Friedrich Kranebitter

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Friedrich Kranebitter (born July 1, 1903 in Wildshut , Upper Austria ; † February 20, 1957 in Linz ) was an Austrian National Socialist, a high-ranking Gestapo functionary in the National Socialist German Reich and an SS Sturmbannführer from 1941 until the end of the war .

Life

Youth and education

Friedrich Kranebitter was born as the son of the gendarmerie officer Adolf Kranebitter and his wife Karoline in their parents' official apartment in Schloss Wildshut in the Innviertel community of St. Pantaleon (Upper Austria) . Due to his father's professional activity, the family relocated several times and finally settled in Schärding , where the father took up the position of district gendarmerie commander. After six years of primary school in Schärding, Kranebitter first attended the Wilhering Abbey High School at the behest of his father . Since he was expelled from this school, although he was the best in his class, due to his radically Greater German disposition, Kranebitter switched to the high school in Ried im Innkreis , where he immediately joined the successful student association Conservative Semestral Association Germania Ried and graduated in 1924 .

After graduating from high school, Kranebitter wanted to study, but complied with his father's wish for a career with the security guard and trained in Vienna to become a security guard and then a senior guard. In addition to his training Kranebitter ran the study of law , which he 1934 with the promotion of Dr. iur. completed. Although he was already a trained lawyer, Kranebitter was not given a job due to his National Socialist sentiments and had to remain a district inspector for the time being. Participation in the February fighting in 1934 resulted in his promotion to deputy commander of the police station guard room in Währinger Kreuzgasse.

In 1929 Kranebitter married Maria Elisabeth from Wildungsmauer . From this marriage there were two daughters. His wife divorced him in 1943 and moved with their two children from Vienna to Wildungsmauer.

time of the nationalsocialism

On March 10, 1931, Kranebitter joined the Vienna NSDAP local group Gersthof II. In March 1934 he became a member of the SS with membership number 340,578 . With the rank of Hauptscharführer he received orders to build and lead the illegal 5th SS Standard 89 news tower as an Austrian officer within the police force .

Immediately after the annexation of Austria to the German Reich , Kranebitter became a member of the Vienna State Police Headquarters on March 13, 1938 . His sister Annemarie's husband, Chief Criminal Inspector Josef Schmirl , head of personal security at the Federal Police Directorate in Linz and before 1938 responsible for combating National Socialist activities during the period of prohibition was the first death of the National Socialists after the "invasion" in March 1938. This was already on Murdered by the National Socialists on March 14, 1938. In April 1938, Kranebitter, meanwhile promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer , was head of the Gestapo branch in the Lower Austrian industrial city of Wiener Neustadt . There he drove as a company car a Steyr 100 that had been confiscated from the Jewish lawyer Michael Stern . From 1940 to 1942 Kranebitter was head of Section II G at the Vienna Gestapo headquarters, where he a. a. was responsible for postal and telephone surveillance, protection of persons and gatherings as well as sabotage and disciplinary matters within the Gestapo. In 1941 he was appointed SS-Sturmbannführer.

After the beginning of the German-Soviet war , Kranebitter became the commander of the security police and SD in the Ukrainian general district of Kharkov , the fourth largest city in the Soviet Union at the time, on January 25, 1942 . There, under his authority, a gas truck was used, in which a few dozen people could be crammed and then suffocated during the transport by the exhaust gases of the gas truck being led into the interior. Kranebitter led mass executions, in which several thousand prisoners were often shot on the edge of previously dug pits outside of Kharkov. Among other things, sixty children who were patients in a children's hospital were also executed in the same way on the direct orders of Kranebitter. After Kharkov was retaken by the Red Army at the end of 1943 , indictments were brought against several subordinates of the Kranebitter who was already serving in Italy in a major Soviet court martial , the Kharkov Court Day. These prisoners meticulously described the planning and execution of the mass murders. On December 18, 1943, the convictions were passed in the Kharkov war crimes trial and Kranebitter was found to be one of the main people responsible for the murder of up to 40,000 people.

Towards the end of 1943, Kranebitter became active in northern Italy and took over Department IV at the headquarters of the Secret State Police in Verona under the later SS group leader Wilhelm Harster . There he was, among other things, compiling the transport lists of thousands of political prisoners from the Fossoli transit camp to concentration camps in Responsible for Germany and Poland and for Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria . During the Cibeno massacre on July 12, 1944, around 70 prisoners from the Fossoli concentration camp were shot by 5 SS subordinates Kranebitter as a deterrent to the rest of the camp inmates.

In June 1944, Kranebitter was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd Class and the War Merit Cross 1st Class with Swords.

Since in the summer of 1944 the Allied front moved steadily from the south to the north in the direction of the Po river , the Fossoli camp and the Gestapo headquarters were relocated to Bolzano . From July 1944 to February 1945, more than a dozen deportation trains were sent from the Bolzano transit camp to other concentration camps. At Kranebitter's orders, a total of 23 internees were liquidated and buried in a mass grave during the "Bolzano Massacre" on September 12, 1944.

post war period

On May 13, 1945, Kranebitter and other high-ranking SS leaders were arrested by US soldiers in Bolzano and transferred to the Rimini camp, which was run by the British. After further relocations within Italy, Kranebitter was finally brought to London by ship in March 1946. In early 1948 the British handed it over to the United States Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) and brought it to Fallingbostel in Lower Saxony . In June 1948 he was handed over to the Austrian authorities on July 15, 1948 without conviction by the Western Allies and transferred to the Carinthian prisoner release camp in Feistritz an der Drau .

During his trial before the People's Court , Fritz Kranebitter was defended by Michael Stern of all people. His sister, the “widow of the Austrian martyr” Josef Schmirl, threw herself into the breach in court for her brother, even though he had ignored her throughout the war after her husband was murdered by the Nazis. His sentence: one year imprisonment for illegal membership in the NSDAP, revocation of the academic title (Kranebitter did not even comply with the request for clemency from the Federal President), no further use in the civil service. On July 15, 1949, Kranebitter was finally released from prison. Cared for by old comrades, he quickly got a job again, initially at the Austrian plastics works in Wels . After all, he worked as an inspector for the Upper Austrian regional fire insurance company.

When Kranebitter died of cancer in 1957, the party said: "His life was only self-sacrificing love and the most faithful fulfillment of duty."

In the years after the war, victims and relatives of victims filed several trials against Kranebitter himself or his subordinates, to whom he was called as a witness. He was never convicted. It was only after his death in the 1960s that the (Italian and German) judiciary began to take a serious interest in him on suspicion of war crimes .

In the 2000 published Festschrift for ninety anniversary of the "Conservative semestral connection Germania Ried", which includes a preface of the Upper Austrian Provincial Governor Josef Pühringer is provided Kranebitter was honored by showing him the only member in the period 1919-1933 a photographic Portrait .

In his novel “Bitter” (2014), the Austrian writer Ludwig Laher traced the life story of Fritz Kranebitter, his public work and works as well as the private background.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Siegwald Ganglmair : Resistance and persecution in Linz during the Nazi era , pp. 1407–1466; in: National Socialism in Linz , Archive of the City of Linz, 2001. ISBN 3-900388-81-4 .
  2. ↑ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm2BkuNLbTo&list=PLECCE148DC64CB7B6&index=1 3-part film about the Kharkov process with the name of Kranebitter from min. 05:40 on Youtube; chronoshistory, 2012.
  3. ↑ Niederösterreichischer Grenzbote, June 4, 1944, p. 5: Wildungsmauer, double award
  4. ↑ http://www.nachrichten.at/nachrichten/kultur/Ein-schrecklich-normaler-Nationalsozialist;art16,1321940
  5. ↑ Ludwig Laher: Bitter. Roman , Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-8353-1387-3 .
  6. ↑ http://www.kirchenzeitung.at/newsdetail/rubrik/vom-gedenken-zum-mut-fassen/ Article in the church newspaper on the presentation of a novel.
personal data
SURNAME Kranebitter, Friedrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian lawyer, SS member, war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Wild hat
DATE OF DEATH February 20, 1957
Place of death Linz