Franz Murer

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Franz Murer (born January 24, 1912 in St. Lorenzen ob Murau , † January 5, 1994 in Leoben ) was an Austrian functionary of the NSDAP . He was one of the main people responsible for the extermination of the Jews in Vilnius and known among the victims as the "butcher of Vilnius".

Crime in Vilnius

Murer was the son of a farmer. In 1938, after Austria was annexed to the German Reich , Murer became a member of the NSDAP . He was trained in the NS-Ordensburg Krössinsee . From 1941 to 1943 he was "responsible for Jewish affairs" in the city of Vilnius, which was then incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ostland as deputy to the regional commissioner Hans Christian Hingst . Vilnius, once known as the "Jerusalem of the North," had a Jewish population of 80,000, which dropped to 600 during Murer's "jurisdiction". He was known for his sadism as he enjoyed mocking his victims. On July 1, 1943, Murer was replaced by Bruno Kittel (* 1922), formerly a musician and actor, now SS-Oberscharführer and head of the Gestapo's "Jewish Department" in Vilnius, who was given the task of dissolving the Vilnius ghetto . Instead, Murer was appointed to the Ordensburg Krössinsee as a teacher and for his own further education . He was probably a teacher there from 1943 to 1945.

Nuremberg Trial

Murer's involvement in the Holocaust was named in the testimony and documents of the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals .

Vilna ghetto

The prosecution heard the witness Abram Gerzewitsch Suzkewer on February 27, 1946.

But I must say that the mass extermination of the Jewish population in Vilnius began when the district commissioner Hans Fincks and the advisor for Jewish questions, Muhrer, came to Vilna. (on August 31, 1941)
About half of the Jewish population of Vilnius did not get as far as the ghetto, but was shot on the way.
When Muhrer came to the ghetto and visited the Jewish workshops, he ordered all workers to lie down on the floor and bark like dogs.
At the end of December 1941, an order was issued in the ghetto prohibiting Jewish women from carrying children.
Muhrer came to the hospital at 6 Street and told the Jewish doctors that an order had come from Berlin stating that Jewish women should no longer be allowed to give birth and if the Germans found out that a woman had given birth to a child the child would be destroyed.
She saw how a German held the child and smeared something under his nose. Then he threw the child on the bed and laughed. When my wife picked the child up from the bed, it already had black lips.

If you find a Jew hidden in someone else's house, all roommates will be shot or hanged , Murer warned the Lithuanian and Polish residents of the city. He let the singer Lyuba Levicka die for one and a half kilos of smuggled peas.

Special offer 1005 in Ponar

On August 14, 1946, Affidavit D-964 was quoted from the hearing of Szloma Gol . The witness reports that in December 1943 the mass graves near Vilna were opened.

“This work, which consisted of opening the graves and setting up the pyre, was supervised by about 80 guards ... In the course of this work, the Lithuanian guards themselves were shot, probably so that they could not divulge what had been done. The commander of the entire square was SA leader Murer, (the clerk for Jewish questions). "
“Our job was to open mass graves and haul out bodies and then cremate them. I was busy digging up these bodies. My friend Belic was busy sawing and trimming wood. "
“We dug up a total of 80,000 bodies. I know this because two Jews who lived with us in the pit were employed by the Germans to count these corpses. That was their only job. The corpses consisted of a mixture of Jews, Polish priests and Russian prisoners of war . "

enrichment

Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe: Your Lordship! I would now like - I do not need to lose any time with this in view of the witness's statement - document D-975, an additional statement by Mr Gol. That will be GB-598. This document describes the process of removing the gold teeth from the corpses. I do not want to go into details, Your Lordship; it has been treated enough times as it normally was. Your lordship! I just want to state that Murer personally took the boxes with him.

post war period

Murer was arrested more or less by chance in 1947 and investigations were carried out at the Graz Regional Court for Criminal Matters because of his work as regional commissioner for the city of Vilnius. In his interrogations, Murer stated that he had never had anything to do with the ghetto or Jewish affairs. In March 1948, Murer was transferred to the Soviet Union in accordance with the Moscow declaration that National Socialist criminals were to be charged at the place where their crimes were committed , because Vilnius was now part of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic . In Vilnius he was sentenced to 25 years of forced labor by the Lithuanian military tribunal on October 25, 1948 for the personal selection of Jews (whereby he is said to have sent over 5,000 to their deaths) and for the shooting of two Jewish women .

In 1955, Murer was handed over to Austria in accordance with the requirements of the State Treaty . Murer was not prosecuted by the Austrian judiciary. Only in 1962, following legal intervention by Simon Wiesenthal , was another arrest and a trial in Graz , which ended with an acquittal on June 19, 1963, which was cheered by part of the Austrian public. The course of the trial turned to a tribunal against the surviving victims, observers reported that “the sons of the accused mocked Jewish witnesses”. Prominent advocates, including those of the ÖVP , testified in his favor during the trial . The public prosecutor's complaint against the acquittal was finally rejected in 1974 by the Graz Regional Court and the proceedings were discontinued. The extensive court file is in the Styrian State Archives in Graz.

Franz Murer lived in Gaishorn am See , Liezen district , until the end of his life . Murer was most recently the district farmers' representative of the ÖVP.

One of Murer's sons is the FPÖ politician and former State Secretary and Member of the National Council, Gerulf Murer , who was born in 1941 . In 1989 he announced that neutral historians from Germany would prove the innocence of his father Franz Murer with a book they had written, but such a book was never published.

From April to June 2017, the film Murer - Anatomy of a Process with Karl Fischer in the title role was directed by Christian Frosch .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Mascha Rolnikaitė: I have to tell. My diary 1941-1945 . There the cold-blooded murder of a girl (p. 83 f), the beatings of a naked woman (p. 110 f.), The sadism against an older man (p. 111).
  2. ↑ Doron Rabinovici: Instances of powerlessness. Vienna 1938-1945. The way to the Judenrat . Historical study, Jüdischer Verlag, Frankfurt 2000, ISBN 3-633-54162-4 (also Diss. Phil. University of Vienna 2000). P. 31.
  3. ↑ The Search for Major Plagge by Michael Good
  4. ↑ Nuremberg Trials, Vol. 8, p. 340 ff.
  5. ^ Arno Lustiger: Feldwebel Anton Schmid. Rescuers of Jews in Vilnius 1941–1942 . In: Vincas Bartusevičius, Joachim Tauber, Wolfram Wette (eds.): Holocaust in Lithuania: War, Murder of Jews and Collaboration in 1941 . Böhlau, Cologne 2003, p. 195; Manus I. Midlarsky: The Killing Trap. Genocide in the Twentieth Century . Cambridge UP, Cambridge 2005, p. 301 .
  6. ↑ Mascha Rolnikaitė: I have to tell. Mein Tagebuch 1941-1945 , p. 139 and passim.
  7. ↑ Hagen Stöckmann: Violence rooms. The so-called NS-Ordensburgen and their graduates between propagandistic preparation, politics of annihilation and generational communalization . In: Söhnke Grothusen, Vânia Morais, Hagen Stöckmann (eds.): Generation and Space: On the symbolic location-relatedness of generational dynamics . Wallstein, Göttingen 2014, p. 125.
  8. ↑ Nuremberg Trials, Vol. 8, pp. 335 ff.
  9. ↑ Hans Fincks instead of Hans Hingst (!). Muhrer (!). The wrong spelling leads to Murer and Muhrer in the process. In the second statement, Murer is referred to as the SA leader. An indication that it was made easy for the defense lawyers to repeatedly find faults in the prosecution in the underbrush of jurisdiction between the ministerial bureaucracy, the armed forces, the party, the SA and the SS, see also the interrogation of the witness Max Jüttner , who can easily deny it that the SA had murdered in Vilnius, while it was the SS in brown shirts. The surviving victims are held responsible for correctly describing the confused organizational structure
  10. ↑ Mascha Rolnikaitė: I have to tell. My diary 1941-1945 , p. 85.
  11. ↑ Mascha Rolnikaitė: I have to tell. My diary 1941-1945 , p. 130.
  12. ↑ Nuremberg Trials, Vol. 21, p. 178 ff.
  13. ↑ Nuremberg Trials, Vol. 21, p. 180.
  14. ↑ Gabriele Pöschl, The Halved Process - The termination of part of the criminal proceedings against Franz Murer in 1955 , [1]
  15. ↑ "My friend Murer" In: Korso. The sustainable magazine for Graz and Styria, December 9, 2008, accessed March 13, 2018. ( Online )
  16. ↑ STLA, state Criminal Court Graz, 15 Vr 1811/1962.
  17. ↑ "In Gaishorn, very old and unmolested, died in the 1990s" Korso
  18. ↑ Korso , ibid., The article points out that such documentation has not appeared in the twenty years since then
  19. ↑ Austrian Film Institute: Murer - Anatomy of a process . Retrieved November 3, 2017.
  20. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung of May 7, 2018 / Alexandra Föderl-Schmid : Review
personal data
SURNAME Murer, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian SS officer
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1912
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Lorenzen ob Murau
DATE OF DEATH 5th January 1994
Place of death Leoben