Franz Suchomel

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Franz Suchomel (3 December 1907 – 18 December 1979) was a Czech‑German Nazi who helped carry out mass killings during World War II. He took part in the T4 euthanasia program, Operation Reinhard, and the Einsatzgruppen actions in the Adriatic area. He was later tried in the Treblinka trials and spent several years in prison.

Suchomel was born in Český Krumlov, Bohemia, then part of Austria‑Hungary. He worked as a tailor and ran his family business. He briefly served in the Czechoslovak Army in the late 1920s and again in 1938. He joined the Sudeten German Party in 1938 and, after the Munich Agreement, became a member of the Nazi NSKK, a paramilitary group.

At the start of World War II, Suchomel served as a tailor in the German Army and fought in the Battle of France in 1940. In March 1941 he became a photographer at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre, part of Action T4, where victims were photographed before killing. In August 1942 he was sent to the Treblinka extermination camp, where he managed transports and valuables and helped push victims toward the gas chambers. In October 1943 he briefly worked at Sobibor. After Operation Reinhard ended, he was sent to Trieste in the Adriatic Littoral as part of a unit involved in extermination and seizing Jewish assets. He left Europe with the army in 1945 and was captured by American troops, then released from captivity in August 1945.

After the war Suchomel lived in Altötting, Bavaria, and worked again as a tailor, also taking part in amateur music groups and church activities.

In 1963 German authorities began investigating Treblinka crimes. The Treblinka trials were held in Düsseldorf from October 1964 to September 1965 against ten defendants. The charges included the murder of hundreds of thousands of people. Suchomel was found guilty of being an accessory to murder (not convicted for individual killings) and was sentenced to six years in prison; he was released in December 1967.

Suchomel was secretly filmed for Claude Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah, released in 1985, in which he discussed Treblinka and his role there.

Franz Suchomel died on 18 December 1979 in Altötting, Bavaria.