Karl Ebner

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Karl Ebner (born October 27, 1901 in Franzensfeste , today South Tyrol ; † November 11, 1983 in Lienz , East Tyrol ) was deputy head of the Secret State Police Vienna during the Nazi era and boasted of his leading role in the deportation of "58,000 Jews and Jewish women from his field ” .

Life

Karl Ebner came from a Catholic family. When he was to be drafted into the Italian army in 1923 - his closer homeland had been annexed by Italy after the end of World War I - he moved to East Tyrol, which had remained Austrian, and never returned to South Tyrol .

As a student at the University of Vienna , he became a member of the Austrian Cartell Association . The lawyer, who received his doctorate in 1928 , began his career as a police officer in the First Republic , but became an illegal member of the NSDAP in 1936, during the corporate state dictatorship , and of the SS in 1937 .

After Austria's “annexation” to the German Reich in 1938, Ebner joined the Gestapo , which established its headquarters in the former Hotel Métropole in Vienna's city center and developed into the largest state police headquarters in the German Reich. Ebner was the “gray eminence” of the Vienna Gestapo. The head of the control center in Vienna was Franz Josef Huber , a Munich resident with whom Ebner was friends and in whose household he lived temporarily. Huber delegated practically all executive tasks to his deputy Ebner and it was also Ebner who announced to the official director of the religious community on February 1, 1941 the instructions for the final deportation of the Jews who remained in Vienna. In it, all assets of the deportees are referred to as “donations”, the proceeds of which are intended “to cover the costs of resettlement and emigration as well as the final solution to the Jewish problem”.

From June 1939 to April 1942, Ebner was in charge of the Gestapo's ideological opponents department and thus played a key role in the persecution, robbery and deportation of people classified as Jewish by the Nazi regime. In 1942 Ebner was promoted to deputy head of the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, and in the same year he was appointed SS-Obersturmbannführer, his highest SS rank.

At the beginning of 1943, when the tide turned to Germany's disadvantage during World War II , Ebner began to intervene on behalf of selected people, including members of the higher clergy and members of the Cartell Association like himself: He warned and protected people who had come into conflict with the Gestapo , and saved the lives of a number of them. Among other things, he helped the Jewish wife of the prominent actor Hans Moser , who was threatened by deportation to Auschwitz in Budapest , to return to her husband in Vienna. (In 1948, at his people's court trial in Vienna, more than 20 people whom Ebner had allegedly or actually helped testified as exonerating witnesses for him and thus saved him from the death penalty.)

With the replacement of Huber as Gestapo chief on December 1, 1944 by Rudolf Mildner , Ebner increasingly lost influence and competence. Finally, criminal proceedings were initiated against him and he was sentenced to three deaths by an SS court on March 16, 1945 for undermining military strength , favoring prisoners and corruption . In a petition for clemency to Heinrich Himmler , Ebner wrote: “Especially in the field of Jewish measures, my name is closely linked to the fact that it was I who answered the Jewish question in Vienna, probably the most Jewish city in the Greater German Reich, in an impeccable and uncompromisingly solved. Around 1 billion material assets were brought to the Reich through the organization I set up. ”Himmler did not respond to the request, but the death sentence was no longer carried out in the turmoil of the last days of the war.

After the end of the war , Ebner was taken to British internment camps and handed over to the Austrian authorities on February 20, 1947. On December 11, 1948, he was sentenced to 20 years in heavy dungeon by the Vienna People's Court because of his position as department head or deputy head of the Gestapo Vienna . On 16 May 1953 he pardoned President Theodor Körner at the request of the large coalition government federal government Raab I . He was released from prison, was ill and unemployed, and then worked as a property manager for a subsidiary of Creditanstalt .

Web links

literature

  • Judith E. Innerhofer: The angel of the Gestapo . In: Falter , Vienna, No. 41, October 9, 2013, p. 18 f.
  • Thomas Mang: The non-person. Karl Ebner, Jewish advisor at the Gestapo Vienna. A perpetrator biography . Edition Raetia, Bozen 2013, ISBN 978-88-7283-464-0 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tanja Malle: Contemporary history: New biography of Nazi perpetrators from South Tyrol . ORF website, Science section, October 18, 2013
  2. ↑ Thomas Mang: Gestapo Headquarters Vienna - My name is Huber (department). In: Mitteilungen (PDF; 285 kB) of the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance , Vienna, No. 164, December 2003
  3. ↑ Document VEJ 3/114 in: Andrea Löw (edit.): The persecution and murder of European Jews by National Socialist Germany 1933–1945 (collection of sources) Volume 3: German Reich and Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, September 1939-September 1941 , Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-486-58524-7 , pp. 382-384.
  4. ↑ VEJ 3/114, p. 383.
  5. ↑ A good day for Dr. Ebner . In: Arbeiter-Zeitung . Vienna December 9, 1948, p. 3 ( berufer-zeitung.at - the open online archive - digitized).
personal data
SURNAME Ebner, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Deputy Head of the Vienna Gestapo and SS-Obersturmbannführer
DATE OF BIRTH October 27, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Franzensfeste
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1983
Place of death Lienz