Anton Galler

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Anton Galler (born January 30, 1915 in Marktl , Lower Austria ; † March 21, 1995 in Dénia , Spain ) was an SS-Hauptsturmführer who was instrumental in the massacre of Sant'Anna di Stazzema during World War II .

Life

Origin and education

Anton Galler was born the illegitimate son of an official of the Reichsbahn . While his mother was baptized Catholic, his father can be described as "believing in God". It is assumed that his family was close to Volkish and National Socialist ideas. He attended elementary school from 1922 to 1927, went to secondary school and until 1933 to the vocational school in Amstetten , where he learned the bakery trade. At the age of 16, he joined the German gymnastics association and applied for membership in the SS . This was initially denied to him due to his age. That is why he joined the Hitler Youth and was accepted into the SS on March 1, 1933. On August 27, 1933, after the Austrian NSDAP and its affiliated organizations had been banned in Austria on June 19, 1933 , he had to flee to the German Reich , where he was accepted into the SS relief organization Dachau , an institution that looked after National Socialists who had fled Austria .

SS career

Galler then became a candidate for an SS leadership career. After passing exams on April 20, 1937, appointed SS-Untersturmführer and then transferred to the protective police in Upper Silesia . At first he worked in the police administration in Gleiwitz , before he was transferred to Beuthen and temporarily held the rank of adjutant in a police battalion. With this unit was involved in the liberation of the Ostmark and the Sudetenland and other police actions. He also fought at the beginning of the war on the Upper Silesian border. Until the end of 1941 he took part in measures in Upper Silesia and Poland, for example as an officer in Police Battalion 83 in Police Regiment 24 in the resettlement of 17,000 people from the Beskids . He was then transferred to the 4th SS Police Panzer Grenadier Division , where he was wounded on the Leningrad Front.

In December 1943 he was transferred to the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" . Due to the high losses of battalion commanders in this division in the course of the Second World War, he succeeded the missing SS-Sturmbannführer Karl-Heinz Cantow towards the end of July as battalion leader of the 2nd Panzer Grenadier Regiment 35; from then on also known as the Galler Battalion ; appointed. On August 12, 1944, the soldiers of the regiment carried out the massacre of San'Anna di Stazzema. After being wounded in mid-October 1944, Galler relinquished command of the battalion.

After the Second World War

After the end of the Second World War, he hid in St. Pölten and emigrated to Canada . He returned to Austria in the mid-1960s and was investigated there for the killing of 13 people in Czestochowa . This procedure was put down. He had settled as a site manager in Salzburg and lived in Taxheim near Salzburg. Then he moved to Dénia on the Spanish Costa Blanca . After the end of the Second World War, this place was a refuge for war criminals, including SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny and SS-Sturmbannführer Gerhard Bremer .

character

For the historian Carlo Gentile , Anton Galler was an "SS leader without charisma". He was a child of the lower class who normally would not have had a chance to become a police officer in the German Reich. He owed his extraordinary opportunities for advancement exclusively to National Socialism as well as his unreserved advocacy for the political goals and methods of the National Socialists. He was personally shaped by his membership in the right-wing organizations in Austria that dreamed of a Greater German Reich, and in his work in the German administrative apparatus of the National Socialist police. He remained a colorless and unknown Nazi leader whose soldiers who were taken prisoner hardly remembered his name.

literature

  • Karl Schellhass: Sources and Research - From Italian Archives and Libraries . E. Loescher & Company, 2001. pp. 554 ff.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 295
  2. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . Pp. 295/296
  3. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 296
  4. ↑ Joachim Palutzki: A place in the sun for the SS. A search for traces on the east coast of Spain , from December 23, 2014. on Deutschlandfunk . Retrieved September 8, 2019
  5. ^ Carlo Gentile: Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS in Partisan War: Italy 1943–1945 . Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2012, ISBN 978-3-506-76520-8 . P. 294
personal data
SURNAME Galler, Anton
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS-Hauptsturmführer and war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH January 30, 1915
PLACE OF BIRTH Marktl , Lower Austria
DATE OF DEATH March 21, 1995
Place of death Denia , Spain