Franz Stark (SS member)

Franz Stark (born October 7, 1901 in St. Louis ; † October 15, 1982 in the Diez correctional facility ) was an American-German National Socialist. As a full-time employee of the SD , he became a member of Sonderkommando 1b in 1941 and, in this function, took an active part in the murder of the Jews during the Second World War . He was tried in 1962 and sentenced to life in prison for murder. His social background as an unskilled worker is considered unusual compared to the origins of other commanders of the Einsatzgruppen.

Life

Stark's mother emigrated to the United States around 1890 , where Franz was born out of wedlock. In 1903 she returned to Germany with her son. After she repeatedly mistreated him, Franz Stark was placed in a foster family in 1905.

Stark began after visiting the elementary school an apprenticeship model mechanic , but without the final examination store. He was then unemployed. In January 1919 he joined the Freikorps Roßbach , with whom he moved to the Baltic States . Without a fight he was dismissed as too young. Back in Munich he was unemployed again and then found work as a messenger for various companies. When he was unemployed again, he reported to the Freikorps Oberland , with which he took part in the Kapp Putsch and the suppression of the Ruhr uprising and the Upper Silesian uprising .

Stark had already joined the NSDAP in 1920 and was one of its first members when the SA was founded in 1921 . In 1923 he took part in the Hitler putsch and the march on the Feldherrnhalle . He then took over messenger services for the banned party. After the end of the NSDAP ban, he became a member of the party again (membership number 127.445). In the following years he made a living as a casual worker; the longest he found employment as a cashier at a cigarette factory.

In 1933, Stark became Reinhard Heydrich's house boy in Munich and a member of the SS . From May to October 1933 he was a rifleman in Infantry Regiment No. 19. In May 1934 he was employed as a full-time employee of the SD and in the SD Upper Section South in Munich as a file manager. In 1937 he changed to the registry for the SD section Augsburg and in 1941 for the SD control section Munich.

In October 1941, Stark was ordered to deploy to the east and assigned to Sonderkommando 1b . With the Sonderkommando he came to Minsk via Riga in early 1941 , where the Sonderkommando was assigned to the commander of the Security Police and SD (KdS) Belarus . Here he supervised several executions. He stood out for his particular brutality. He carried a horse whip with him with which he drove his victims to the executions. During an execution of Jews from Rakov, which did not take place quickly enough for him, Stark began shooting before he even reached the place of execution. During an action against the Minsk ghetto from March 1-3, 1942, he supervised the transport of Jews to the execution site by rail. The following day he took part in the execution himself and personally shot at least 30 people.

In May 1942 he went to the SD office in Paris for three weeks and was then employed again in the registry in Munich. On December 22, 1942, he married Barbara Trambauer, born in Augsburg. Schindele, (1895–1962), who had previously been married to Heinrich Trambauer , who was considered a party hero of the NSDAP due to his role in the 1923 Hitler putsch.

At the beginning of 1944, Stark moved to the Augsburg SD office. After the end of the war, he initially moved to Munich under a false name, where he soon lived again under his real name and was interned by the Americans on September 17, 1945. After spending time in various internment camps, he was released on April 29, 1948. He then worked as a laborer and driver.

In October 1962, Stark and a number of other members of the KdS Minsk office, including Georg Heuser , were indicted before the Koblenz Regional Court . In court he was one of the few who admitted his crimes in “almost ruthless frankness”. This included the murder of three Jews out of personal vengeance. The General Commissioner for the General District of Belarus, Wilhelm Kube, caught the eye of Stark with his whip during the action in Minsk. There was a confrontation and in order to get revenge on Kube, Stark shot three Viennese Jews who were working as barbers for Kube. For this act, Stark was sentenced to life imprisonment for murder, while his co-defendants were sentenced to temporary imprisonment terms only for aiding and abetting murder.

As the historian Helmut Langerbein notes, Stark differed from other commanders of the firing squads because of his social background, his brutality and his personal motives.

literature

• LG Koblenz, May 21, 1963 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, vol. XIX, edited by Irene Sagel-Grande, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1978, No. 552, pp. 159–317 Subject matter of the proceedings: shooting, gassing in a 'gas truck' and burning of thousands of Soviet Jews and Western European Jews deported to Minsk, gypsies, the mentally ill, other Soviet civilians and Soviet agents in the Years 1941-1944 in the area of ​​the KdS / BdS Minsk. Shootings of reprisals, etc. a. Execution of 300 men, women and children from Minsk after the assassination attempt on General Commissioner Kube
• Helmut Langerbein: Hitler's death squads. The logic of mass murder. 1st edition. Texas A&M University Press, College Station 2004, ISBN 978-1-58544-285-0 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Jürgen Gückel: Class photo with mass murderer: The double life of Artur Wilke , Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-525-31114-1 , p. 292.
2. ↑ Helmut Langerbein: Hitler's death squads. The logic of mass murder. 1st edition. Texas A&M University Press, College Station 2004, ISBN 978-1-58544-285-0 , p. 65.