Franz Lechthaler

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Franz Lechthaler (born August 3, 1890 in Volxheim , † 1967 ) was a German police officer and perpetrator of the Holocaust.

Life

Lechthaler was the son of a master mason. He attended elementary school in Volxheim and trained as a painter. In 1911 he became a soldier and in the First World War on the Eastern Front used. In the course of the downsizing of the army , he was dismissed in 1920 with the rank of sergeant , also because he had been elected to the soldiers' council of his squadron in occupied Kiev in 1918 . Lechthaler applied for an officer career in the police service and was promoted to police lieutenant in Erfurt in 1921 . He was stationed in Aachen , Bochum and Wiesbaden . He married in Wiesbaden and had a daughter. After seizing power in 1933, he applied for membership in the NSDAP . However, he was not accepted because he had joined the revolutionaries in Kiev at the time and spoke out in favor of Hindenburg and against Hitler when issuing orders to his police unit on the occasion of the 1932 presidential election . In 1938 he was promoted to major in the police service in Königsberg and received the membership book of the NSDAP retroactively to May 1, 1933.

In December 1939, Lechthaler was appointed commander of Reserve Police Battalion 11 , which was set up after the outbreak of war and was stationed in Pultusk in occupied Poland at the time . The battalion temporarily consisted of four companies that were involved in various actions against the civilian population in Poland, Lithuania and Belarus. In this intelligentsia and Jews robbed and murdered. Since August 1941, Lechthaler has been building a Lithuanian auxiliary force for the order police in Kaunas and deployed parts of the battalion to guard the forced ghetto in Kaunas . The command route from Lechthaler to those of his police officers who were involved in the mass murders of Einsatzgruppe 3 in Kaunas in autumn 1941 could not be conclusively verified in the later trial against Lechthaler.

In October 1941, Lechthaler was transferred to Minsk with 326 police officers in two companies and 457 Lithuanian auxiliaries, where he supported the 707th Infantry Division with security measures. The troops immediately began what they called “Aktion Judenrein”. On October 14th, around 1,400 Jewish residents were shot in Smolevich . On October 26, 1941, Lechthaler received an order from Chief of Staff (Ia) of the 707th Infantry Division Fritz Wedig von der Osten to shoot all Jews in Sluzk . Lechthaler himself was there and passed the relevant orders on to his company commanders, and he also ordered the children to be murdered. Lechthaler's companies also carried out mass shootings of Jews elsewhere in Belarus ; between 1,800 and 3,500 Jews were murdered in Kletsk . Under the command of an officer of the police battalion, two companies of the Lechthaler subordinate Lithuanians evacuated the civilian prison camp in Minsk and murdered “communists” in 1675.

In the second half of 1942 Lechthaler was a tactics teacher at the police school established in the occupied Pelplin . He attended a regimental leader course in Dresden-Hellerau and was promoted to lieutenant colonel of the police in September 1942 . As a regimental leader of Police Regiment 17 , he led operations against partisans in Poland and Yugoslavia . At the end of the war he was sentenced by an SS and police court to three months in prison for procrastinating orders, but because of the German surrender in May 1945, the sentence was no longer carried out.

In June 1945 Lechthaler was released from British captivity and moved to Eschwege , his wife's hometown. He worked there as an accountant. During the denazification in 1947 he was classified as "exonerated". Since the Nuremberg Trial of the Major War Criminals 1945/46 the participation of units of the out by Lechthaler police battalion in the massacre of Jews in October 1941 in Belarus was Slutsk public since a report of the German area commissioner was from Slutsk, Heinrich Carl, taken as evidence and was published in 1948 as part of the IMT's trial files . Against Lechthaler and one of the former company commander, Willy Papenkort , in the late 1950s was determined and Lechthaler came on April 28, 1960, two months before the deadline for statute of limitations , in custody .

While Lechthaler from the Kassel Regional Court because of " aid for manslaughter " for three and a half years ' imprisonment was sentenced Papenkort received an acquittal for lack of evidence. After the Federal Court had set aside the judgment, Lechthaler was in the revision process condemned "at least 15 children" to two years in prison for complicity in the murder of. Papenkort, who, like Lechthaler, had pleaded an orderly emergency in court, was acquitted again in accordance with the case law of the time in the Federal Republic of Germany.

literature

  • "LG Kassel January 9, 1963". In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966 , vol. XVIII, ed. by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs and CF Rüter. University Press, Amsterdam 1978, No. 546, pp. 779-849.
  • Wolfgang Curilla : The murder of Jews in Poland and the German Ordnungspolizei 1939–1945. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2011, ISBN 978-3-506-77043-1 .
  • Wolfgang Curilla: The German Ordnungspolizei and the Holocaust in the Baltic States and Belarus, 1941–1944. F. Schöningh, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 3-506-71787-1 .
  • Stefan Klemp : Not determined. Police Battalions and the Post War Justice. A manual. Klartext, Essen 2005, ISBN 3-89861-381-X .
  • Peter Lieb : Perpetrator out of conviction? Colonel Carl von Andrian and the murders of the Jews of the 707th Infantry Division 1941/42 , in: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 50 (2002), issue 4, pp. 523–557 (PDF in the archive, 6.7 MB)
  • Christian Gerlach : Calculated murders. The German economic and extermination policy in Belarus from 1941 to 1944 . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 1999.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Information on the curriculum vitae at LG Kassel January 9, 1963
  2. ↑ Wolfgang Curilla: Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei , 2006, pp. 150–181
  3. ↑ Wolfgang Curilla: Der Judenmord in Polen , 2011, p. 93
  4. ↑ Wolfgang Curilla: Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei , 2006, p. 154
  5. ↑ Stefan Klemp: Not determined , 2005, p. 109
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Curilla: Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei , 2006, pp. 163–166
  7. ↑ Stefan Klemp: Not determined , 2005, p. 110
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Curilla: Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei , 2006, p. 209
  9. ^ Christian Gerlach: Calculated Morde , 1999, p. 612
  10. ↑ Stefan Klemp: Not determined , 2005, p. 111
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Curilla: Der Judenmord in Polen , 2011, pp. 821–825. The unit is called "Police-Schützen-Regiment 32" in Stefan Klemp: Not determined , 2005, p. 457
  12. ↑ In Stefan Klemp: Not determined , 2005, p. 449, Lechthaler was in command of the 5th SS Police Regiment from mid-1944 until the end of 1944
  13. ^ IMT, December 20, 1945, pp. 111ff. IMT Vol. XXVII, 1948, Document 1104-PS, pp. 1-8; Report p. 4–8; also in: Wolfgang Curilla: Die deutsche Ordnungspolizei , 2006, pp. 167–170
personal data
SURNAME Lechthaler, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German police officer and perpetrator of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Volxheim
DATE OF DEATH 1967