Siegfried Graetschus (9 June 1916 – 14 October 1943) was a German SS functionary at the

Sobibor extermination camp Sobibor (, Polish: ) was an extermination camp built and operated by Nazi Germany as part of Operation Reinhard. It was located in the forest near the village of Żłobek Duży in the General Government region of German-occupied Poland. As a ...

during

Operation Reinhard or ''Einsatz Reinhard'' , location = Occupied Poland , date = October 1941 – November 1943 , incident_type = Mass deportations to extermination camps , perpetrators = Odilo Globočnik, Hermann Höfle, Richard Thomalla, Erw ...

, the deadliest phase of

the Holocaust in occupied Poland The Holocaust in Poland was part of the European-wide Holocaust organized by Nazi Germany and took place in German-occupied Poland. During the genocide, three million Polish Jews were murdered, half of all Jews murdered during the Holoca ...

. He was assassinated by a prisoner during the Sobibor uprising. Graetschus joined the SS in 1935 and the

Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party (german: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), was a far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported t ...

in 1936. He served at

Bernburg Euthanasia Centre The Nazi Euthanasia Centre at Bernburg (german: NS-Tötungsanstalt Bernburg) operated from 21 November 1940 to 30 July 1943 in a separate wing of the State Sanatorium and Mental Hospital (''Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalt'') in Bernburg on the Riv ...

and

Treblinka extermination camp Treblinka () was an extermination camp, built and operated by Nazi Germany in Occupation of Poland (1939–1945), occupied Poland during World War II. It was in a forest north-east of Warsaw, south of the Treblinka, Masovian Voivodeship, vi ...

before being posted to Sobibor in August 1942. He succeeded

Erich Lachmann Erich Gustav Willie Lachmann (6 November 1909 – 23 January 1972) was an SS functionary who participated in Operation Reinhard in Sobibor extermination camp. Lachmann was born on 6 November 1909 in Legnica. His first job was that of a journeyman ...

as commander of the approximately 200 Ukrainian

Trawniki guards Trawniki is a village in Świdnik County, Lublin Voivodeship, in eastern Poland. It is the seat of the present-day gmina (administrative district) called Gmina Trawniki. It lies approximately south-east of Świdnik and south-east of the regi ...

at Sobibor.Sobibor Interviews: Biographies of SS-men
/ref> Graetschus was killed during the prisoner revolt at Sobibor. While sources agree that he was killed in the shoemaker's barracks with an

axe An axe ( sometimes ax in American English; see spelling differences) is an implement that has been used for millennia to shape, split and cut wood, to harvest timber, as a weapon, and as a ceremonial or heraldic symbol. The axe has ma ...

to the head, they differ as to whether the fatal blow was struck by Yehuda Lerner, a Varsovian Jew, or by Arkady Wajspapir, a Jewish Russian Red Army soldier.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Graetschus, Siegfried 1916 births 1943 deaths People from Tilsit People from East Prussia SS non-commissioned officers Axe murder Nazi Party members Sobibor personnel killed during the Sobibor uprising