|
Heinrich Arthur Matthes (11 January 1902 – date of death unknown) was a German ''SS-Scharführer'' (Sergeant) who worked as a deputy commandant of Treblinka extermination camp during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust in Poland. He was appointed chief of the extermination area at Camp 2 where the gas chambers were built and managed by the ''SS'' overseeing some 300 slave labourers disposing of corpses under penalty of death. ==Life== Matthes was born in 1902 in Wermsdorf, near Leipzig. His father was a senior male nurse. Matthes attended public elementary school for eight years. He then became a tailor, but changed careers to nurse. He trained at Sonnenstein and took his exam there. Then he worked at the Arnsdorf and Bräunsdorf hospitals.〔 He married and had one daughter. At the beginning of 1934, he joined both the Nazi Party and the SA. When World War II broke out, he was drafted into the army. After about two years, Matthes was then recruited by Action T4, the Nazi state-sponsored program to kill disabled persons. He worked in the T4 photo laboratory and then served in the T4 unit with Organization Todt in Russia.〔Henry Friedlander (1995). ''The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution'', Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, p. 242. ISBN 0-8078-2208-6〕 In August 1942, he was ordered to Lublin reservation, where he was in short time drafted into the SS with the rank of ''Scharführer'' (Sergeant), dispatched to Operation Reinhard, and sent to Treblinka extermination camp. There he was appointed chief officer commanding Camp II (the extermination area) and the gas chambers.〔 Matthes was remembered by fellow Treblinka SS officer Franz Suchomel in the following way: Matthes was obsessed with cleanliness. In the autumn of 1942, Matthes shot two prisoners because at the end of the work day they had not properly cleaned to his satisfaction the stretcher which they used to transport corpses.〔 In the winter of 1942—43, a typhus epidemic broke out in Treblinka. Matthes took eight sick inmates to the ''Lazarett'' and had them shot. During that same winter he shot the prisoner Ilik Weintraub because, while transferring bodies from the gas chambers to the pits, Weintraub had stopped for a moment to drink some water from the well.〔 Matthes as remembered by Jerzy Rajgrodzki, a prisoner in the extermination area: In the autumn of 1943 Matthes was transferred to Sobibor extermination camp. He would later serve in Trieste with the other Operation Reinhard perpetrators.〔 At the Treblinka Trials in 1965 he was sentenced to life imprisonment.〔(First Treblinka Trial )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Heinrich Matthes」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|