisonment
Erich Fuchs: 4 Years Imprisonment
Robert Jührs: Acquitted & Released
Erwin Lambert: 3 Years Imprisonment
Franz Wolf: 8 Years Imprisonment
Ernst Zierke: Released on Health Grounds
Alfred Ittner: 4 Years Imprisonment
Hans - Heinz Schütt: Acquitted & Released
Werner Dubois: 3 Years Imprisonment
Erich Lachmann: Acquitted & Released
Kurt Bolender: (Committed Suicide on the 10th October 1966)
One
of the accused, Kurt Bolender, the
former commander of extermination Camp
III, committed suicide. SS-Unterscharfuehrer
Erich Fuchs, who had helped in the construction
of the gas
chambers at the death camps Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka, was
convicted for having directed experimental
gassings that killed at least 3,000 Soviet
prisoners and was sentenced to four
years in prison. He later died in 1984.
Gustav
Wagner, Deputy Commandant of Sobibor,
who had ordered the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of Jews as chief of the selections and had been sentenced to death in absentia by
the Nuremberg
Tribunal, escaped his sentence along with Franz
Stangl with help of the Vatican
to Brazil, where Wagner was admitted
as a permanent resident on April 12,
1950.
Wagner
lived openly in Sao Paulo until his arrest
in May 1978, but the Brazilian Supreme
Court refused to extradite him to Germany.
According to his attorney Gustav Wagner
comitted suicide in October 1980.