Felix Landau (SS member)

Felix Landau

Felix Richard Landau (* 21st May 1910 in Vienna , † 20th April 1983 , (buried in Hernalser cemetery )) was an Austrian hauptscharführer and as a member of an SS - Einsatzkommando in the murder of Jews in Galicia involved. His diary is considered the unique testimony of a Nazi criminal about his participation in the Holocaust . At times he protected the artist Bruno Schulz .

Origin and career

Born out of wedlock to Paul Stipkowich and Maria Maier, Felix Richard Landau received the surname of his Jewish stepfather after his mother married Jakob Landau, who lives in Vienna, in 1911. As early as 1925 he joined the Hitler Youth and was expelled from a Catholic boarding school for apprentices because he was actively recruiting members. He trained as a cabinet maker. In March 1930 he joined the armed forces , from which he was excluded again in June 1933 because he had been an active member of the NSDAP since March 1931 (membership number 442,571). In 1934 he took part in the assassination of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (" July Putsch " by the Austrian National Socialists) and was imprisoned until 1937 for it. After fleeing from another arrest for renewed Nazi activities in the German Reich , he was awarded the Blood Order for his participation . After the “ Anschluss ” he went back to Austria and worked as a Gestapo official in Czechoslovakia and from the end of 1939 in Poland at the KdS in Radom . There he met the typist Gertrude, whom he later married.

Worked with the SS task force

After the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, he volunteered for the SS Einsatzkommando, which, on the orders of SS Oberführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, arrested 22 professors and their families in Lemberg on the night of July 3rd , under the direction of Walter Kutschmann, carried out the Lviv professor murder and brutally murdered thousands of Jews in the Drohobycz area . Until May 1943 he was responsible for the organization of “Jewish work”. From July 1941 he kept a diary in which he documented his own atrocities in the Holocaust in detail, interspersed with love letters to his beloved. The diary was "primarily written for later submission to the mistress Gertrude S." and was intended to "provide information about the more or less glorious activities of the accused during his spatial separation from the mistress", so the Stuttgart jury ruled in 1962. A copy of the diary is in the Federal Archives, holdings B 162 (Central Office of the State Justice Administration in Ludwigsburg), No. 21164, and in the Ludwigsburg State Archives (signature EL 317 III Bü 1089). In 1963 it was published on behalf of the city of Ramat Gan (Israel) by Tuviah Friedman under the title "Diary of SS-Hauptscharführer F. Landau on his activities in Drohobycz, 1941-44" for the first time in the German original and in a Hebrew translation.

In the diary entry of July 22, 1941 in Drohobycz, Landau wrote:

“My ordered workers didn't come in the morning. When I wanted to go to the Jewish committee next door, an employee of theirs just came and asked me for support, as the Jews refused to work here. I went over. When those assholes saw me, they all ran apart in all directions. It's a shame, I didn't have a pistol with me, otherwise I would have shot some overboard. I then went to the Judenrat and informed him that if 100 Jews didn't line up in one hour, then I would choose 100 Jews, not to work, but to shoot. Less than 30 minutes later, 100 Jews arrived, plus 17 men for those who had just fled. I reported the incident and at the same time demanded that the refugees be shot because they refused to work, and that happened exactly 12 hours later. 20 Jews were killed. "

The entry of August 2, 1941 further states:

" Since I had the 20 Jews shot away from him [the council of elders] for refusing to work, things have been going well ."

This murder was the subject of the Stuttgart trial against Felix Landau.

At the end of 1941, Landau was already living with Gertrude in a princely villa and married them in 1943 (divorced again in 1946) after his first marriage had been divorced the year before. In 1943 he returned to Vienna and served in the department “Offenses against the treachery law ” at the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna.

His relation to Bruno Schulz

Landau valued the artist Bruno Schulz , protected him and provided him with additional food (at least for a while). In return, he asked him to paint murals about fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm in his son's nursery. In November 1942 Landau killed the personal dentist of his colleague Karl Günther. In revenge, Günther shot the Jew Schulz and said: "You killed my Jew - I killed yours."

After the war

After the war ended , Landau was recognized by a former worker in Linz in 1946 and imprisoned by the Americans. In August 1947, however, he managed to escape from the internment camp Camp Marcus W. Orr . From 1950 he established himself as an interior designer in Nördlingen under the false name of Rudolf Jaschke . In order to be able to enter into a new marriage, he gave the criminal police in Stuttgart his correct personal details in early 1958. As a result, the Stuttgart public prosecutor's office initiated an investigation and Landau was taken into custody on August 15, 1958. On March 16, 1962, he was sentenced to life imprisonment by the Stuttgart Regional Court . The appeal in the criminal case before the Federal Court of Justice was rejected as unfounded by decision of June 11, 1963. In 1973 he was pardoned.

Statements about his personality from the Stuttgart criminal proceedings

• In connection with the murder of the 20 Jews: "In all of his actions, the accused did not want to promote an act of others, but rather pursue and achieve his own interests, namely the exposure of his personal power and the excessive intimidation of the Jewish workers."
• “Witness B. gave credible evidence that the accused had been a horror of the city for the Jewish population, especially until he was amply surrounded and satisfied with luxury. The witnesses, G., M., B. and Z. have consistently and credibly testified that the accused brutally beat down and kicked Jewish workers for trivial reasons. This did not preclude the accused from making human contact with Jews from whom he received personal benefit. [...] Diary entry from July 22, 1941. He wrote about the interrogation of a Ukrainian:

'In one room he received a little special treatment from me as an introduction ! After the first blow, the blood was already splattering. First he tried denial, but after the 4th blow he gave up. '"

• "The witness also credibly testified that the defendant was generally very arrogant and addicted to assertion."

literature

• Walter Kempowski : The echo sounder . Barbarossa '41. A collective diary. btb Verlag, 4th edition, 2004. The entries are apparently diary entries and / or letters to an unknown addressee (including pp. 243–245).
• Thomas Sandkühler: Final solution in Galicia. The murder of Jews in Eastern Poland and the rescue initiatives of Berthold Beitz 1941-1944 . Dietz successor, Bonn 1996, ISBN 3-8012-5022-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Felix Landau in the catalog of the German National Library
• Entry on Felix Landau in the documentation archive of the Austrian resistance

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernst Klee, Willi Dreßen, Volker Rieß: "Once again I've got to play general to the jews." From the war diary of Felix Landau, who was the holder of the blood medal . In: Omer Bartov (ed.): The Holocaust. Origins, Implementation, Aftermath . Routledge, London 2000. ISBN 0-415-15035-3 . Pp. 185-203. In it the biographical note pp. 202–203.
2. ↑ Landau's friend Gertrude works as a typist for the commander of the security police in Radom , where they met in 1940 (cf. Bert Hoppe, Hildrun Glass (editor): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933 - 1945. Vol. 7 : Soviet Union with annexed areas. Part 1: Occupied Soviet areas under German military administration, Baltic States and Transnistria . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2011. ISBN 978-3-486-58911-5 . S. 156, footnote 5.).
3. ↑ Christiaan F. Rüter [edit.]: Justiz und NS-Verbrechen , Amsterdam 1978, ISBN 3-598-23790-1 , vol. 18: The criminal judgments issued from November 21, 1961 to January 10, 1963, case no. 531, pp. 32/22.
4. ↑ Later publications (in excerpts) u. a. in:
   • Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Rieß (eds.): “Nice times”. The murder of Jews from the perspective of the perpetrators and gawkers . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988. ISBN 3-10-039304-X , pp. 88-104
   • Bert Hoppe , Hildrun Glass (editor): The persecution and murder of the European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933 - 1945. Vol. 7: Soviet Union with annexed areas. Part 1: Occupied Soviet areas under German military administration, the Baltic States and Transnistria . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2011. ISBN 978-3-486-58911-5 . Pp. 155–157 and 161.
5. ↑ Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Rieß (eds.): "Schöne Zeiten". The murder of Jews from the perspective of the perpetrators and gawkers . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-10-039304-X , p. 99.
6. ↑ Ernst Klee, Willi Dressen, Volker Rieß (eds.): "Schöne Zeiten". The murder of Jews from the perspective of the perpetrators and gawkers . S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-10-039304-X , p. 103.
7. ↑ After the war ended in 1945, the Americans established an internment camp in Salzburg for former Nazi officials. In the so-called "Lager Glasenbach" all Austrian employees of the Gestapo and the Secret Field Police , all members of SS-Totenkopfverband , members of the General SS and the Waffen-SS from the Unterscharfuhrer upwards, functionaries of the party and its affiliated organizations from the local group leader or A comparable position upwards, general staff officers of the Wehrmacht, top officials from the ministerial council or regional president upwards, district captains (senior officials of the Reichsgaue), district administrators (= district captains) and mayors. The camp was dissolved again in 1947 and the detention for the approximately 20,000 inmates remained largely without any further consequences. Former inmates later founded a right-wing association that exerted considerable influence on politics in Austria through the Association of Independents and the later Freedom Party of Austria .
8. ↑ Bert Hoppe, Hildrun Glass (editor): The persecution and murder of the European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933 - 1945. Vol. 7: Soviet Union with annexed areas. Part 1: Occupied Soviet areas under German military administration, the Baltic States and Transnistria . Oldenbourg Verlag, Munich 2011. ISBN 978-3-486-58911-5 . P. 155.
9. ↑ Christiaan F. Rüter [edit.]: Justice and Nazi Crimes, Amsterdam 1978, ISBN 3-598-23790-1 , Vol. 18, p. 12.
10. ↑ Christiaan F. Rüter [arr.]: Justice and Nazi Crimes, Amsterdam 1978, ISBN 3-598-23790-1 , Vol. 18, p. 18.
11. ↑ Christiaan F. Rüter [edit.]: Justice and Nazi Crimes, Amsterdam 1978, ISBN 3-598-23790-1 , Vol. 18, p. 21.