With a change of command in the
Operation Reinhard death camp system, Franz was transferred to
Treblinka extermination camp. He quickly became the camp's deputy commandant on the orders of
Christian Wirth. He was promoted to serve as the last camp commandant from mid August until November 1943 to conclude
the Holocaust in Poland. In the testimony (27 February 1946) of one
Samuel Rajzman at the major war crimes trial held in Nuremberg, Franz was "the commander of the camp" and orchestrated the building of the railway station at Treblinka. Rajzman said, "When the persons descended from the trains, they really had the impression that they were at a very good station from where they could go to
Suwalki,
Vienna,
Grodno, or other cities." Rajzman also stated that Franz was responsible for the death of renowned psychologist
Sigmund Freud's sister. At first, Kurt Franz supervised work commandos, the unloading of transports, and the transfer of Jews from the undressing rooms to the gas chambers.
Barry the dog Franz was known for being unusually cruel and sadistic. He often made his rounds of the camp riding a horse, and would take his
St. Bernard dog, Barry, along with him. Barry was trained to follow Franz's command, which was usually to bite the
genitalia or
buttocks of prisoners.
The Treblinka song As reported by lower-ranking SS officers and soldiers, Kurt Franz also wrote the lyrics to a song which celebrated the Treblinka extermination camp. Prisoner Walter Hirsch wrote them for him. Franz enjoyed shooting at prisoners or those still in the rail cars with his pistol or a hunting rifle. He frequently selected bearded men from the newly arriving transports and asked them whether they believed in God. When the men replied "yes", Franz told each man to hold up a bottle as a target. He would then say to them, "If your God indeed exists, then I will hit the bottle, and if He does not exist, then I will hit you." Then Franz would shoot at them. Kurt Franz also had experience as a boxer before arriving at Treblinka. He put this training to sadistic use by victimizing Jews as punching bags. On occasion he would "challenge" a Jew to a boxing duel (of course the prisoner had to oblige), and gave the prisoner a boxing glove, while keeping one for himself, to give the illusion of a fair fight. But Franz kept a small pistol in the glove that he kept for himself, and he would proceed to shoot the prisoner dead once the gloves were on and they had assumed the starting boxing position. Oscar Strawczinski wrote: In the 1964 trial, a witness gave testimony: "Describing his sufferings at the hands of ex-camp commander Kurt Franz and nine other defendants, Abraham Goldfarb, 55, said he once saw Franz join a group of Jewish children in play just before they were gassed. He said he heard Franz say at the time that children were “all headed for heaven.” He also said that the German guards would cut open pregnant Jewish women after they were gassed to make sure 'the fruit of their wombs' were also dead." Franz was promoted to
Untersturmführer (second lieutenant) and became an appointed official on 21 June 1943 on the orders of
Heinrich Himmler. On 2 August 1943, Franz along with four SS men and sixteen Ukrainians went for a swim in the nearby
Bug River, which depleted the security at Treblinka significantly and helped to improve the chances of success of the prisoner revolt that took place at the camp that day. After the revolt, the camp's commandant
Franz Stangl left. Kurt Franz served as his replacement, and he was instructed to dismantle the camp and to eliminate every trace of evidence that it had ever existed. Franz had at his disposal some SS men, a group of Ukrainian guards and about 100 Jewish prisoners who had remained after the uprising. The physical work was carried out by the Jews during September and October 1943, after which thirty to fifty prisoners were sent to
Sobibor to finish dismantling there, and the remainder were shot and cremated on Franz's orders. After Treblinka, in late autumn 1943, Franz was ordered to
Trieste and northern Italy, where he participated in the persecution of partisans and Jews until the war's end. He was wounded in late 1944 and, after recovery, employed as security officer on the Görz-Trieste railway line. ==Post-war trial and conviction==