Fritz Swoboda

Fritz Swoboda (born March 29, 1922 in Brno , Czechoslovakia ; † May 31, 2007 in Baden near Vienna , Austria ) was an Austrian member of the Waffen SS who never had to answer to court for his war crimes committed during World War II .

Life

Childhood, youth, first war missions

Due to the fact that Fritz Swoboda was almost never "officially put on record", relatively little is known about his life. His unmarried parents lived separately, and at the age of seven he had left his mother's apartment in Brno and moved to live with his father in Vienna. After school he had learned the trade of gardener and had joined the SS disposable troops before the start of the war , which made him one of the core cadres of the Waffen SS. His first war mission was in 1940 on the Western Front . He then fought in the Balkans and after the beginning of the war against the Soviet Union as a member of the SS division "Reich" on the Eastern Front .

"Use" in the Reich Protectorate

When Czech resistance fighters carried out an assassination attempt on Reich Protector Reinhard Heydrich on May 27, 1942 as part of Operation Anthropoid in Prague , the SS replacement battalion, of which Fritz Swoboda was a member at the time, was there. For Swoboda a "mission" began, which he proudly reported to his cellmate and the interrogation officers in numerous conversations while he was in American captivity. Swoboda belonged to the " Stosstrupp ", as he called it, who helped storm the Prague Church of St. Cyril and Methodius , where the assassins were hiding, on June 18, 1942 . His involvement in overcoming the assassins earned him the War Merit Cross 2nd Class with Swords . In the following weeks he was directly involved in the criminal court as the commander of a firing squad consisting of twelve men, which the German occupation authorities followed up with the Heydrich assassination attempt. While in American captivity, he described to his cell mate in detail what had happened in the SS barracks in the Rusin district of Prague on June 26, 1942:

"There were shootings incessantly, there was the twelve mark bonus, 120 kroner a day for the firing squads. We didn't do anything else, so the groups of 12 men each led 6 men and then killed them. I didn't do anything else for 14 days. And there we got double meals, because it really gets on our nerves. […] But the man has hard earned the double board and the 12 marks, killing 50 women in half a day [sic!]. […] At first you said, great, better than doing work [sic!], But after a few days you would have preferred to go back to work. That got on my nerves, and then you got stubborn, then it didn't matter. "

Swoboda was also involved in the " second case, " which was another mass shooting of 275 men and women that began on July 14 and lasted for three days. Swoboda never had doubts about his “nerve-wracking” job, which also included having to check whether the victims were “ hit well ” and occasionally had to “help” with a head shot. For him, there was no question that he had only " shot people who had just been sentenced on orders ". The murdered had “ mostly totally opposed German laws ”, which is why the mass executions “ from a legal point of view ” were proper “ executions ”. Swoboda emphatically emphasized the “success” of this approach, which he saw in the fact that “the Czech Republic ... had been quiet since 1943. “He was convinced that the Resistance in France could have been prevented by applying the same terrorist strategy earlier.

War on the Western Front, life after the war

The massacres in Prague were not the only war crime in which Svoboda was directly involved. In the American wiretapping camp Fort Hunt near Washington , a top secret facility for the systematic investigation of prisoners of war for the purpose of gathering information, which was operated jointly by the US military and naval intelligence services and whose files contained knowledge of Svoboda's war crimes, he frankly told of the shooting of American prisoners Prisoner of war on the German Western Front . He was involved in this war crime, which can no longer be precisely dated and apparently fell victim to nine US soldiers, as part of his front-line deployment with the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Götz von Berlichingen" . It can be assumed that Swoboda, who had made it up to the SS-Oberscharführer and was taken prisoner of war by the Americans in November 1944 , was responsible for numerous other murders, about which he probably never spoke.

Svoboda's luck was that keeping the existence of Fort Hunt secret was a top priority for the US military, which is why the tapping logs were not used for the purpose of prosecuting Nazi criminals. As a free and de facto innocent man, Swoboda, who had not spoken a word of remorse during his imprisonment, was released from American captivity in May 1947. Back in Austria, he worked in his learned profession until retirement. Swoboda married at the age of 43. However, his marriage had remained childless, and he had lost his wife to an illness after seven years of marriage. Swoboda died in 2007 in a nursing home in Baden near Vienna. Because of his crimes he never had to answer to court in the post-war period, they only became known after his death through the evaluation of the tapping protocols from Fort Hunt as part of a scientific project.

Web links

• Felix Römer: Secret wiretapping protocols. Hitler's soldiers among themselves. In: Spiegel Online (Pictures 1–3: Photos by Swoboda and pictures of some of the listening protocols)

References and comments

1. ↑ Unless otherwise stated, all information and conclusions relating to Fritz Swoboda come from Felix Römer : Kameraden. The Wehrmacht from within. Piper, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-492-05540-6 , pp. 404-414.
2. ↑ See Römer (2012), pp. 405f.
3. ↑ Quoted from Römer (2012), pp. 120f.
4. ↑ ^{a b c} Quoted from Römer (2012), p. 407.
5. ↑ ^{a b} Quoted from Römer (2012), p. 409.
6. ↑ Fort Hunt was a former artillery bastion on the Potomac River . In this there were two prisoner complexes, in whose cells the conversations of the inmates could be monitored around the clock using hidden microphones. Whenever the prisoners' conversations touched on topics that seemed relevant, they were recorded and passages of the conversations that seemed particularly valuable were then completely transcribed. Besides these Room Conversations also made by US interrogators were in Fort Hunt Interrogations recorded and added to the results of a verbatim transcripts or summaries the prisoner files. Even for the operators of the facility, it was astonishing that the prisoners' need for communication and conversation made them forget all caution and restraint in their conversations within a short time. See: Römer (2012), pp. 31–59; another, "A New Weapon in Modern Warfare." Military intelligence services and strategic "Prisoners of War Intelligence" in interrogation camps in the USA, 1942–1945. In: Christian Gudehus , Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer (eds.): "The Führer was again far too humane, far too soulful" The Second World War from the perspective of German and Italian soldiers. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt / Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-596-18872-7 , pp. 116-139.
7. ↑ See Römer (2012), pp. 407f.
8. ↑ An American interrogation officer (IO) judged Swoboda as follows: “ When he described the shooting of the people in Prague, one could feel that this prisoner did this ... with pleasure, and the IO has the feeling that he was a ... Killer is whose only thought is to kill everything in his way in the dream of conquering this world. “Furthermore, the IO wrote in its report that Swoboda should actually be locked up for the rest of his life. Quoted from Römer (2012), p. 404. Translation by Felix Römer.