Helmut Rauca

Helmut Albert Rauca (born November 3, 1908 in Trieb im Vogtland, Kingdom of Saxony , † October 29, 1983 in Kassel ) was a perpetrator of the Holocaust . As a member of Einsatzkommando 3 in Kaunas , he was instrumental in the murder of more than ten thousand Jews from the Kaunas ghetto and other regions of Lithuania .

biography

Career

Rauca attended school in Plauen , worked in this profession from 1926 to 1928 after training as a commercial clerk, and in 1928 joined the Saxon State Police. In 1931 he became a member of the NSDAP . According to his testimony in his Canadian extradition process, he was transferred to a criminal investigation department in 1935 and to the Security Police (SiPo) in 1938 or 1939 . On the other hand, in a résumé dated September 1, 1938, he had stated that he was transferred to the political department of the Plauen local police on May 1, 1935, and that the latter was incorporated into the Gestapo at the end of 1936 . On December 1, 1936, he joined the security service of the Reichsführer SS . On September 30, 1937 he was promoted to SS-Rottenführer and on November 11, 1938 to SS-Unterscharführer, during the time of his assignment in Lithuania he was in the rank of SS-Hauptscharführer.

Use in Lithuania

When the war broke out , Rauca was initially deployed in Prague and West Prussia , in the summer of 1941 he came to Kaunas as a member of Einsatzkommando 3, commanded by SS-Standartenführer Karl Jäger , where EK 3 set up a new security police station on July 2nd and from there the Organized extermination of Jews across Lithuania. Rauca belonged to Main Division IV (Gestapo) headed by Obersturmführer Peter Eisenbarth . As the deputy of Obersturmführer Joachim Hamann, he participated in his rolling command , which consisted of Hamann, Rauca and 58 Lithuanian members and, with the support of other Lithuanian forces, murdered practically the entire Jewish population of the Lithuanian rural communities from the end of June to the beginning of October. For this purpose, Hamann commissioned the local police forces to concentrate the victims, to select and prepare the scene of the crime and to bring the necessary auxiliary workers together. Only then did a detachment of the taxiing command move in and carry out the execution.

As Gestapo representative for Jewish affairs, Rauca was also responsible for selections and for those mostly in the IX. Fort of Kaunas executed executions of Jews from the Kaunas ghetto. The German arrest warrant of July 16, 1982, which became the basis for the extradition of Raucas from Canada, accused Rauca of the murder of 11,584 people between August 18, 1941 and December 25, 1943 and specifically made the following charges:

• August 18, 1941: Selection and execution of 534 people from the Kaunas ghetto, who were brought to Fort IV and shot there on the edge of prepared mass graves .
• Early September 1941: murder of an unknown person because the victim was suspected of trying to hide a silver fork. Rauca is said to have first beaten the victim with a club and then killed with a shot in the back of the head.
• Around September 26, 1941: selection and execution of 1,854 people who he arrested on the streets of the Kaunas ghetto and who were in the IX. Fort was shot.
• October 28 and 29, 1941 (so-called Big Action, referred to in the Jäger report as “cleaning up the ghetto of superfluous Jews”): Selection and execution of 9,200 people from the Kaunas ghetto. All the inhabitants of the ghetto, more than 30,000, had to assemble at 6 a.m. on October 28 on the Demokratų-Platz. At around 9 o'clock the place was surrounded by the SS and Lithuanian auxiliaries. Rauca personally made the selection of those to be shot, which lasted into the evening hours. The selected people were then housed in the so-called Small Ghetto and shot in Fort IX at dawn the following day. According to Commander Jäger, the 9,200 victims were “2007 Jews, 2920 Jewish women, 4273 Jewish children”.
• Between November 18 and December 25, 1943: Together with other SS persons, Dr. Nathan (Nachman) Shapiro - the son of Chief Rabbi Abraham Dov Shapiro - and his wife, his twelve-year-old son and his mother, of whom Rauca is said to have killed at least one of the victims with a shot in the back of the head.

post war period

After the end of the war, Rauca is said to have returned to his Saxon homeland and surrendered to the American occupation and was in American custody from 1945 to 1948. According to another account, he was first transferred to the Western Front, captured by the Americans and interned in the former Stalag IX A near Ziegenhain , a special camp for former SS and Gestapo officers, but on November 11, 1945 in an American military hospital in Karlsruhe transferred, employed there as a nurse and released after just eight months. He is said to have been employed as a coal miner in Duisburg and finally traveled in 1950 with the support of the Canadian Christian Council for Resettlement of Refugees (CCCRR) via Bremerhaven to Canada , where he worked with the Beaverbrae in Saint John (New Brunswick) on December 30, 1950 arrived. He initially worked in Canada as a worker in a tobacco plantation in Otterville ( Ontario ), then worked as a bricklayer in Toronto for a few months in 1951 and moved to Kitchener, Ontario in 1952 , where he worked as an employee in a restaurant and worked in the local community for a few years the German-Canadian gained a foothold. In 1956, Rauca acquired Canadian citizenship and returned to Toronto to work as a self-employed businessman. a. with a dry cleaner to try. In April 1959 he became a partner in a motel in Huntsville, Ontario , a three-hour drive north of Toronto, which he ran as resident manager until he retired in September 1973. He then lived in Metropolitan Toronto until his arrest in June 1982 . He received a retirement pension and went abroad.

The extradition procedure

It is not known why Rauca was apparently released early from American custody, lived undisturbed in Germany for several years and was then able to enter Canada despite the mandatory exit and entry controls. Historian Margolian speculates that Rauca could have been recruited as an intelligence source during his American imprisonment due to his East German origins. Sol Littman argues that Rauca likely received support from US intelligence agencies, without which he would not have been able to immigrate to Canada. Rauca entered under his own name, which he changed to "Rauka" only slightly for 6 months when he applied for Canadian citizenship in 1956. After that he lived again under his original name.

The search for Rauca had already begun in 1948 when his name was mentioned repeatedly during interrogations at the Nuremberg Trial . The GDR public prosecutor Günther Wieland was very interested in tracking down Rauca. He had information early on that Rauca had been interned by the US Army in the main camp IX A Ziegenhain after the end of the war . But as the Cold War began , the chances were slim that the American occupying powers would extradite him. In 1959 Wieland discovered, apparently through information from close relatives of the Raucas, that he had emigrated to Toronto, Canada. In response to inquiries, however, the Canadian government made it unmistakably clear that it would refuse to extradite an accused war criminal to a country behind the "iron curtain". Wieland thought it best to pass on his information to colleagues in West Germany.

On September 21, 1961, the Frankfurt Public Prosecutor's Office (FRG) issued an arrest warrant against Rauca, which primarily focused on his responsibility for the "big action" of 28/29. October 1941, but initially had no consequences. A request from the German authorities in 1972 to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) led to an investigation by the RCMP, which, along with further research, corroborated the suspicion, but could not find out the whereabouts, as the Canadian social authorities allegedly through the different spelling of the name were misled or refused to hand over the address with reference to the protection of personal rights.

It was only as a result of the initiative of the Attorney General of the Canadian Government, Robert Kaplan, that a Canadian arrest warrant was finally issued against Rauca and that Rauca was arrested on June 17, 1982 by the RCMP. On June 21, 1982 there was a first hearing before the Supreme Court of Ontario , as a result of which Rauca was given the opportunity to appeal to the Federal Court of Canada , but this was rejected. On July 16, 1982, the Frankfurt public prosecutor replaced their existing arrest warrant with a new one, which was expanded to include four further allegations, and the Canadian judiciary then served Rauca with a correspondingly expanded arrest warrant while he was in custody. On September 1, 1982, a Raucas application for release from prison was denied by the Ontario Supreme Court. On 12./13. October 1982 was followed by another, this time two-day hearing before the Supreme Court of Ontario, which took place with the participation of numerous witnesses and experts. Involved were u. a. the historian Raul Hilberg and the First Frankfurt Public Prosecutor Walter Griebel . In the reasoning for the decision published on November 4, 1982, Judge Gregory Evans determined the admissibility of the detention and the extradition notice and decided that Rauca should remain in custody until his extradition, but should be given the opportunity to give reasons in writing by observing the prescribed period of 15 days Apply for a detention review under the Habeas Corpus Amendment Act . On November 22, 1982, the motion was filed and dismissed by the Supreme Court of Ontario without further hearing. On February 12, 1983, Rauca filed an appeal with the Ontario Court of Appeals. Raucia's defense did not deny that regardless of the justification of the allegations, there were sufficient grounds for extradition, but cited the fact that Rauca, as a Canadian citizen, was protected against extradition by Article 6.1 of the Canadian Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms and also those accused Acts were committed in an area outside the jurisdiction of the state requesting the extradition. The appellate court rejected the application on April 12, 1983 with the decision that the right to free choice of residence according to the 6th Article of the Fundamental Rights in this case the limitation possibilities mentioned in the 1st Article ("within reasonable legal limits, as they can be proven in a free and democratic society are justified ”), and stated with regard to the legal status of the Federal Republic of Germany that it, as the legal successor of the German Reich, was entitled to demand extradition for acts in its jurisdiction at the time.

After filing yet another motion to the Supreme Court of Canada , Rauca decided not to pursue that motion any further. On May 20, 1983, he was finally extradited from Canada and flown to Frankfurt. While awaiting trial, he died of cancer on October 29, 1983 while in custody.

literature

• Sol Littman: War Criminal on Trial: Rauca of Kaunas . Lester & Orpen Dennys, Toronto 1983; 2. revised Ed., Key Porter Books Ltd., Toronto 1998, ISBN 1-55013-967-3 (not yet evaluated for this article).
• Re Federal Republic of Germany and Rauca. Canada, Ontario Court of Appeal, April 12, 1983 . In: International Law Reports 88 (1992), pp. 278-301.
• Howard Margolian: Unauthorized Entry: the Truth about Nazi War Criminals in Canada, 1946-1956 . University of Toronto Press, Toronto 2000, p. 113 ff.

Web links

• CBC Archives: The Helmut Rauca case , November 4, 1982, TV report by Sol Littman (English)
• Legal and political consequences of the Causa Rauca for the persecution of Nazi criminals in Canada, from 1987 considered; Der Neue Mahnruf , 1987, # 12, vol. 40, p. 6.

References and comments

1. ↑ Career according to the Federal Republic of Germany and Rauca (1983/1992), pp. 283f.
2. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 481.
3. ↑ For the organization of the Kaunas office see Alexander Neumann / Petra Peckl / Kim Priemel: Training for mass murder. The participation of the next generation of Sipo leaders in the Holocaust in Lithuania in 1941. In: Timm C. Richter (Ed.), War and Crimes. Situation and intention: case studies , Meidenbauer, Munich 2006 (= Aktuell / Villa ten Hompel, 9; ISBN 3-89975-080-2 ), pp. 63–73.
4. ↑ Presentation of the working method of the roll command according to Rüdiger Ritter: Labor-sharing mass murder: War crimes in Lithuania during the Second World War , in: Timm C. Richter (ed.), War and crime. Situation and intention: case studies , Meidenbauer, Munich 2006 (= Aktuell / Villa ten Hompel, 9; ISBN 3-89975-080-2 ), pp. 53–62, pp. 59 f .; see. Knut Stang: collaboration and mass murder. The Lithuanian Auxiliary Police, the Hamann Roll Command and the murder of the Lithuanian Jews. Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main [a. a.] 1996, ISBN 3-631-30895-7 .
5. ↑ ^{a b} As Gestapo representative for Jewish affairs, who worked in this function with Fritz Jordan as the representative of civil administration, Rauca is mentioned by Avraham Tory in his chronicle of the Kaunas ghetto in connection with the "Great Action" of October 28, 1941 Pictured: Avraham Tory, Surviving the Holocaust. The Kovno Ghetto Diary , Harvard University Press, London [u. a.], 1990, p. 49ff., cit. Judit Bokser / Gilda Waldman M., El ghetto: historia y memoria , in: acta sociológica 26-27 (1999), pp. 55-86, pp. 66f., Cf. Jürgen Matthäus: Key Aspects of German Anti-Jewish Policy , in: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies (Ed.), (PDF; 366 kB), Washington 2005, pp. 17–31; Dov Levin: How the Jewish Police in the Kovno Ghetto saw itself (PDF; 238 kB) , in: Yad Vashem Studies 29 (2001), pp. 183-237; also the eyewitness report by Solly Ganor in Frieda Miller: Light One Candle: A Child's Diary of the Holocaust (PDF; 3.1 MB) , Vancouver Holocaust Education Center, 2004 ( ISBN 1-895754-50-X ), p. 11, and the eyewitness report by Faigie Schmidt Libman in Audrey Crasto: Holocaust survivor remembers World War II criminal arrested 23 years ago  ( page no longer available , search in web archives ), The Medium Online, February 27, 2006.
6. ^ Re Federal Republic of Germany and Rauca (1983/1992), p. 279, p. 281.
7. ↑ ^{a b} The "Jäger Report": Bookkeeping of Mass Murder , Jäger Report, sheet 5
8. ^ Re Federal Republic of Germany and Rauca (1983/1992), pp. 284f.
9. ^ Margolian, Unauthorized Entry (2000), p. 113.
10. ↑ Sol Littman: War Criminal on Trial: Rauca of Kaunas . 2. revised Ed., Key Porter Books Ltd., Toronto 1998, ISBN 1-55013-967-3 , pp. 137 ff.
11. ↑ Margolian, Unauthorized Entry (2000), pp. 114f.
12. ↑ Sol Littman: War Criminal on Trial: Rauca of Kaunas . 2. revised Ed., Key Porter Books Ltd., Toronto 1998, ISBN 1-55013-967-3 , p. 139.
13. ↑ Sol Littman: War Criminal on Trial: Rauca of Kaunas. Key Porter Books Ltd., p. 133.
14. ↑ On the general reluctance of Canadian authorities to prosecute German war criminals at this time, see Harold Troper, Morton Weinfeld: Jewish-Ukrainian Relations in Canada Since World War II and the Emergence of the Nazi War Criminal Issue , in: American Jewish History 77.1 ( 1987), pp. 106-134, on the Rauca case, pp. 127f.
15. ↑ Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom ( Memento of May 22, 2001 in the Internet Archive ), 6 (1)
16. ^ Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom ( Memento of May 22, 2001 in the Internet Archive ), 1: "The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society. "