Hermann Langer (SS member)

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Hermann Langer (born November 6, 1919 in Hannsdorf , Czechoslovakia , † August 22, 2016 in Linden , Hessen ) was an SS officer in the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" of the Waffen SS . He was convicted of a war criminal in Italy in 2005 , but never had to serve the sentence.

Life

Langer joined the NSDAP in 1938 and volunteered for the SS in November of the same year at the age of 19 in his home town of Hannsdorf (SS number 477436). According to his written testimony in the criminal proceedings against him at the military court in La Spezia , as an unemployed gardener, he was faced with the choice of either being drafted into the armed forces or volunteering with the SS. Since he did not want to do military service, he preferred the service with the SS, which was referred to as "civil service" in the recruitment process, but was soon disappointed, according to his testimony, as the safe civil service turned out to be service at the weapon.

He did his basic training with a machine gun company of the SS-Totenkopfverband in the SS and police camp in Berlin-Adlershof . In May 1939, according to his own statement, he and his unit were transferred to Danzig , which together with other units formed the Danzig SS Home Guard . After the outbreak of World War II, he first took part in the attack on Poland and in 1940 in the French campaign.

According to witness statements by the La Spezia military prosecutor, however, he is said to have served with the skull associations in the Dachau concentration camp before the French campaign . In France, he was wounded in Le Paradis on May 27, 1940. At this time he was a member of the Totenkopf Infantry Regiment 3 of the SS Totenkopf Division , whose members committed the Le Paradis massacre of 99 British prisoners of war on the day of his wounding .

According to his written testimony, after his recovery he was transferred to a reserve battalion in Wroclaw and worked there as a trainer. Before he was posted to the Eastern Front again in December 1941 , he completed a course as a demolition specialist . In the SS division "Reich" he was used as a demolition officer with the rank of SS-Unterscharführer in a motorcyclist unit.

At the beginning of August 1942 he was subordinate to SS Artillery Regiment 2 as SS-Hauptscharführer . In the summer of 1944 he was posted as SS-Untersturmführer and company commander in a supply company of the 16th SS Panzer Grenadier Division "Reichsführer SS" in Italy. The company responsible for supplying the division with ammunition was stationed near Lucca in Tuscany from the end of June 1944 .

On the night of September 1 to September 2, 1944, he played a key role in the planning and execution of a raid in the Carthusian monastery of Farneta about 7 km northwest of Lucca. In the operation known as the Farneta massacre , around 100 civilians were arrested as hostages, of which around 60 people, including twelve monks, were killed as reprisals for partisan attacks on German troops.

He escaped an indictment by an Allied military tribunal in the immediate post-war period because his name was incorrectly given as Hermann Langer Gartner when the case was investigated and the mistake, the second surname referring to the profession, was not found.

The case was not reopened until the 2000s, after the files on the events in the Farneta Charterhouse were inaccessible in the so-called closet of shame until the mid-1990s . In 2004, Langer was charged with complicity in multiple murders by the La Spezia Military Court. In the first instance he was acquitted in December 2004, and in the second instance he was found guilty in absentia by the Court of Appeal in Rome in November 2005 and sentenced to life imprisonment. In October 2006 the Court of Cassation dismissed the appeal that was lodged as inadmissible.

Hermann Langer then lived unmolested as a pensioner near Giessen , as he was not extradited from Germany, although a European arrest warrant issued in 2007 was available. The request made by the Italian Minister of Justice in 2011 under international agreements to enforce the sentence in Germany also went unheard .

He died in August 2016 at the age of 96 in a retirement home in Linden near Gießen.

See also

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Langer, Hermann (1919–2016) on gedenkorte-europa.eu, the homepage of Gedenkorte Europa 1939–1945 , accessed on May 21, 2017
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Langer - sentenza dicembre 2005 - MAZZI G. In: difesa.it. Retrieved August 26, 2019 (Italian).
  3. ^ Strage di Farneta, cosa emerge dal processo. In: toscanaoggi.it. July 15, 2004, accessed September 18, 2019 (Italian).
  4. ↑ Assolto il nazista Langer accusato dell'eccidio di Farneta. In: repubblica.it. December 10, 2004, accessed September 20, 2019 (Italian).
  5. ↑ Silvia Buzzelli, Marco De Paolis, Andrea Speranzoni: La ricostruzione giudiziale dei crimini nazifascisti in Italia. Questioni preliminari. Giappichelli, Turin 2012 ISBN 978-88-348-2619-5 pp. 144-145
  6. ↑ 61 years later. Life imprisonment for EX-SS officer for massacre in Italy , from November 25, 2005, on News Austria. Retrieved September 18, 2019
  7. ↑ Ex SS della strage di Farneta libero nonostante l'ergastolo (Italian), from November 26, 2011, on Lanazione. Retrieved September 18, 2019
personal data
SURNAME Langer, Hermann
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS officer and Nazi war criminal
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Hannsdorf
DATE OF DEATH 22nd August 2016
Place of death Linden (Hesse)