Alois Schintlholzer

Alois "Luis" Schintlholzer (born December 18, 1914 in Hötting ; died June 18, 1989 in Innsbruck ) was an Austrian SS-Sturmbannführer and war criminal . With a murder squad he was actively involved in the November pogroms in Innsbruck in 1938, in the deportation of the Jewish population in Merano in 1943 and in other war crimes in northern Italy in 1944 and 1945. In the post-war period he helped Adolf Eichmann to flee Germany in 1950.

Life

Alois Schintlholzer came from a humble background. His father, Othmar Schintlholzer, was an upholsterer. After attending the commercial training school in Innsbruck, he became a commercial clerk. The athletically active Schintlholzer, who was a member of the German Gymnastics Federation and the Alpine Club , made a name for himself as a sports boxer.

Nazi era

Influenced by the events of the Höttinger Saalschlacht , he joined the Hitler Youth in June 1932 . In the same year he became a member of the Austrian NSDAP and the SA . At the end of 1933 he secretly joined the SS , which, like the NSDAP and its affiliated organizations, had been banned since June 1933 as a result of an attack by the National Socialists on a division of Christian-German military gymnasts in Krems .

Thanks to his brutality, he soon made a career in the SS. In July 1937 he was arrested for illegal political activities and sentenced to several months in prison, which led to further radicalization in him. Shortly after the annexation of Austria in March 1938, he was promoted to SS-Obersturmführer . As a result, he headed an SS department in the city on the Inn and, because of his commercial training, worked as an Aryanization administrator in a clothing store.

On the night of the pogrom from November 9th to 10th, 1938, he headed a commando in Innsbruck that SS-Oberführer Hanns von Feil charged with the murder of the businessman and representative of the Jewish community Karl Bauer. The group of four to five people led by Schintlholzer, pretending to be Gestapo officials, gained access to Bauer's apartment at Gänsbacherstraße 4. Bauer was severely wounded by blows and stab wounds, but, unlike his neighbors Richard Graubart and Wilhelm Bauer, survived the murder . Whether Schintlholzer and his group were involved in the murders of the latter two could not be unequivocally clarified during the police investigation into the case in 1946, even if there are some indications. Schintlholzer claimed during the investigation against him in 1961 that he had deliberately not carried out the murder order and that Feil had severely reprimanded him for it, whereupon he gave up his command in protest.

In 1939 he married. The marriage had three children. In 1940 he was drafted into the Waffen SS and first attended the SS Junker School in Bad Tölz . War missions followed in the Balkans and Russia . In the Balkans, he led a special unit whose task was the deportation and murder of Jews.

In the summer of 1943 he was assigned to the high mountain school of the Waffen SS in Neustift in the Stubai Valley . After Mussolini's fall , Schintlholzer and a combat group led by him occupied the Reschen Pass on August 10 as part of the Axis case . After the announcement of the government Badoglio concluded armistice with the Allies on September 8, he received advance and disarm members of the Italian armed and security forces and capture the command. The carabinieri brigadier of the local Carabinieri guard, Ottavio Monaco, with whom there had been disagreements since the occupation of the pass, was accused of being an enemy of the South Tyroleans , and was shot in cold blood by Schintlholzer and the body was sunk in Lake Reschen . The latter reappeared a little later on the surface of the water and was then weighted down with stones by members of the South Tyrolean security service and sunk again in the lake.

In Merano, the Schintlholzer group, together with the SD led by Heinrich Andergassen , was entrusted with the arrest of the Jews living in Merano on the night of September 15-16, 1943. The arrested were then deported to Auschwitz via Reichenau camp and most of them did not survive the Holocaust .

In spring 1944 he was entrusted with the management of the mountain combat school of the Waffen SS in Predazzo in Trentino . On August 20 and 21, 1944, soldiers from the mountain combat school were under his command together with the 6th company of the SS Police Regiment Bolzano and units of the Parachute Panzer Division 1 Hermann Göring in an anti- gang operation in the Val Biois between Canale d'Agordo and Falcade involved. The action, in which Schintlholzer was slightly injured, claimed 37 lives in the end, and women and children were among the victims. The action, led by Schintlholzer as the highest-ranking officer, was distinguished by its particular brutality. Several hamlets in the area were burned down and some residents were locked in their burning houses. Those who were rounded up were tortured in order to extract names of partisans from them.

After he was promoted to Sturmbannführer in January 1945, he took over the Gestapo command in Trento in the spring of 1945 . In the last days of the war he again led a combat group named after him, which committed a number of other war crimes in Trentino and claimed another 30 lives, the last of them in Fiemme Valley on May 4, 1945, two days after the German surrender in Italy came into force was kicked. In these actions, too, the Schintlholzers group was characterized by particular atrocities.

post war period

After the events in the Fiemme Valley, Schintlholzer first fled to South Tyrol. In the general turmoil after the end of the war, he managed to go into hiding, also because he spread the rumor that he had committed suicide. In October 1945, however, there was increasing evidence that he was still alive. When he found out that they were on his trail, he changed hiding places and fled from Meran to the mountains, but was eventually tracked down by US soldiers and interned in the Rimini POW camp. Shortly afterwards, in 1946, he used a mass escape to flee again to South Tyrol. At this point in time, an arrest warrant had already been issued against him in Innsbruck , but the Italian judiciary also began to take an interest in him. At the end of May 1947 he was finally surprised in his sleep in a hotel room in Upper Vinschgau and arrested by Carabinieri. But this time too he managed to evade jurisdiction. In the same year he left for Germany .

In Bielefeld he was registered under his real name. Schintlholzer, who had been widowed since December 1944, married his second wife there in 1949. In the same year he had his three children from his first marriage come from South Tyrol. In his adopted German home, Schintlholzer used to hang out with former Nazis. As the BND later suspected, it was a network of former Nazis from Tyrol . Through this network he became Adolf Eichmann's escape helper in 1950, whom he personally drove from Celle to Bad Reichenhall on the Austrian border.

His help to escape would later take revenge after Eichmann was tracked down by the Israeli secret service in Argentina in May 1960 and the German authorities became aware of Schintlholzer. He was summoned by the public prosecutor, whereupon he tried to dive again and in June 1960 he fled to Munich . From Munich he explored his return to Innsbruck. When he was assured that he would only face a two to three year prison sentence if he returned voluntarily, he returned to his hometown on April 17, 1961 and surrendered to the authorities. Schintlholzer was arrested the same day, six days after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem began.

He had been wanted in Innsbruck since the French occupation in 1945. As a result of the NS amnesty passed by the Republic of Austria in 1957, the investigations against him were discontinued in 1958. After he surrendered, a preliminary investigation into attempted murder during the November 1938 pogrom was launched. A charge of assault would have already been statute barred. After eleven months of pre- trial detention , he was released in 1962 due to a lack of evidence and witnesses. Schintlholzer had refused to disclose the names of the people involved in the November pogrom and the Bauer couple, who had meanwhile emigrated to the United States , could not identify Schintlholzer from the photographs presented.

From then on he lived undisturbed in Innsbruck. After the second marriage failed, he remarried in 1974. In Italy, an investigation had been launched into the events in Val Biois in 1970. A trial before the jury court in Bologna did not take place until 1979. In July 1979, Schintlholzer was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia, but the sentence was overturned because it had not been pronounced by a competent military court . It was only after the case was reopened in November 1988 that he was again sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia.

He died on June 18, 1989 without having been extradited from Austria. His obituary notice with Nazi sayings, from which parts of his family publicly distanced themselves, caused a sensation.

literature

• Nikolaus Bliem: SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schintlholzer - "Butcher of the Jews". In: Thomas Albrich (Hrsg.): The perpetrators of the Jewish pogrom in 1938 in Innsbruck. Haymon , Innsbruck 2016, ISBN 978-3-7099-7242-7 .
• Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939. Beck , Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-56681-3 .
• Lorenzo Gardumi: Maggio 1945 “a nemico che fugge ponti d'oro”: la memoria popolare e le stragi di Ziano, Stramentizzo e Molina di Fiemme. Fondazione Museo storico del Trentino, Trento 2008, ISBN 978-88-7197-105-6 .
• Ludwig Walter Regele: Meran and the Third Reich: A reading book. Studienverlag , Innsbruck 2007 ISBN 978-3-7065-5773-3 .
• Gerald Steinacher : Nazis on the run: How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy. Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2008 ISBN 978-3-7065-4026-1 .
• Philipp Trafojer: The bloody trace of a murderer: Alois Schintlholzer (1914–1989). In: The Vinschger Wind. Volume 1 issue 10, September 8, 2005.

Web links

• The traces of a murderer - Vinschgerwind
• Combat group Schintlholzer - Atlante delle Stragi Naziste e Fasciste in Italia (Italian)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c} Nikolaus Bliem: SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schintlholzer - "Butcher of the Jews". P. 58
2. ↑ Michael Gehler : Spontaneous expression of the "popular anger"? New aspects of the Innsbruck Jewish program from 9./10. November 1938. In: Zeitgeschichte, Heft 1/2, 1990/91 p. 14
3. ↑ Saul Friedländer: The Third Reich and the Jews: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939. Pp. 296-297
4. ↑ ^{a b} Nikolaus Bliem: SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schintlholzer - "Butcher of the Jews". P. 59
5. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Philipp Trafojer: The bloody trace of a murderer: Alois Schintlholzer (1914–1989). P. 6 f.
6. ↑ Ludwig Walter Regele: Meran and the Third Reich: A reading book. P. 126
7. ↑ Hansjörg Stecher: In the footsteps of Anton Spechtenhauser. A South Tyrolean fascist as a victim of South Tyrolean Nazis. In: Eva Planzelter (Ed.): Option and memory. La memoria delle opzioni. History and Region / Storia e Regione. 22nd year, 2013, issue 2, Studienverlag, Innsbruck 2013 ISSN 1121-0303 p. 80
8. ^ Joachim Innerhofer, Sabine Mayr: Murderous homeland. Suppressed life stories of Jewish families in Bolzano and Meran. Edition Raetia, Bozen 2015, ISBN 978-88-7283-503-6 . P. 101
9. ↑ Valle del Biois, 20-21 August 1944 (Belluno - Veneto). In: straginazifasciste.it. Retrieved March 11, 2020 (Italian). 
10. ↑ Lorenzo Gardumi: Maggio 1945 “a nemico che fugge ponti d'oro”: la memoria popolare e le stragi di Ziano, Stramentizzo e Molina di Fiemme. Pp. 102-103
11. ↑ Combat group SS Schintlholzer. In: straginazifasciste.it. Retrieved March 11, 2020 (Italian). 
12. ↑ Nikolaus Bliem: SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schintlholzer - "Butcher of the Jews". P. 60
13. ↑ Gerald Steinacher: Nazis on the run: How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy. P. 50
14. ↑ Klaus Wiegrefe: Triumph of Justice. In: spiegel.de. March 28, 2011, accessed March 13, 2020 . 
15. ↑ ^{a b c} Nikolaus Bliem: SS-Obersturmführer Alois Schintlholzer - "Butcher of the Jews". Pp. 61-63
16. ↑ Ludwig Walter Regele: Meran and the Third Reich: A reading book. P. 127