Mentz was an unskilled laborer and joined the Nazi party in 1932. From 1940 to 1941 he was working as a laborer at several gassing chamber sites without apparent direct involvement in the gassing operations. From mid 1942 to the end of 1943 he was appointed to Treblinka where he organized slave labor. There, his main job was at the so-called 'military hospital' where new arrivals too weak, ill, frail, or injured to walk to the gas chambers were transported. In the 'hospital' they were murdered, partially incinerated, and buried in mass graves.