Gustav. Wagner, a former commandant at Sobibor concentration comp where 250,000 Jews were exterminated including several of them at his own hands, made it clear here this week that his major regret was that Germany had lost the war.
Wagner was speaking in a BBC television interview filmed in Brazil. The program included four of the handful of Sobibor survivors who said Wagner would never enjoy his lunch until he had first personally murdered two or three of the inmates.
The 68-year-old gray-haired Nazi insisted, in subdued tones, that he had personally never murdered anybody. The extermination program was top secret work for the German Reich which he was sworn by oath to carry out, he said. He and his colleagues were merely carrying out orders; “We were small fry. I am an ordinary man, like others I feel no different,” he said.
He said that he had seen people exterminated “who were really innocent,” but he would have been shot if he had not done his duty. Germany had called him to make war and given him a job to do, Wagner said. “But now they punish me for it. Everything went wrong once Germany lost the war.” he concluded.
Esther Raab one of the survivors, recalled how Wagner would come out of his office with his thumbs in his pockets, a sign that “he needed blood like a drunkard needs to drink.” An-other survivor, describing how Wagner had beaten a father and son to death with an axe handle, said the Nazi chief could not enjoy his lunch without first having killed two or three people.”
Simon Wiesenthal, head of the Vienna War Crimes Documentation Center, who helped to track down Wagner in Brazil, said Wagner’s life was not important. What mattered was that he should be arrested 37 years and 10,000 miles from the scene and time of his crime. “That is a warning for the would-be murderers of the future.” he said.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
