The ‘Disappearance’ of SS-Hauptscharführer Lorenz Hackenholt A Report on the 1959-63 West German Police Search for Lorenz Hackenholt, the Gas Chamber Expert of the Aktion Reinhard Extermination Camps © Michael Tregenza (Page 16) When the new gassing installation had been completed - modelled on the 'Stiftung Hackenholt' in Belzec — Hackenholt and Lambert were transferred by Wirth to the Sobibor extermination camp where new gas chambers were also needed. Lambert: received from Wirth the task of enlarging the gassing installation in Sobibor, to be precise, to construct it on the model of Treblinka. I then travelled to Sobibor ... together with Hackenholt ... First, I went with Hackenholt to a timber yard near Warsaw. There Hackenholt placed a big order for wood for construction work at Sobibor. Finally, we travelled together to Sobibor ... I could have arrived there sometime in October, I cannot say exactly. I only remember that it was already cold when I arrived ... we reported to the camp leader, Reichleitner. He then gave us suitable instructions for constructing the gassing installation. The camp was already in operation before our arrival and there was already a gassing installation there. [54] Lambert assumed correctly that the Sobibor gas chambers had to be replaced for the same reasons as the chambers at Belzec and Treblinka: they were neither big enough nor solid enough to handle the number of Jews being sent to the camp for extermination. The same half-a-dozen Ukrainian guards employed in Treblinka as labourers also went to Sobibor with Hackenholt and Lambert. Their leader, a Volksdeutscher bricklayer called Busche, was also their interpreter. [55] At the onset of winter, Hackenholt returned to Belzec where — on the orders of the Reichsführer-SS, Himmler — the hundreds of thousands of corpses buried in the camp were about to be exhumed and cremated. For a few weeks he operated a mechanical excavator opening the mass graves and removing the decomposing contents and during this time, according to Belzec villagers who met him in the local bars, 'Hackenholt stank of corpses'. On the instructions of SS-NCO Herbert Floss, the Aktion Reinhard cremation expert, the exhumed human remains were cremated on big grates constructed of railway lines placed on top of squat concrete pillars arranged around the rim of an empied grave. At the beginning of December, a second grate was constructed and between them the two pyres consumed about 4,000 corpses every 24 hours. SS-NCO Heinrich Gley who supervised the cremations estimated that over half a million corpses were burnt between the end of November 1942 and March 1943.[56] In December 1942, Hackenholt returned to Berlin on leave to spend Christmas and the New Year celebrations with his wife Ilse, whom he had seen only once since their wedding the previous autumn. On returning to duty in Poland at the beginning of 1943, Hackenholt was again assigned to Treblinka by Wirth to assist with the cremation operation which had just started at the camp. On Wirth's orders, the corpses of the _______________ [54] Ibid., 208 AR-Z 251/59 (Sobibor Case), p. 1542. Statement by Erwin Lambert on 2.10.1962 in Stuttgart. [55] Ibid. [56] OKBL Ds. 1604/45 - Zamosc (The Death Camp at Belzec), witnesses statements. [57] ZStL 208 AR-Z 268/59: Case Against Lothar Hoffmann et al (Lublin Gestapo Case), p. 2887. Statement by Heinrich Gley on 6.2.1962 in Munster. [58] Ibid., pp. 2887-2888.    Back Page 16 Forward
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