Franz Wolf (SS officer)

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Franz Wolf (9 April 1907 – 9 October 1999) was a German Nazi official who worked in the Nazi euthanasia program and later at the Sobibor extermination camp in occupied Poland during the Holocaust.

Born in Krummau (today Český Krumlov, Czech Republic), he served in the Czechoslovak Army and the German Wehrmacht and later worked at the Hadamar Euthanasia Centre and the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, where he photographed mentally ill patients before they were killed.

In early 1943 Wolf and his brother Josef were sent to Sobibor as specialists in euthanasia. At Sobibor he supervised the sorting of victims’ belongings and led the Waldkommando forest unit that supplied wood for cremations; he remained there until the camp uprising. His brother Josef Wolf was killed in the uprising.

After the war, Franz Wolf lived in West Germany for about two decades. He was arrested in 1964 and indicted in the Sobibór trial for involvement in the murder of Jews. On 20 December 1966, a court in Hagen sentenced him to eight years in prison for participating in the murder of at least 39,000 Jews, with the indictment listing as many as 115,000 victims.

Wolf died in Palling, Germany, on 9 October 1999, aged 92.