Karl Rahm

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Rahm during his captivity (May 1945)

Karl Rahm (born April 2, 1907 in Klosterneuburg ; died April 30, 1947 in Litoměřice ) was an Austrian SS-Obersturmführer and camp commandant of the German concentration camp in Terezín in the German-occupied Czechoslovakia, later known as Ghetto Theresienstadt .

Life

Karl Rahm, son of an Austrian Federal Railroad official, completed an eight-year school education. He then learned the trade of machinist, but became unemployed a year after completing his training. He became involved in the metalworking union and in 1925 became a member of the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Austria ( SDAP ). From 1927 to 1933 he was a member of the Austrian Army and thereafter repeatedly unemployed. In 1934 he joined the offshoot of the NSDAP and the SS , which were banned in Austria at the time, and was thus involved in illegal activities. From February 1939 he worked under Adolf Eichmann at the " Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna " and from October 1940 to February 1944 in the " Central Office for Jewish Emigration in Prague " with Hans Günther in Prague on the robbery of Jewish people who were driven to emigrate With. Rahm was married and had three children. His brother Franz was interned as a communist in the Dachau concentration camp .

From February 8, 1944, he acted as the last commandant in what is known as the Theresienstadt Ghetto, and remained in this post assigned to him by Eichmann and Günther until May 5, 1945 . A quarter of the prisoners in the Theresienstadt ghetto (around 33,000) died there mainly because of the appalling living conditions. About 88,000 prisoners were further deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau (including family camps) and other extermination camps such as Treblinka , Majdanek or Sobibor .

Under cream were u. a. carried out the "beautification work" in the camp, which veiled reality, in order to use the visit of representatives of the Red Cross in June 1944 for propaganda purposes and to counteract the foreign representation of the mass murder of Jews, which the Nazis denied as " atrocity propaganda ". In this context, the propaganda film “ Theresienstadt. A documentary film from the Jewish settlement area ”was made, which was intended for a foreign audience, but due to the approaching end of the war, only individual representatives of foreign organizations could be shown in closed performances. The contributors were then murdered in Auschwitz. Under Rahm, the number of prisoners deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp for extermination rose again considerably.

At the end of the war , Rahm fled to Austria, where he was arrested and extradited to Czechoslovakia . In Litoměřice, Rahm was sentenced to death by a Czech court and executed by hanging on April 30, 1947 .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Jan Björn Potthast: The Jewish Central Museum of the SS in Prague - Opponent Research and Genocide in National Socialism. Campus-Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-593-37060-3 , p. 83
  2. ↑ Hans Safrian : Eichmann and his assistants. Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 51 f.
  3. ↑ a b Theresienstadt Lexicon. Rahm, Karl. - Short biography of Rahm ( memento of February 14, 2019 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on February 24, 2019
  4. ↑ Karel Margry: The concentration camp as an idyll: “Theresienstadt” - a documentary film from the Jewish settlement area ( Memento from April 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on November 6, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Rahm, Karl
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian camp commandant of the Theresienstadt ghetto (1944–1945)
DATE OF BIRTH April 2, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Klosterneuburg
DATE OF DEATH April 30, 1947
Place of death Litoměřice