Lorenz Hackenholt (1914 – 1945)

Lorenz Hackenholt came from Gelsenkirchen and initially worked as a bricklayer. In 1933, he volunteered for the SS, to which he was admitted in 1934 and which then trained him to be a driver. He had belonged to the NSDAP since 1933. As a member of the security personnel at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, he was assigned to »Aktion T4« in November in 1939. Until the summer of 1941, Hackenholt was employed in all six killing centres as a driver and »corpse burner«, but he was also responsible for the operation of the gas chambers.

After the end of »Aktion T4« he was engaged as »gassing expert« for »Aktion Reinhardt« in occupied Poland, where more than two million Jews were systematically murdered. He designed not only the first gas chamber in Bełżec, but also a »gas van« which was used to gas Jewish institutional patients in transit. Until the middle of 1943, he was instrumental in the construction of gas chambers in the extermination camps of Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka, in the mass murders themselves and the subsequent disposal of the bodies. As an SS-Hauptscharführer, he was subsequently involved in the extermination of Jews and in anti-partisan operations in the Trieste region, where he was probably killed in the spring of 1945. Hackenholt was declared dead in 1945.