"In a letter written on January 3, 1976, Kurt Franz, who continually protested his innocence, strongly denied having been camp Commandant. He wrote: "I served in Treblinka with the military rank of a Oberscharführer of the Waffen-SS responsible exclusively only for the guard detachment and with the men for the guarding of the camp. An Oberscharführer is a Technical Sergeant and not an officer!" The letter is printed in no. 44 of the Historische Tatsachen (note 105) on p. 23. Kurt Franz, who was charged with participation in the murder of 300,139 Jews, had lived in Düsseldorf under his own name up to 1959. (A. Rückerl, NS-Vernichtungslager..., op. cit. (note 62), pp. 44f.); therefore he obviously had a good conscience and it had never occurred to him that he could be accused of anything! Only in 1993 was he released, a gravely ill and broken man, after decades of imprisonment."