Gustav Wagner (SS member)

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Gustav Franz Wagner (born July 18, 1911 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary ; † October 3, 1980 in São Paulo ) was an Austrian SS-Oberscharführer and, as part of Aktion Reinhardt, deputy commander in the Sobibor extermination camp .

Life

Gustav Wagner was a trained mechanic . In 1931 he became a member of the NSDAP in Vienna, which was still banned in Austria. He was arrested for illegal graffiti ( swastikas ) and pasting posters and went to the German Reich in 1934 to avoid further arrest.

In Germany, Wagner first became a member of the SA , and then joined the SS towards the end of the 1930s . From around 1940 he was an administrative officer of the Gestapo in the Nazi killing center in Hartheim near Linz in the “euthanasia program”, the murder of disabled people in Operation T4 . There he was responsible for the cremation of the bodies of the murdered victims. He also got to know Franz Stangl , who was then the administrative manager in Hartheim. A friendship developed between the two men during this time.

Action Reinhardt

Due to this experience, Wagner was first appointed Franz Stangl's deputy in March 1942, and then from September 1942 Franz Reichleitner's deputy commandant in the Sobibor extermination camp . Here he held the rank of SS-Oberscharführer from February 12, 1943.

As permanent camp manager in Sobibor, he carried out selections on the ramp and was in charge of the decision: another short life or immediate death for around 250,000 people as part of the "Reinhardt Campaign".

Heinrich Himmler awarded him the Iron Cross for his work in Sobibor and described him as one of the “most deserving” men of the “Aktion Reinhardt”. Among the prisoners, he was considered a sadist who also encouraged other abuse and murder. One survivor said Wagner would never have lunch without first killing. Gustav Wagner was also known under the names “executioner of Sobibor”, “the butcher”, “smiling angel of death” and “Welfel” ( Yiddish for wolf).

After the uprising in Sobibór on October 14, 1943, he received the order to close the camp and was transferred to Italy to the special department Einsatz R , where he continued to work on the " final solution ". At the end of the war he stayed in Yugoslavia , later he was taken prisoner by the Americans , from which he fled.

After 1945

After the end of the Second World War , Wagner worked under a false name as a construction worker in Graz . After a meeting with Franz Stangl, with the help of the Vatican, they first managed to escape to Syria and then to Brazil. Together with the commandant Franz Stangl, whom he had also represented in the Treblinka extermination camp, he managed to escape to Brazil with the rat line . There he received a permanent right of residence on April 12, 1950 and lived undisturbed under the cover name "Günther Mendel" and earned himself as a caretaker.

On May 30, 1978, he was arrested after Simon Wiesenthal tracked him down. He was identified in a police station in São Paulo , Brazil by Stanisław Szmajzner - one of 47 surviving inmates of the Sobibór extermination camp who escaped during the Sobibór uprising . Wagner was not in the camp during the uprising. Extradition requests were made to Brazil by Israel, Austria (of which he was a citizen) and Poland (in whose area Sobibor was). However, these were rejected in all cases by the Brazilian Attorney General. The West German government also made a request for extradition, but this was rejected by the Brazilian Supreme Court on June 22, 1979.

In an interview with the BBC on June 18, 1979 , Wagner showed no remorse for his crimes and stated, “I had no feelings about it… It was just some job for me. After work we never talked about our work, we drank and played cards. "

According to the (partly doubted) statement of his lawyer, Wagner committed suicide on October 3, 1980 in São Paulo. Wagner was a staunch National Socialist until the end of his life.

Wagner's career is often viewed as typical, as he began in 1940 with gassings and other killings in institutions for the disabled , in his case in the Nazi killing center in Hartheim near Linz ("Aktion T4"). A large part of the management personnel at gassings had gained initial experience in such murders. The complete dehumanization of the disabled preceded that of the Jews. Wagner, for example, was selected for the murder in Sobibor, particularly because of his personal file in Hartheim.

literature

  • Jules Schelvis : Sobibor extermination camp . Unrast, Hamburg 2003, ISBN 3-89771-814-6 , passim (see list of names), biography: p. 311 f.
  • Robert Wistrich : Who was who in the Third Reich? A biographical lexicon. Supporters, followers, opponents from politics, business, military, art and science . Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1987, ISBN 3-596-24373-4 .
  • Gerald Steinacher: Nazis on the run. How war criminals escaped overseas via Italy . Studien-Verlag, Innsbruck / Munich / Vienna 2008, ISBN 3-7065-4026-6 .
  • Daniel Stahl: Nazi Hunt. South America's dictatorships and the prosecution of Nazi crimes . Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1112-1 .

Web links

credentials

  1. ↑ [1]
  2. ↑ [2]
  3. ^ Robert Wistrich: Who was who , p. 368.
  4. ^ A reunion after the time of Sobibor . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of June 2, 1978.
  5. ↑ The interview ran in the series BBC Panorama : Gustav Wagner - Angel of Death , June 18, 1979, BBC 1.
personal data
SURNAME Wagner, Gustav
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wagner, Gustav Franz; Mendel, Günther
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH July 18, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 1980
Place of death São Paulo (Brazil)