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SS-Unterscharführer Willi Bruno Mentz (30 April 1904 – 25 June 1978) was a member of the German SS in World War II and a Holocaust perpetrator who worked at Treblinka extermination camp during the Operation Reinhard phase of the Holocaust in Poland. Mentz was known as "Frankenstein" at the camp.
Treblinka II Totenlager, which was built during Operation Reinhard, was operational between and marking the most deadly phase of the Final Solution. Treblinka Death Camp Day-by-Day Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team, H.E.A.R.T. Retrieved 11 August 2013. During this time, more than 800,000 Jews; men, women, and children died in its gas chambers. Other estimates of the number killed at Treblinka exceed 1,000,000.Donat, Alexander, ed. The Death Camp Treblinka: A Documentary. New York: Holocaust Library, 1979. LOC 79-53471Franciszek Ząbecki, Wspomnienia dawne i nowe, PAX Association Publishing, Warsaw 1977.
The Lazaret killing station was dressed with the Red Cross flag. Mentz wore an easily recognizable white doctor's smock for deceit. His fresh new victims were taken behind the barracks to the edge of an open excavation seven metres deep, where the corpses of prisoners were smouldering. They were executed while facing the inferno. Mentz shot thousands of Jews through the back of the neck and pushed their bodies into the flames. He was known as "Frankenstein" to the prisoners, one of the most-feared overseers among the work-brigades. According to one source: "The only thing that is certain is that the number of Jews from the transports he killed single-handedly runs into thousands". In December 1943 Mentz was sent for a short time to Sobibor extermination camp.
After Sobibor, Mentz served in Italy during Aktion R (known as the SS Task Force R), i.e. the killing of Jews and partisans there. After 1945, he went back to working as a master milkman in West Germany. He was arrested in 1960. During the first of the Treblinka Trials, Mentz was convicted of aiding and abetting the murders of 25 Jews, and being an accessory to the murders of 300,000 Jews. He was sentenced to life in prison. On 31 March 1978 he was released from prison due to poor health and died on 25 June 1978 in Niedermeien.
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