Franz wish

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Franz Wunsch (born March 21, 1922 in Drasenhofen ; † February 23, 2009 ) was an Austrian overseer in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp .

Life

Franz Wunsch joined the SS before he was eighteen , which he - according to his own admission - considered to be an elite group . When the war broke out, he went to the front. After a knee shot at the Eastern Front , he became the headquarters company of the SS garrison administration Auschwitz allocated. In September 1942 he was promoted to SS-Unterscharführer and employed as a supervisor and commando leader in the SS guards of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and there in the Canada department as head of the securities warehouse , in the leather factory and in the special command. Witnesses later reported that he was a "Jew hater", carried out selections on duty at the railway ramp at least once a week and brutally beat men and women.

Wish changed his brutal behavior only when he fell in love with the Slovakian Jew Helena Citrónová . On her first day at the Canada department she had to sing a birthday song to the SS man. Helena and her sister Rožinka, who was ten years older, were able to save Wunsch from the gas chamber and look after them as far as possible, but not Rožinka's two children. Thanks to Helena's influence, he turned into “another person”, according to the later testimony.

On July 18, 1944, Wunsch was sentenced to five weeks of strict detention in solitary confinement by the SS and Police Court XV , Kattowitz branch , for the theft of some small items from the securities warehouse with a total value of 30 Reichsmarks .

Franz Wunsch, who worked as a traveler after the war , was imprisoned in Vienna on August 25, 1971 . He was in the second Vienna Auschwitz Trial from 25 April to 27 June 1972 together with Otto Graf also SS guard at Auschwitz, after a two-month hearing by the Circuit Court ", despite overwhelming evidence of guilt" on June 27, 1972 due to limitation acquitted (Judgment: LG Vienna 20 Vr 3805/64). The charge was "Participation in mass murders in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp (bringing those designated for gassing to the gas chamber by using force, working on the ramp service, throwing the hydrocyanic acid preparation Zyklon B into the gas chambers) and violent crimes against Jewish prisoners during his service in Auschwitz". This murder charge was made according to §211 RStGB , which was valid at the time of the crime , but ultimately only manslaughter according to §212 RStGB could be proven beyond doubt, which was now time barred. The accusation of violent crime was based on statements according to which Franz Wunsch shot a 20-year-old Greek Jew who was a worker in the clearance squad on October 7, 1944, when an uprising had taken place in the Sonderkommando.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ SS: éléments biographiques ( Memento of November 20, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ In 1930 there was a postcard publisher of the same name in his birthplace Drasenhofen; was it his father? - Source: The Mistelbach district. Old views and books. ( Memento of February 22, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) St. Pölten 2005, page 13, no.22 and 23 (PDF; 5.4 MB).
  3. ↑ a b Ludwig Eiber , Robert Sigel (ed.): Dachau trials - Nazi crimes before American military courts in Dachau 1945–1948. Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2007, ISBN 978-3-8353-0167-2 , p. 252 ( digitized version )
  4. ↑ Holocaust and war crimes in court. Two brutal thugs. ORF , November 27, 2006, accessed on September 11, 2018 .
  5. ↑ Auschwitz: Ashes and Gold , pp. 61–72 .
  6. ↑ Citrónová interview in the BBC documentary Auschwitz: The Nazi and the Final Solution (minute 6:40) .
  7. ↑ Citrónovás statements (with photo) .
  8. ^ Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Europaverlag, Vienna 1972, ISBN 3-203-50414-6 .
  9. ^ History. Volumes 33–34, Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation, HELDREF Publications, 2004, p. 19.
  10. ↑ Jürgen Illigasch, Karl Stuhlpfarrer : The Own and the Foreign (= Contemporary History, Volume 26, Issue 1 ). StudienVerlag, Innsbruck / Vienna 1999, ISBN 3-7065-1353-6 .
  11. ^ Israel Gutman , Michael Berenbaum (Ed.): Anatomy of the Auschwitz death camp. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1998, ISBN 0-253-20884-X , p. 257 ( digitized ).
  12. ↑ Joachim Perels (Ed.): Auschwitz in der deutschen Geschichte (= series of publications by the Fritz Bauer Institute, Volume 25 ), Offizin, Hannover 2010, ISBN 978-3-930345-72-4 .
  13. ↑ Justice and Remembrance No. 12 / December 2006, p. 20 (PDF; 712 kB).
  14. ↑ Presentation on Nachkriegsjustiz.at , accessed on December 16, 2011.
  15. ^ Sabine Loitfellner: Auschwitz trial in Austria. Background and causes of failure. in: Thomas Albrich, Winfried R. Garscha , Martin F. Polaschek (eds.): Holocaust and war crimes in court. The case of Austria. StudienVerlag, Innsbruck / Vienna / Bozen 2006, ISBN 3-7065-4258-7 , pp. 183–197.
personal data
SURNAME Wish, Franz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian SS-Unterscharfuhrer and security guard in Auschwitz concentration camp
DATE OF BIRTH March 21, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Drasenhofen , Lower Austria
DATE OF DEATH February 23, 2009