Johann Feil

Johann (von) Feil , also Hanns (von) Feil (born June 13, 1896 in Leonfelden , Austria-Hungary , † January 31, 1957 in Mittenwald , Federal Republic of Germany), was an Austrian SS-Oberführer and commander for the murders in the Pogrom night on November 9, 1938 in Innsbruck .

Life

Feil was born into a family of civil servants in Upper Austria and had seven siblings. After attending school, he graduated from the teacher training college in Linz , where he graduated from high school in March 1915. He was then immediately drafted into the Joint Army . During the First World War he served mainly in Italian theaters of war . Feil was dismissed from the army in 1919 with the rank of lieutenant in the reserve and began his learned profession as a specialist teacher for arts and crafts drawing in Schärding , later in Linz. In the 1920s he was involved in the social democratic union milieu. In 1926 he married Maria Cembran (* 1907 in Nago / South Tyrol) and the marriage had three children. Another child was born out of wedlock in 1924.

At the beginning of April 1932, Feil joined the NSDAP (membership number 900.434) and the SA , and in July 1932 he joined the SS (SS number 41.937) and was appointed SS-Hauptsturmführer of the 37th SS Standard Linz. SS-Obersturmbannführer already in 1933 , he was noticed again and again in his apprenticeship by agitation for the NSDAP, was sentenced to five days of arrest and suspended from civil service in early 1934. In May 1934, he was reinstated as a subject teacher, and on June 15, 1934, Feil was appointed head of the 76th SS Standarte Salzburg. On July 25, 1934, Feil was involved in the July coup of the NSDAP and the murder of Federal Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss , was wanted by the police and had to flee Austria. After a short stay in Czechoslovakia, he transferred to the National Socialist German Reich and was expatriated from Austria. Feil was looked after by the SS relief organization in Dachau . From October 1935 to March 1938 he led the 17th SS standard in Celle . With the General SS he reached the rank of SS-Oberführer in March 1938 . He had been a German citizen since December 1934.

Pogrom night 1938 in Innsbruck

After the annexation of Austria on March 21, 1938, Feil was appointed SS-Oberführer and Full-Time Leader for SS Section XXXVIII, based in Innsbruck. In the pogrom night on 9/10 November 1938, so-called roll commands were put together by Feil . Their task was to carry out violent actions against Jewish members of Innsbruck society. It was forbidden to take firearms with you, but at the same time Feil gave the instruction "at the slightest appearance of resistance to break it by any means". Feil did not give an express order to kill the Jews, but admitted in the party proceedings against the perpetrators carried out in 1939 that “the subordinates should have drawn the conclusion from his words and should also have drawn the conclusion that the 'retaliatory measures' were carried out the life of a Jew does not arrive ”(quotation from the“ Decision regarding the termination of the proceedings of the Supreme Party Court against SS-Hauptsturmführer Hans Aichinger and others for murder ”, on February 9, 1939). The dead and injured during the Innsbruck Pogrom Night, according to statements made by several participants and also because of his own confession in the proceedings, were due to Feil's orders.

The process had happened as follows: During the November pogroms on the night of November 9th to 10th, 1938, Gauleiter Franz Hofer let Feil know at 1 a.m. that the “boiling people's soul” had to show itself in Innsbruck. Feil then had SS men subordinate to him in civilian clothes line up at 2:30 a.m. The SS men were divided into three groups and were instructed by Feil “to kill Jews in Gänsebacher Strasse without a fuss”, although Feil himself had not received a murder order from Hofer. On the first floor of Gänsbacher Straße 4, the engineer Richard Graubart was fatally injured by knife wounds in the presence of his family and on the floor above his neighbor Wilhelm Bauer was so badly mistreated in the hallway with tools and knife wounds that he died on the way to the hospital. The President of the Israelite Community for Tyrol and Vorarlberg , Richard Berger , was forced to get into a car under the pretext of going to the local Gestapo office, wearing only pajamas and a coat. The car drove towards Kranebitten and Berger was finally forced to get out of the car. He was murdered under gruesome circumstances and his body was thrown in the Inn . In the course of these murders, other Jews in Innsbruck were seriously injured. Feil then had the Jewish community center confiscated as the official seat of the local SS section leadership.

War career

During the Second World War he joined the Waffen-SS and from May 1940 belonged to the SS-Totenkopfstandarten . He was deployed with the SS Totenkopfwachbataillon Oranienburg from February to August 1941. In August 1941 he became the commander of the SS military training area at Heidelager near Debica . From April 1942 to June 1942 he was employed with the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen” and briefly with the 6th SS Mountain Division “North” . As SS city commander of Prague , he was deployed immediately after the assassination attempt on Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942 and from mid-July 1942 as commander of the SS military training area Beneschau in Bohemia. With the Waffen-SS he reached the rank of Standartenführer in the reserve in September 1942 . He was dismissed from the Waffen SS at the beginning of October 1942 for health reasons. He then headed SS-Section XXXVI full-time and from 1943 the SS-Section XXXXIII in “Litzmannstadt” . He was holder of the War Merit Cross I and II class with swords.

He was later reactivated and was SS and police commander in Udine from mid-March 1944 to September of that year . After conflicts, Friedrich Rainer Feils asked for his replacement and he was sent to the police chief in Linz for "induction" . In spring 1945 he volunteered for the final battle for Berlin and suffered a head injury.

Rat line to Argentina

Feil was taken prisoner by the English. After the war he was put on the Austrian war criminals list No. 2 because of his active participation in the pogroms against Jews in Innsbruck. In 1948 Hanns Feil was released from captivity through systematic starvation - which put himself in a life-threatening poor condition - and with the support of the " silent help " and was brought to Reith near Seefeld in Tyrol by his family . From there he was illegally brought to Rome with the help of fellow Tyroleans, the Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal , church officials and Italian fascists , in order to be disembarked in 1949 with one of the " rat lines " to Buenos Aires . There he called himself Johann Peter Greil and - as a trained painter - kept himself afloat with caricatures in the German "exile" magazine Der Weg (El Sendero) and other odd jobs . Sick of cancer, he returned to Europe in March 1956 and hid in Mittenwald near Garmisch-Partenkirchen . There he was looked after by his family and friends until he died on January 31, 1957 and was buried in the local cemetery (his grave was abandoned 20 years later). Johann von Feil was never held accountable for the acts he was accused of.

literature

• Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Hermagoras-Verlag, Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-7086-0578-4 .
• Maximilian Oswald: SS-Oberführer Johann Feil . In: Thomas Albrich (ed.), The perpetrators of the Jewish pogrom in 1938 in Innsbruck . Haymonverlag, Innsbruck 2016, pp. 28–31.
• Hans Schafranek : An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014 (= yearbook 2014), pp. 79–105.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 90
2. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 287ff.
3. ^ Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 91
4. ↑ Documentation archive of the Austrian Resistance ( Memento of the original from January 21, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. November pogrom Innsbruck ( Memento of the original from December 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.   
5. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, pp. 289f.
6. ↑ Saul Friedländer : The Third Reich and the Jews . Volume I: The Years of Persecution 1933–1939. dtv, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-423-30765-X , p. 296f.
7. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from October 23, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
8. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, pp. 290f.
9. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 291f.
10. ↑ ^{a b c d} Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS Totenkopf Standard (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 92
11. ^ Wolfgang Graf: Austrian SS Generals. Himmler's reliable vassals , Klagenfurt / Ljubljana / Vienna 2012, p. 293