Franz Novak

Franz Novak (born January 10, 1913 in Wolfsberg ; † October 21, 1983 in Langenzersdorf ) was an Austrian SS-Hauptsturmführer . As an employee of Adolf Eichmann, he coordinated the rail transports for the deportation of European Jews to the concentration and extermination camps in the east between 1940 and 1945 .

Nazi career

After graduating from community school in 1928, Novak began an apprenticeship at the Ploetz print shop in Wolfsberg. The printing company published the anti-Semitic and German-nationally oriented regional magazine Unterkärntner Nachrichten . Socialized there, Novak became a member of the Hitler Youth in October 1929 . In April 1933 he joined the SA from the Hitler Youth . A month earlier on March 1, 1933, he had already acquired membership in the NSDAP . After the NSDAP was banned in Austria in July 1933, he continued to work illegally and rose to become NSBO local group leader in Wolfsberg and squad leader in the SA. During the July coup of the National Socialists in 1934, he took part in the fighting for Wolfsberg. After the defeat of the putschists, he fled to Yugoslavia . From there he went to Germany, where he joined the Austrian Legion . After Austria's annexation in 1938, he came to Vienna and was taken on as an assistant at the Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna , which was headed by Adolf Eichmann . At the same time he joined the SS .

Eichmann employees

In July 1939, Novak, who had proven himself in Vienna, was transferred to the newly established Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague . In the spring of 1940 Eichmann brought him to the RSHA in Berlin , where Novak was employed in the newly established Eichmann department for "Jewish and eviction matters", which had been set up on the basis of the models in Vienna and Prague. As a transport officer, it was his job to order wagon material for the deportation trains from the Deutsche Reichsbahn, to work out the timetables together with the Reichsbahn, to coordinate the individual SS and police stations to handle the transports and to inform the concentration camp staff about incoming transports. Novak worked closely with the Jewish consultants in the individual European countries such as Theodor Dannecker , Alois Brunner and Dieter Wisliceny . In 1944 he was a member of the Eichmann Special Operations Command stationed in Budapest , which deported a total of 476,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz from March 15 to July 9, 1944 . The transports organized by Novak there deported 6,000 to 12,000 people a day. Most of the deportees were murdered as soon as they arrived in Auschwitz.

Escape and Law Enforcement

In 1945 Novak went underground under a false name in Austria (1945-55 occupied) . After the War Criminals Act and parts of the Prohibition Act were repealed in 1957 , Novak again took his real name. In the course of the investigation into the Eichmann case, the Frankfurt am Main public prosecutor's office issued arrest warrants against his former employees, including Novak , in 1961. He was arrested on January 20, 1961 at his workplace in Vienna as the manager of a printing company. In pre-trial detention in the Vienna Regional Court, Novak denied having heard of the murder of the Jews he had deported before 1945. In his first trial in Vienna in 1964, he defended himself with the assertion: "For me, Auschwitz was just a train station". The Auschwitz survivors Ella Lingens-Reiner , Hermann Langbein and Franz Danimann testified against him . However, the jury acquitted Novak on the accusation of aiding and abetting murder and only convicted him on the basis of Section 87 of the Austrian criminal law (the so-called "railway workers paragraph"), which made it a punishable offense to deliberately endanger the safety of passengers on a railroad transport. Novak was sentenced to eight years in prison. The judgment was overturned by the Supreme Court due to a formal error . In 1966, the jury approved Novak that he had acted under a state of emergency and acquitted him. This acquittal, like the guilty verdict, was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1969. Only the judgment of the fourth main hearing in 1972, which again meant seven years for Novak on the basis of Section 87, became legally binding. Novak, who was released in 1966 after five years in custody, did not have to serve the remainder of the sentence. It was issued to him by grace by Federal President Rudolf Kirchschläger . Simon Wiesenthal later calculated that Novak only had to serve three minutes and 20 seconds of imprisonment for every single victim he brought to Auschwitz to be murdered.

literature

• Kurt Pätzold, Erika Schwarz: "For me Auschwitz was just a train station." Franz Novak - Adolf Eichmann's transport officer . Metropol Verlag, Berlin 1994. ISBN 3-926893-22-2
• Donald M. McKale: Nazis after Hitler: how perpetrators of the Holocaust cheated justice and truth . Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham MD 2012, ISBN 978-1-4422-1316-6 , pp. 291-296
• Three minutes per victim - about what Austrian courts do and don't do in Nazi trials . In: Der Spiegel . No. 3 , 1966 ( online ).

Web links

• Novak, Franz . In: Theresienstadt Lexicon.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Date of death cf. Berndt Rieger: The dispatcher of death. Franz Novak, Eichmann's transport expert. A biography , Norderstedt 2001, p. 127f
2. ↑ Berndt Rieger, Der Fahrdienstleiter des Todes, p. 17f.