Richard Thomalla

Richard Thomalla (; 23 October 1903 – 12 May 1945) was a German war criminal and SS commander of Nazi Germany. A civil engineer by profession, he was head of the SS Central Building Administration at Lublin reservation in occupied Poland. Thomalla was in charge of construction for the Operation Reinhard death camps Bełżec, Sobibor and Treblinka during the Holocaust in Poland.

Operation Reinhardt

Born in Sabine in the former Upper Silesia region of the German Empire (now, the village of Sowin, Opole Voivodeship, Poland). Thomalla became a member of the Nazi Party in 1932: (no. 1,238,872) and Schutzstaffel (SS no. 41,206). These workers consisted of about eighty Jews from ghettos within the vicinity of the camp. A squad of ten watchmen trained at Trawniki concentration camp guarded these workers. Upon completion of the camp, these Jews were shot.

SS commander Erwin Lambert who had previously been assigned to the Action T4 euthanasia program and had constructed the new gas chambers in Treblinka, testified about Thomalla:

Between July 1942 and October 1943, around 850,000 people were murdered in Treblinka. Thomalla was reportedly executed by the NKVD (Soviet secret police) in Jičín, Czechoslovakia on 12 May 1945; he was formally declared dead in absentia by a court in Ulm in 1957.