Their relationship dissolved after two years when her father heard that Frenzel was a Nazi Party member.

Responding to an appeal to loyal party members, Frenzel applied for special service in the military through his SA unit but instead was assigned to Action T4, the Nazi program to kill people with disabilities.

[7] Along with other T4 recruits, Frenzel reported to the Columbia Haus in late 1939, where he was first checked for political reliability and then watched a film on the supposed degeneration of handicapped people.

Like his colleagues, that was Frenzel's first experience with gassing and burning people, which proved useful later in the extermination camps.

[citation needed] On 20 April 1942, he was assigned to Operation Reinhard and sent to Sobibor extermination camp.

At Sobibor, he served as commandant of Lager I, the area in which Jewish prisoners lived and performed forced labour.

[9] Frenzel claimed that when he received his orders, he was told that Sobibor was merely a work camp, which he had to guard.

In the spring of 1943, after two Jews from Chelm had escaped from the camp, the staff consulted among themselves, and Frenzel announced the verdict that every tenth prisoner at the morning roll call would be executed.

[12] The historian and Holocaust survivor Jules Schelvis gave the following evaluation of Frenzel's tenure: His lust for power over defenceless people was mirrored by an equally great need to ingratiate himself to his superiors.

He wanted to be regarded as the perfect SS man by his superiors and fellow camp staff alike.

The realization that he was lord and master of the [work Jews], to know that they were at his disposal, that he could do with them as he pleased, aroused the lowest instincts in him.

[13]When Frenzel was convicted in 1966, the judges concluded: ...aided by his eager and deliberate active participation, an undetermined number of Jews, but at least 151,000, were killed, in the main through gassing.

He terrorized the prisoners, mocking them with his loud voice and deriving sadistic pleasure from thrashing them with his leather whip.

He was commandant of Lager 1, or the Arbeitsjudenlager, as well as the Bahnhofskommando, and formed the labour commandos after taking roll call.

He did not dispute the fact that he had used his own discretion in executing his function, taking decisions of life and death without consulting camp commanders first.

Frenzel stated:After the disembarking of the train, the children and the feeble Jews were forcibly thrown onto the trolley.

In the canteen at Sobibor I once overheard a conversation between Karl Frenzel, Franz Stangl and Gustav Wagner.

[3] As the war ended, he was arrested by United States troops at a prisoner-of-war camp near Munich but was soon released.

But then I thought very often about the enemy bomber pilots, who surely were not asked whether they wanted to carry out their murderous flights against German people in their homes in such a manner.

In the years after the war, Frenzel frequently expressed remorse for his actions but explained that he had simply complied with his duty.

[5]Karl Frenzel spent the last years of his life in a retirement home in Garbsen near Hannover, where he died on 2 September 1996.

In a 1983 interview, Frenzel — who was at the camp from its inception to its closure — admitted the following about Sobibor:Poles were not killed there.