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Among the Aktion Reinhard camp personnel
transferred to the airfield by Wirth was SS-NCO Kurt Bolender, formerly a
member of the Sobibor camp staff and recently released from custody in an SS
penal camp. His arrival did not please Wirth, as Bolender recalls:
Wirth was not enthusiastic about my
arrival and showed his displeasure by pushing me away. But on orders from
Berlin he had to keep me ... I was assigned to a Kommando supervised by
Hackenholt ... Hackenholt looked after himself and cared little for his work
brigade. [63] On 31 October 1961, Ilse
Hackenholt, while again being interrogated by officers from SK III/a, informed
them that in the autumn of 1943 she had visited her husband at the Lublin
airfield camp. He had sent her a telegram in which he wrote that he had been
injured and that she should come and see him. They agreed to meet first in
Warsaw:
At that time my husband was in a
factory, or some such similar place in Lublin, in which Jews were interned and
had to work. My husband lived at that time in Lublin in the camp complex ... As
far as I know, my husband performed guard duty on the area of the camp. I
cannot give more precise details about his duties. [64]
During her stay in Lublin during the last
three weeks of October and the first days of November 1943, Ilse Hackenholt met
several of her husband's SS comrades as well as Gottlieb Hering, the former
commandant at Belzec. At this time he was commandant of the Jewish labour camp
at Poniatowa near Lublin which came under Wirth's jurisdiction, and regularly
visited him at the airfield.
Just over three weeks after Ilse
Hackenholt's arrival in the city, she had to leave suddenly and return to
Berlin, as she explained to the police officers:
I have an extraordinarily unpleasant
memory of the last days of my holiday in Lublin. As explained before, we lived
a part of the time inside the camp complex, and on this particular day the
whole camp was surrounded and the interned Jews were driven out. Although I
myself saw that the camp was surrounded, I cannot say for sure to which units
the soldiers belonged. I believe I heard from my husband that the camp was
surrounded by the SS. The Jews were taken some distance from the camp and later
I heard shooting. I surmised something bad was happening. It was uncanny for me
there. My holiday was not yet over but I decided to leave. Besides, I remember
that Hering advised me to leave.
[64]
_______________
[63] Ibid., 208
AR-Z 252/59 (Belzec Case), pp. 1314-1315. Statement by Kurt Bolender on 5 June
1961 in Munich. Bolender had been sentenced by an SS and Police Court in Cracow
to nine months imprisonment — three of them in a penal camp in
Danzig-Matzkau, for intimidating a witness and committing perjury during his
divorce proceedings.
[64] Ibid., pp. 1496-1497. Statement by Ilse
Hackenholt on 31.10.1961 in Sonthofen. 65 Ibid.
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