Altötting civil murders

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The historian Ulrich Völklein used the term civil murders of Altötting to describe a final phase crime against Altötting citizens shortly before the end of the Second World War , in which Adam Wehnert, Josef Bruckmayer, Hans Riehl, Monsignor Adalbert Vogl and Martin Seidel were committed by an SS commando on April 28, 1945 were shot dead, while District Administrator Josef Kehrer and Mayor Karl Lex died by suicide according to official reports. They tried to liberate their hometown from Nazi rule in order to prevent destruction by the approaching US troops . On May 1, 1945, the electrician Max Storfinger was finally shot.

Situation on April 28, 1945

At the end of April 1945, the collapse of Nazi rule was imminent. As far as known, the Altöttingen District Administrator Josef Kehrer was aware of the efforts of his friend Captain Rupprecht Gerngross and his freedom campaign in Bavaria , which he made known to participants in the conversation at best. On April 28, 1945, at 5 o'clock in the morning, Captain Gerngross occupied the Freimann and Erding transmitters and broadcasted that the Bavarian Freedom Campaign (FAB) had taken over government; To liberate the Bavarian homeland, everyone should unite. District Administrator Kehrer should have expected the news and went to the District Office at 6 a.m., where he gathered a circle of trustworthy citizens around him until around 8 a.m. The aim was to hand over the pilgrimage and military hospital Altötting to the approaching US troops without a fight and undamaged .

procedure

District Administrator Kehrer had six National Socialist functionaries who appeared dangerous to him arrested, including the government inspector Karl Schuster, leader of an SA storm, the local group leader Karl Stubenhofer, the organization leader of the NSDAP Franz Obermaier (participant in the 1923 Hitler coup ) and the 2nd mayor of Neuötting Heinrich Hilleprandt , Blood medal bearers and " old fighters ". Mayor Karl Lex committed suicide when he was arrested.

The news of the arrest of the party functionaries also reached officers in a hospital in Neuötting , who, under the leadership of Colonel and SA Standartenführer Karl Kaehne, formed an officer patrol and went first to the town hall, then to the district administration. Allegedly, government councilor Kehrer shot himself in the head when the officers appeared in his office in the district administration; he died two days later on April 30, 1945. The chief physician of the hospital to which Kehrer was admitted, however, doubted this representation of the officers, since he could not find any traces of smoke at the point of the bullet. In a report two years later, the Munich coroner Laves expressed the opinion that, according to the firing channel, it must have been an Army pistol PKK 7.65 mm, which Kehrer did not have; Another nine months later, however, he also thought a shot from a Czech pistol with a slightly smaller caliber (6.35 mm) was possible - Kehrer had owned one.

Around the same time at 11 a.m., Gauleiter Paul Giesler had the news spread over the radio that Bavaria's freedom campaign had been crushed. In the absence of adequate armament, the group around District Administrator Kehrer had nothing to oppose the armed military. The officers' patrol freed the six Nazi officials who had been captured shortly after 11 a.m. Under the leadership of the head of organization Obermaier and with the help of SA-Sturmführer Schuster, who was also released, and the local group leader Stubenhofer, a list was drawn up containing all the people who had entered the district office that morning - at least as far as they were observed by the party officials from the detention cell . District manager Fritz Schwaegerl ordered the arrest of nine citizens of Altötting who were on the list by telephone from Mühldorf : the mill owner Josef Bruckmayer, the administrative inspector Martin Seidel, the warehouse manager Hans Riehl, the administrator of the Holy Chapel, monastery dean Monsignore Adalbert Vogl, the bookseller Adam Wehnert , the former mayor Gabriel Mayer, the writer Heinrich Haug , the government councilor Scheupl and the publisher's owner Hans Geiselberger . After district manager Schwaegerl had arrived in Altötting, he added lawyer Gmach and master builder Irpertinger to the list. Only the first five on the list could be arrested by 2 p.m., the others were not found at home. It is not known whether they had been warned and were able to evade arrest using their local knowledge or whether they happened to do business outside of their home.

Civil murders

In addition to the district leader, a group of about 60 SS men from the Trummler combat group had arrived. The district leader organized a kind of court martial that sentenced the five prisoners to death. Martin Seidel, Josef Bruckmayer, Adam Wehnert, Adalbert Vogl and Hans Riehl were shot by the SS at around 3:30 p.m. in the courtyard of the then district administration. Kreisleiter and SS then moved away again, evidently without looking for the Altoettingers still on the proscription list. The local rulers apparently no longer bothered either.

On May 1st, the US troops had advanced to the north bank of the Inn (in fact they had already crossed it at Niedergottsau near Haiming ) and over loudspeakers demanded the surrender of Alt- and Neuötting . As a sign of the handover, all lights should be switched on at night. The citizens complied with this request, but a fanatical Air Force lieutenant named Merkel was manning the local electricity company with three men. When workers and residents of the plant in front of the gates demanded that the power supply be maintained, Merkel had the electrician Max Storfinger singled out from among the demonstrators and shot immediately.

Liberation and legal reappraisal

On May 2nd the US troops moved into Altötting. The judicial processing of the offenses after the end of the war took place partly in front of the ruling chamber set up by the Allies , partly in front of regular German courts. The perpetrators and those involved in the crime were - if charged - either acquitted because of the lack of orders or, in the case of conviction, given amnesty after a few years:

  • District leader Fritz Schwaegerl died of suicide before the end of the war.
  • Colonel Karl Kaehne was sentenced to five years in a labor camp as the "main offender " in his court proceedings in 1948 . In the criminal proceedings before the jury court for the civil murders in Altötting, he was acquitted of "proven innocence" in the death of District Administrator Kehrer. Thereupon, on Kaehne's appeal, the jury changed its judgment in December 1950 and now classified him as a “incriminated person”. He did not have to serve the five-year labor camp sentence.
  • The Napola student ( Pforta ), lieutenant and later a lawyer Merkel was accused of manslaughter to Max Storfinger in March 1953 and to 18 months in prison convicted. He was acquitted in October 1954 by the Federal Court of Justice on the basis of the Law on Impunity . Storfinger had campaigned for the rescue of Altötting.
  • SS-Untersturmführer Fritz Otto Albrecht took part in the shootings in the district office garden and then executed three other people at the Wacker plant in Burghausen . Albrecht was acquitted in 1956 because of a "lack of orders".
  • SS-Sturmbannführer Werner Hersmann , Albrecht's superior, was sentenced to eight years in prison in 1950 for manslaughter. In 1958, Hersmann was sentenced to another 15 years in prison in the Ulm Einsatzgruppen trial for participating in mass murders in Russia.
  • SS-Hauptsturmführer Olaf Sigismund, also the superior of Albrecht, was sentenced to five years in prison in 1950 for manslaughter.
  • The Altötting NS functionaries who were involved in drawing up the list of those to be executed were not prosecuted. In the arbitration chamber proceedings, they were classified as "burdened" or "less burdened".

Commemoration

Altar wall of the resting chapel in the cloister of the collegiate parish church

After the war, a memorial for all seven victims was erected on the spot where the five Altötting residents were murdered . This was expanded to a resting chapel in 1959 and included in the cloister of the collegiate parish church . Today there is also a permanent exhibition in front of the Romanesque gate of the collegiate parish church , which explains the processes and backgrounds of the events in Altötting at the end of the Nazi regime.

The Catholic Church has included the following people from the events of that time as witnesses of faith in the German martyrology of the 20th century : Adalbert Vogl, Josef Bruckmayer, Josef Kehrer, Ludwig Schön, Hans Riehl, Martin Seidel, Josef Stegmair, Adam Wehnert and Max Storfinger.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ LG Traunstein, March 5, 1953 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German convictions for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966. Vol. X, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . University Press, Amsterdam 1973, No. 348, pp. 543-563 Shooting of a civilian who had called for the surrender of Altötting, who had been trapped by the Americans, to light the windows and raise white cloths ( Memento of the original from December 8th 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.jur.uva.nl