Georg Klotz

Georg "Jörg" Klotz (born September 11, 1919 in the South Tyrolean mountain village of Walten in the municipality of St. Leonhard in Passeier ; † January 24, 1976 in Telfes im Stubai ) was a leading member of the South Tyrol Liberation Committee (BAS) in the 1960s .

Life

Georg Klotz was the youngest of eight children of the blacksmith Anton Klotz and his wife Rosa. He was a trained blacksmith and charcoal maker and owned a sawmill. In April 1950 he married the teacher Rosa Pöll, with whom he lived in the Waltener Schmiedhaus and has six children.

As a teenager, he witnessed the Italianisierungsversuche of fascist Italy in South Tyrol. (see history of South Tyrol ). During the Second World War , Klotz served as a non-commissioned officer with the mountain pioneers of the Wehrmacht in Norway, on the Arctic Ocean and near Stalingrad. For his bravery he was awarded the Iron Cross, first and second class. After returning from the war and being an American prisoner of war, he initially devoted himself to rebuilding the South Tyrolean rifle system . When Italy refused the South Tyroleans the right to self-determination after the war and repeatedly delayed the implementation of the autonomy of South Tyrol provided for in the Paris Treaty , Klotz joined Sepp Kerschbaumer's Liberation Committee South Tyrol (BAS). Soon there were differences of opinion within the BAS about the timing and type of actions. The more radical part around Klotz aimed at a guerrilla war similar to the Algerian war , while for the more moderate part around the founder Sepp Kerschbaumer, the protection of human life was the top priority. In the end, Kerschbaumer prevailed.

Night of fire

As the BAS commander of Passeier, Klotz was a confidante of the night of fire and evaded the threat of arrest by fleeing to Austria . In the Milan anti-terrorism processes Klotz was sentenced three times in absentia:

• 1. Milan Trial 1965: 18 years and 2 months, because of membership in the BAS, as well as the co-organization of the night of fire.
• 2. Milan Trial in 1966: 4 years and 4 months because of several assassinations in Passeier.
• 3. Milan Trial 1969: 23 years for multiple attempted murder. The additional charges for the attack on the Steinalm on September 9, 1967, which left three dead and four injured, were dropped by the court for lack of evidence.

In another trial in Bozen, Klotz was sentenced in absentia to 6 years, 7 months and 10 days in prison for organizing an assassination attempt in June 1968 with the aim of derailing a train on the Brenner Railway . Overall, Georg Klotz was sentenced to 52 years, 1 month and 10 days in prison.

exile

Klotz had lived in exile in Austria since the night of fire and tried to continue to organize a guerrilla war against the Italian state with a few helpers . For this purpose, two trainers from the right-wing extremist French OAS came to Innsbruck in March 1964 to train Klotz and his people.

On the night of September 6th to 7th, 1964, Georg Klotz and his companion Luis Amplatz were murdered . At the time of the attack, Klotz and Amplatz were in South Tyrol and wanted to spend the night in a hay hut in Saltaus in Passeier. The perpetrator was an Austrian named Christian Kerbler , probably recruited by the Italian military secret service SISMI , who shot Amplatz in his sleep and hit Klotz with two bullets. However, the latter managed to escape on foot over the mountains back to Austria in a dramatic 42-hour escape with a bullet in the chest and a wound on the face. The murderer Christian Kerbler was sentenced to 20 years in prison by an Italian jury in Perugia on May 7, 1969 for murder and attempted murder, but has not yet been caught. In Austria, Klotz was arrested, treated in the Wörgl hospital and, at the age of 48, sentenced on October 14, 1968 by a Viennese jury to 15 months of severe dungeon for preparing explosives in South Tyrol. The court rejects the defense's objection that terrorist attacks in South Tyrol should be viewed as a political and not a criminal offense.

At this point in time, South Tyrolean terrorism was already a playground for right-wing extremist, Pan-Germanic and, above all, neo-Nazi circles from Germany and Austria. Since those blocks refused to assume the leadership position he was striving for, he retired to the Austrian Ruetztal as a woodcutter and charcoal burner . He supplied the Grassmayr bell foundry in Innsbruck with the charcoal produced . His two sons helped him with woodwork and dangerous rafting on the Ruetzbach in the summer. He lived in a simple wooden hut in the municipality of Telfes in Stubai until his death in 1976.

At his last place of residence, friends erected a log cross with a memorial book for everyone to enter. Georg Klotz is still revered today primarily by patriotic Tyroleans as a freedom fighter. In 2005 the hut in which Klotz had last lived was rebuilt with the help of the same groups. In the future it will serve as a log museum for the “South Tyrolean struggle for freedom”.

useful information

The eldest of Georg Klotz's six children, the high school teacher Eva Klotz , born in 1951, had been a member of the South Tyrolean state parliament from 1983 until she left on December 2, 2014 , and for South Tyrolean freedom since 2007 .

literature

• Karl Springenschmid : The Jörg. From the life of the South Tyrolean freedom fighter Georg Klotz. Verlag KW Schütz , Preußisch Oldendorf 1980, ISBN 3-87725-097-1 .
• Eva Klotz: Georg Klotz. Freedom fighter for the unity of Tyrol. Effect! Book, Neumarkt an der Etsch 2010, ISBN 978-88-904054-8-8 .

swell

1. ↑ among other things: Archive link ( Memento from August 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
2. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from August 27, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
3. ↑ Archive link ( Memento from May 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
4. ↑ For this section and the entire preliminary remarks: http://www.uibk.ac.at/zeitgeschichte/zis/stirol.html