Adolf Storms

Adolf Storms (* 28. August 1919 in Lintfort , Germany ; † 28. June 2010 in Duisburg , Germany) was a unterscharführer and a member of the Waffen-SS - Division "Wiking" and one of the alleged main perpetrators of the massacre in Burgenland place German Protect . In this final phase crime , about 60 Jewish slave laborers from Hungary were murdered on March 29, 1945. The "Storms case" gained notoriety because the perpetrator was tracked down by chance and confronted with his past by the Viennese political scientist Walter Manoschek , from which the documentary film Then I'm Yes a Murderer was first shown in 2012 .

Life

Pre-war period, military service

Information about Adolf Storm's life before and after his military service is extremely sparse. It is known that in 1939 he volunteered for the Reich Labor Service (RAD) and when the war broke out he switched to the Deutsche Reichsbahn , where he said he was employed at the ticket office of a train station. In March 1942 he volunteered for the Waffen SS and was initially assigned to a replacement battalion of the SS Panzer Grenadier Regiment “Westland” of the SS division “Wiking”. In September 1942 Storms was seriously wounded on the Eastern Front in the Caucasus and, after several months in the hospital, was sent to Field Training Battalion 5 of the Division in Klagenfurt in 1943 , and later to Ellwangen (Jagst) . As an armorer, he probably returned to his unit (8th rifle company of the “Westland” regiment of the “Wiking” division) on the Eastern Front in late autumn 1943. As a member of this unit, he was promoted to SS-Unterscharführer and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class in March 1944 . He was one of those soldiers who had managed to escape from the Cherkassy pocket. In December 1944, the division was transferred to Hungary, where it took part in the attacks to relieve Budapest and, after their failure, withdrew fighting towards the south-east wall . Adolf Storms was separated from his unit at Lake Balaton in March 1945 , then made his way to the Austrian border alone and reached German rifles on the evening of March 28, 1945.

Massacre in German riflemen

At that time there were around 500 Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in Deutsch Schützen who had to work on the local subsection of the south-east wall . Alfred Weber, a ban leader of the Hitler Youth (HJ), was entrusted with the management of the construction work as subsection leader. In view of the approaching front and the announcement by the guards that they would not wait for the Red Army to arrive , rumors were already circulating among the local population that the Jews would all be shot before they retreated. After the arrival of Storms and two other members of the Waffen SS, Weber, who was most certainly the author of the murder plan, insured himself that they would help in the liquidation of the forced laborers, which was scheduled for the following day. After the division of tasks for the impending mass murder had been determined on the morning of March 29, the forced laborers were divided into groups of 20 to 30 men by the HJ members still present - almost 17-year-old boys - from their accommodation to the cemetery of Deutsch Schützen there, taken over by the other Hitler Youth members and taken to the old church, the Martinskirche , from where one of the SS men who formed the murder squad led them to the place of execution . The notification from the Oberwart District Gendarmerie Command dated August 31, 1945 to the Vienna Public Prosecutor said:

“The Jews were initially instructed to put down their tools. Then they had to step forward and hand over their watches. [...] Then the Jews had to line up next to each other in the trench. Then the SS Unterscharführer [recte: SS-Oberscharführer] Storms shot down the Jews with a pistol, and the SS Hauptscharführer and 1 Feldgend [arm] with a submachine gun. Even before the Jews went into the trench, they pleaded with the SS men with folded hands not to shoot them. But this was in vain and the SS men kicked several Jews with the feet so that they fell into the ditch. "

Death march to Hartberg

After about sixty Jews had been shot and the meanwhile third group of victims was waiting for their end, the verbal order came from the village to stop the shootings immediately. According to some witnesses, he was Weber phone from the district leader of Oberwart, Eduard Nicka been issued. Weber now arranged for the "evacuation" of the 400 or so Jews still alive in the direction of Hartberg . Together with the SS men, he formed the guard on the slum train, which started marching that morning. The Hitler Youth, who had now been joined by three more Hitler Youths who had arrived in the village after the shootings, buried the corpses on Weber's orders and then joined the marching column. Their path initially led from Deutsch Schützen via St. Kathrein , Kohfidisch , Kirchfidisch and Mischendorf to Jabing , where they spent the night. The train finally reached Hartberg the next day via Rotenturm an der Pinka , Oberdorf , Litzelsdorf , Mitterberg and Wolfau .

On the march, the Jews were not only exposed to the brutal treatment of their guards, but on March 30, 1945, the second day of the march, exhausted Jews were also murdered by SS men. Testimony and the discovery of the corpse confirmed that Adolf Storms shot an exhausted Jew in a wooded area on the way between Jabing and Oberdorf that day. After the marching column had reached Hartberg, the forced laborers were handed over to a party functionary of the NSDAP, who then apparently handed them over to a Volkssturm unit that had to guard them on the march towards Graz . Although the SS escort team is no longer mentioned in the sources from here on, it cannot be ruled out that at least one of the SS men accompanied the transport on its further route, not least because units of the SS division "Wiking" were following stayed in this room as before. The Hitler Youth, who had reached this point from Deutsch Schützen, now received full military training and then served in the Volkssturm until the end of the war. Adolf Storms was her superior at the beginning, but was later replaced by an officer of the Wehrmacht . At the end of the war, not only did the trace of Alfred Weber, the mastermind behind the murder of German riflemen, be lost, but also Adolf Storms.

Life after the war

Due to the trial in Austria against the members of the Hitler Youth involved in the mass murder in 1946, and the trial against Alfred Weber as their client in 1956, it would have been possible for the Austrian and German judiciary, including Adolf Storms, who was included in the trial files his real surname and had been written out in the wanted journal since July 12, 1946, to be held responsible. The discovery of the mass grave of the victims of the Deutsch Schützen massacre on August 23, 1995 would also have been an opportunity to bring the last perpetrator at large to justice. According to the Austrian Criminal Code, the Federal Ministry of the Interior involved in the search for the grave would have been obliged to report murder and to initiate investigations in this case. Storms remained unmolested until a student of Walter Manoschek came across his name in one of the trial files. After a simple phone book search and a phone call in Germany, it was clear that the conversation partner was the one named in the case file. In the summer of 2008 Manoschek visited Storms, who gave his consent to interviews about his war experiences and ultimately even agreed to have them filmed.

Although Storms repeatedly affirmed in these interviews his willingness to want to remember March 29, 1945, his memory failed him "in the lurch". The circumstantial evidence, the recorded testimony of the earlier trials and the testimony of the contemporary witnesses who were still alive were weighty enough for the Dortmund public prosecutor to bring charges against the now 89-year-old in November 2009. However, the proceedings did not open because Adolf Storms died in June 2010. Manoschek processed the film material obtained through the interviews with Storms - supplemented by interviews with Hitler Youth members and survivors involved in the massacre - into a comprehensive documentary on March 29, 1945 in Deutsch Schützen.

literature

• Walter Manoschek: "Then I'm a murderer!" Adolf Storms and the massacre of Jews in German Schützen. Wallstein, Göttingen 2015. ISBN 978-3-8353-1650-8 .

documentation

• Then I'm a murderer. (Production and screenplay: Walter Manoschek; 70 minutes, color; Austria 2012). See: online (youtube) .

Web links

• David Rennert: "Perhaps the shootings of Jews were not worth remembering for him." (Interview with Walter Manoschek) . In: The Standard of November 8, 2012.
• Marion Wittfeld: In conversation: director and political scientist Walter Manoschek In: uni: view The online newspaper of the University of Vienna from November 8, 2012,

References and comments

1. ↑ Information according to SS personal file, here: marriage request 1943 from the then SS rifleman Storms, BArch Berlin; quoted Walter Manoschek on request d. Vfs.
2. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, all information and conclusions relating to Adolf Storm come from Andreas Forster: Der Deutsch Schützen -komplex. In: Walter Manoschek (ed.): The case of Rechnitz. The massacre of Jews in March 1945 , Braumüller Verlag, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-7003-1714-2 , pp. 57-78 and the documentation Then I'm a murderer . The description in Eleonore Lappin is also relatively detailed, albeit insufficiently documented: The role of the Waffen-SS in the forced labor operation of Hungarian Jews in Gau Styria and in the death marches to the Mauthausen concentration camp (1944/45) . (PDF; 114 kB) In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance. Yearbook 2004, Vienna 2004, pp. 77–112, in German Schützen pp. 93–96.
3. ↑ It is possible that one of the two men was not a Waffen-SS man, but a member of a mountain troop unit or the field gendarmerie. It also remains unclear whether the three men came to Deutsch Schützen together or only met here.
4. ↑ These were not ordinary Hitler Youths, but so-called Hundertschaftsführer . When the HJ Hundreds present in Deutsch Schützen were disbanded shortly before the massacre and their relatives were released home, they stayed in the village. Forster (2009), p. 63.
5. ^ Eva Holpfer: The massacre of Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers at the end of the war in Deutsch-Schützen (Burgenland) and its punishment by the Austrian people's judiciary. In: Holocaust Hefte No. 12/1999, ed. from the Hungarian Auschwitz Foundation, Holocaust Documentation Center, Budapest, pp. 43–70, cited here from the online edition at www.nachkriegsjustiz.at, accessed on April 7, 2013.
6. ↑ The “burial squad” tried to kill a living Jew named Sándor Künsztler again. He survived again, was found the following night and stated that he had been shot by children. Forster (2009), p. 68.
7. ↑ A more precise indication of the place where this incident occurred cannot be found in the literature. Forster (2009), p. 71, states that the murder was committed outside of Oberdorf. According to Lappin (2004), p. 95, footnote 89, it passed north of Jabing. Holpfer (1999) also mentions Jabing as a crime scene, based on the trial documents from 1946.
8. ↑ In this regard, too, the information in the literature contradicts one another. The information here is essentially based on Forster (2009), p. 71f. Lappin (2004), p. 95, on the other hand, writes that the Hitler Youth guards in Sebersdorf , south of Hartberg, had been replaced by the Volkssturm. The same information can also be found in Eleonore Lappin: The death marches of Hungarian Jews through Austria in the spring of 1945 (PDF; 37 kB), p. 5 (info on remeber.at ), accessed on April 10, 2013.
9. ↑ On the trials of 1946 and 1956 cf. Holpfer (1999) . - In this context it should also be mentioned that Storms had lived in the place where Walter Manoschek visited him in 2008 since the early 1950s.
10. ↑ See Susanne Uslu-Pauer: Memories in German Schützen (PDF; 21 kB) (Info on kreuzstadtl.net ), accessed on April 10, 2013.