Stanislau's Bloody Sunday

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On October 12, 1941, more than ten thousand Jewish men, women and children were shot on Stanislau's Bloody Sunday . This mass murder in what was then Stanislau, which now houses the Western Ukraine belonging to Ivano-Frankivsk , who organized hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger . The massacre is considered to be the beginning of the “ Final Solution ” in the General Government .

background

After the Polish-Soviet War from 1919 to 1921, the East Galician area around Stanislau , which had previously belonged to Austria-Hungary, became part of the Second Polish Republic by agreement in the Peace of Riga as Stanisławów Voivodeship . The area was annexed by the Soviet Union after September 17, 1939 due to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact . On July 2, 1941, shortly after the German attack on the Soviet Union , Stanislau was occupied by Hungarian troops. At the end of July 1941, the Germans took over the rule and on August 1, 1941, incorporated the Galicia district into the Government General alongside the existing districts of Krakow , Lublin , Radom and Warsaw .

The city of Stanislau (in Polish Stanisławów , belonging to Ukraine since 1945 and renamed Ivano-Frankiwsk in 1962) is 120 kilometers southeast of Lviv . In 1931, 24,823 Jews lived there; the total population for 1938 is given as 85,000. The Jewish population grew to 42,000 in 1941. Some of these were Jews who had fled there during the German invasion of Poland ; but the majority had been expelled from the Transcarpathian occupied by Hungary . All Jews had to wear an armband as identification.

Liquidation of the "Polish-Jewish intelligentsia"

The Stanislau branch of the commander of the Security Police and the SD Lemberg (later renamed the Grenzpolizei-Kommissariat Stanislau ) was led by SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Krüger from the end of July 1941 to August 1942 . She was responsible for the districts of Stanislau and Kalusch as well as the region around Rohatyn with over 700,000 inhabitants. The agency had barely thirty German employees, but it had numerous volunteers who were recruited from local ethnic Germans and Ukrainian militia . As early as August 2, 1941, Krüger had members of the Polish intelligentsia arrested and a few days later 600 of them shot and buried in the Pawelce forest. According to Krüger, Karl Eberhard Schöngarth issued instructions at the end of August or September that led to the mass murders of Jews in Galicia from October 1941. However, it has not been conclusively clarified whether SS-Sturmbannführer Helmut Tanzmann from the Einsatzkommando e.g. V. or SS and Police Leader Friedrich Katzmann took the initiative and issued the decisive orders. According to Krüger, the extermination of the Jews was to be carried out in Stanislau because a ghetto planned there and actually set up in December 1941 could only have accommodated a fraction of the local Jews. Another motive for the start of the mass murders in this region is the proximity to the Hungarian Carpathian-Ukraine border, from which Jews were continually being deported to the Galicia district.

“Dress rehearsal” in Nadwirna

On October 6, 1941, Krüger carried out a “major action” in the small town of Nadwirna , which is considered a “dress rehearsal” for the organization of Stanislau's Bloody Sunday. This action was prepared at a briefing in Lemberg, at which Friedrich Katzmann is said to have announced the beginning of "ordered liquidation measures against the mass of Jews in Galicia". Krüger is said to have announced to his people early in the morning before the start of the "action" (according to the judgment of a jury court) that they were facing "a difficult task" and that "the extermination of the Jews had been ordered by the Führer".

In addition to the people in his office, Hans Krüger police officers from Vienna were available to command the Ukrainian auxiliary police . In addition, he drew two companies from the 133 Reserve Police Battalion. About two thousand Jews were rounded up at a fenced off assembly point in the city. The victims - men and women, children and old people - were loaded onto trucks and taken to a wooded area. The victims had to take off their clothes there. They were led in groups to a dug pit and shot there. At least 1200 Jewish people were killed that day. In the evening, the remaining Jews were released from the assembly point after they had handed in all valuables.

Bloody Sunday

On the morning of October 12, 1941, Hans Krüger gave the orders for the "large-scale operation". The troops of the security police, the reserve police battalion 133 and the local Ukrainian militia systematically cleared the Jewish apartments: starting at the railway line, continuing through the city center to the Belvedere district, where the ghetto was later set up. The Jews who were supposed to take their valuables with them were driven into the market square. In columns of 200 people they had to march to the new Jewish cemetery in the Zagwozdzieckie district; The sick and infirm were taken there by truck.

The cemetery was surrounded by a high wall. Several pits had been dug there the night before. The first victims shot were 400 Jews who had fled to Hungary but were then deported across the border and imprisoned in Stanislau. The Jews arriving from the assembly point had to sit down first and were closely guarded. They later had to take off their outerwear and hand over the valuables they had carried with them before being led to the edge of the pit. The firing squads consisted of ten to fifteen shooters each, who fired with carbines and pistols. The mass shooting was called off at dusk. The survivors were driven from the cemetery while being beaten.

According to contemporary witnesses, 10,000 to 12,000 Jewish men, women and children were shot in Stanislau on Bloody Sunday. These numbers are also mentioned in the literature. When taking evidence in the judgment against Hans Krüger, the court assumed at least 6,000 victims.

Mass murders in Galicia

The so-called Blood Sunday of Stanislau on October 12, 1941 is considered to be the beginning of the “Final Solution” in the Generalgouvernement . On October 13th, Heinrich Himmler , Odilo Globocnik and the HSSPF Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger met in Berlin and probably decided to set up stationary extermination camps in the Generalgouvernement.

By December 1, 1941, numerous other mass shootings were carried out in the Galicia district , namely in Rohatyn, again in Stanislau and in Deljatyn and Kalush, each of which killed several thousand Jews. At the end of March 1942, Krüger had more than a thousand “useless Jews” arrested from the Stanislau ghetto; on April 1, 1942, they were taken to the Belzec extermination camp and gassed there . What has been preserved is a letter of protest addressed to Joachim von Ribbentrop from an ethnic German from Stanislau who denounced the mass shootings. On July 2, 1942, the New York Times published a report of the massacre of 700,000 Jews in the German-occupied territories; it is written about 15,000 victims in Stanislau.

The Stanislau ghetto was liquidated in January 1943. In early 1944, a special detachment opened most of the mass graves , burned the bodies and covered the traces of the crime. Stanislau was liberated by the Red Army on July 27, 1944. Of the city's Jewish residents, only a hundred had survived.

Criminal penalties

At the beginning of 1966, a scandalous trial against two perpetrators took place before the Salzburg Regional Court. A second main hearing before the Vienna Regional Court followed and ended on November 8, 1966 with a sentence of eight and twelve years in prison. Both perpetrators were released early as a pardon.

After several years of investigation, there was a trial against 14 members of the security police in Stanislau in 1968, in which the crimes on Bloody Sunday were also the subject of the trial. On May 6, 1968, the Münster Regional Court sentenced three perpetrators to life imprisonment and six to long prison terms.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 85,000 from Elisabeth Freundlich: The murder of a city called Stanislau. Nazi extermination policy in Poland 1939–1945. Vienna 1986, ISBN 3-215-06077-9 , p. 148 / without year 70,000 from Dieter Schenk: The Lviv Professors Murder and the Holocaust in East Galicia. Bonn 2007, ISBN 978-3-8012-5033-1 , p. 184.
  2. ↑ It is disputed whether this order was already made during the Hungarian occupation that lasted a few days - as in Dieter Pohl: Hans Krueger and the Murder of the Jews in the Stanislawow Region (Galicia) (English; PDF, 127 kB), but not in the later German version (see Lit.) / different from Israel Gutman et al. (Ed.): Enzyklopädie des Holocaust. Munich and Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Vol. III, p. 1371.
  3. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 136.
  4. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 136.
  5. ↑ Dieter Pohl: Hans Krüger - the 'King of Stanislau'. In: Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Gerhard Paul: Careers of violence. National Socialist perpetrator biographies. Darmstadt 2004, ISBN 3-534-16654-X , p. 137.
  6. ^ Quotes from Katzmann and Krüger in the findings of the jury court on Count II: Christiaan Rüter u. a .: Justice and Nazi crimes. Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicide crimes 1945–1999. Volume 28. The criminal judgments issued from April 29, 1968 to May 11, 1968 serial no. No. 672-677. Amsterdam 2003, ISBN 3-598-23819-3 , case 675, p. 282.
  7. ↑ Determination of the jury court = Christiaan Rüter u. a .: Justice and Nazi crimes. Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicide crimes 1945–1999. Volume 28, p. 283 / In the literature deviating from this 2000 (Pohl)
  8. ↑ Christiaan Rüter u. a .: Justice and Nazi crimes. Collection of German criminal convictions for Nazi homicide crimes 1945–1999. Volume 28. The criminal judgments issued from April 29, 1968 to May 11, 1968 serial no. No. 672-677. Amsterdam 2003, ISBN 3-598-23819-3 , pp. 322-323.
  9. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945. (Source collection) Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941–1945. Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 , p. 20.
  10. ↑ Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews ... Volume 9, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 , p. 21.
  11. ↑ Document VEJ 9/62 of April 11, 1942 in: Klaus-Peter Friedrich (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933-1945 (collection of sources) Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941-1945 , Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 , pp. 250-251.
  12. ↑ VEJ 9/89 - Klaus-Peter Friedrich (arr.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. (Source collection) Volume 9: Poland: Generalgouvernement August 1941–1945. Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-486-71530-9 , p. 324.
  13. ^ Israel Gutman et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Munich and Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-492-22700-7 , Vol. III, p. 1372.
  14. ^ Document archive of the Austrian Resistance: verdict against two perpetrators in 1966
  15. ↑ Justice and Nazi crimes ( Memento of the original from October 29, 2013 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. Volume 28, Case 675. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www1.jur.uva.nl