Ernst Lerch

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Ernst Lerch (born November 19, 1914 in Klagenfurt ; † 1992 or 1997 there ) was an Austrian SS-Sturmbannführer . In the " Operation Reinhardt " he added as adjutant of the SS and Police Leader for the District of Lublin , Odilo Globocnik responsibility for the Holocaust at more than two million Jews and 50,000 Roma in German-occupied Poland .

Life

Ernst Lerch first studied at the University of World Trade in Vienna , then quickly dropped out and worked from 1931 to 1934 as a waiter in hotels in Switzerland, France and Hungary. Then he was employed in the Café Lerch, which his father ran in Klagenfurt, until the “Anschluss” of Austria in 1938. The café became a popular meeting place for Austrian National Socialists who lived in illegality. So Odilo Globocnik , Kurt Claasen and Ernst Kaltenbrunner met there.

On December 1, 1932, Lerch joined the NSDAP ( membership number 1,327,396) and became a member of the SS on March 1, 1934 (SS number 309,700). In 1936 he was appointed SS-Untersturmführer and a year later SS-Obersturmführer. In 1938 Lerch moved to Berlin, where he worked as SS-Hauptsturmführer from March 1938 in the party's security service (SD).

From February 1940 to September 1941 Lerch worked in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin until he was appointed race and settlement leader in Krakow .

From 1941 to 1943 Lerch served in Lublin as head of Globocnik's personal office and as staff leader of the General SS. On July 21, 1942, he was appointed SS-Sturmbannführer . Lerch was one of the most important men in " Aktion Reinhardt ". He was jointly responsible for "Jewish affairs", the mass murder of the Jews in the Generalgouvernement. In addition, he coordinated the radio link between the headquarters of "Aktion Reinhardt" in Lublin and the RSHA in Berlin. The tasks within "Aktion Reinhardt" included the overall planning of the deportations , the planning and construction of extermination camps and the confiscation of property and valuables of the victims and their delivery to the authorities in the German Reich . The "Aktion Reinhardt" included around 100 people under the leadership of the detective inspector Christian Wirth , who was already involved in the killing of disabled people, the so-called Aktion T4 , and was thus able to contribute his "experience" in the use of gas to kill people .

After the "Aktion Reinhardt" ended, Lerch came to Italy in September 1943. In Trieste he was Globocnik's right-hand man in the Adriatic Coastal Operations Zone . For a short time Lerch was the provisional police chief in Rijeka .

Life after 1945

After the capitulation, Lerch fled to Carinthia and was arrested there on May 31, 1945, together with Globocnik, Hermann Höfle and Georg Michalsen on the Möslacher Alm on Lake Weissensee by an English commando. He was interrogated by the English military police in Wolfsberg. Lerch denied everything and was able to escape from prison. He then went into hiding from 1947 to 1950.

Lerch was arrested again in 1960 and sentenced to two years in prison by the Wiesbaden district court (8JS 1145/60). He then ran the “Tanzcafé Lerch” in his hometown of Klagenfurt until the early 1970s, where Udo Jürgens began his musical career.

In 1980, the Israeli foreign secret service Mossad planned to kill Lerch. One wanted to attach an explosive device to his car from a moving motorcycle and detonate it later. The project, which was never implemented, only became known in 2018 after the former Mossad employee Yossi Chen had published relevant documents on the homepage of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial .

Austrian court case

In 1971 Ernst Lerch was indicted again, this time in his hometown of Klagenfurt together with Helmut Pohl. The public prosecutor's office in Vienna was charged with crimes of mass extermination for participating in the murder of 1.8 million Jews in eastern Poland during "Aktion Reinhardt" as well as other violent crimes as members of the staff of the Higher SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik in Lublin.

Despite this massive allegation, the main hearing in May 1972 was stopped after only two days at the request of the public prosecutor and never resumed (reference number 25 Vr 3123/71).

reception

In his theater play Tanzcafe Treblinka from 2001, Werner Kofler addressed Lerch's life and the lack of consequences of his crimes.

literature

  • Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8
  • Alfred Elste: Carinthia's brown elite. 20 biographical sketches of the "old fighters" of the NSDAP. Hermagoras-Verlag, Klagenfurt 1996, ISBN 978-3-85013-476-7 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry in the GND, Tp 136445314
  2. ↑ Holocaust Education & Archive Research Team.
  3. ^ "Tanzcafé Lerch": From the Nazi meeting point to Udo Jürgens' stage diepresse.com, accessed on June 7, 2018
  4. ↑ Michael Jungwirth: When Israel sent its killers to Austria. In: Small newspaper. June 1, 2016, accessed August 10, 2018 .
  5. ^ "Tanzcafe Treblinka" in Kammerlichtspiele. orf.at of January 25, 2017.
personal data
SURNAME Lerch, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian perpetrator of the Holocaust
DATE OF BIRTH November 19, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Klagenfurt
DATE OF DEATH 1992 or 1997
Place of death Klagenfurt