English source-aligned edition
Josef Hirtreiter
Josef Hirtreiter served as staff member at the Treblinka II killing centre. The profile reconstructs the person’s function in Hadamar and Treblinka II through documented office, decisions, supervision or operational conduct. It does not assign every crime committed by an institution or region to one individual.
Confirmed findings
- From October 1940 Hirtreiter worked at the Aktion T4 centre in Hadamar and later served in Operation Reinhard at Treblinka II. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage)
- The court found that he supervised victims being undressed and driven to the gas chambers and used violence and committed killings within the camp. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage; Source: pomoc.holocaustresearch.pl, cited passage)
- The findings also covered the killing of small children left with transports; the court convicted him of murder in an indeterminate number of cases. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage; Source: fritz-bauer-institut.de, cited passage)
Place in the chain of responsibility
The judgment individualizes Hirtreiter’s direct conduct but does not establish a source-safe victim number; the profile does not replace that uncertainty with an estimate. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage; Source: pomoc.holocaustresearch.pl, cited passage; Source: fritz-bauer-institut.de, cited passage)
Key events and mechanisms
- From October 1940 he worked at the T4 centre in Hadamar. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage)
- In 1942–1943 he served at the Treblinka II killing centre. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage; Source: pomoc.holocaustresearch.pl, cited passage)
- On 3 March 1951 the Frankfurt Regional Court sentenced him to life penal servitude; the Federal Court upheld it on 10 January 1952. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage; Source: fritz-bauer-institut.de, cited passage)
The circle records authority, function and agency. Several profiles may describe different parts of the same persecution chain, so profile-level totals must not be added together.
Postwar accountability
Arrested in 1946, he was sentenced to life in 1951. He served the sentence at Butzbach and was released for illness in 1977. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage; Source: pomoc.holocaustresearch.pl, cited passage; Source: fritz-bauer-institut.de, cited passage)
Limits of the evidence
The profile does not attribute Treblinka’s total victim count or an exact number of victims of his direct acts, which the court did not establish. The institutional source confirms only the death year 1978, so the exact day and place are omitted. No portrait was selected without verified rights. (Source: junsv.nl, cited passage; Source: pomoc.holocaustresearch.pl, cited passage; Source: fritz-bauer-institut.de, cited passage)
Sources
The source set combines institutional, archival, trial or scholarly material from at least two independent publishers.