Grain sand crime

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Memorial stone for the six victims of the grain sand crime

As a grain of sand crime is murder of five politically unpopular male civilians and one as supposed Jewish persecuted woman from Nierstein and Oppenheim on March 21, 1945 during World War II by Wehrmacht - and NSDAP -Personal on the grain of sand called, the opposite on the Nierstein and Oppenheim on the right bank of the Rhine . The act took place after the fleeing retreat of German troops on the Rhine ferry to the Kornsand from the Oppenheim bridgehead, which was only set up and held for a short time, to the other side of the Rhine in front of the Americans advancing from the west. The American tanks were already visible in the vineyards above Oppenheim at the time of the crime. The act was carried out by Wehrmacht Lieutenant Hans Kaiser at the behest of NSDAP functionaries who were also evacuated from Nierstein.

prehistory

In March 1945 the Allies conquered the areas on the left bank of the Rhine in the Palatinate, Rheinhessen and parts of the Rhineland, coming from the west. On March 18, the 3rd US Army under General George S. Patton took Bad Kreuznach without resistance. On the same day, the Ludendorff Bridge in Remagen , captured by the Americans on March 7, collapsed . At the same time, the Germans blew up all the bridges that led across the Rhine: the Mainzer Südbrücke , the Rheinbrücke Gernsheim 18 km south of Nierstein on March 19 and the Ernst Ludwig Bridge in Worms on March 20. A Rhine crossing with floating bridges became inevitable for the Allies if the invasion of Germany was to continue. The Wehrmacht considered the Rhine a natural border that was difficult to cross. The preparations of the US Army for the crossing were kept secret from the Germans. The location of the Landskrone ferry between Nierstein and Kornsand was chosen to cross the Rhine . This ferry, located between Oppenheim and Nierstein, was a cable ferry and was still intact at the time. The 3rd Army under General Patton therefore advanced to the area around Nierstein and Oppenheim, where the German troops had set up a bridgehead for a short time.

On the night of March 21, the Wehrmacht cleared the Nierstein-Oppenheim bridgehead via the ferry to Kornsand. The combat commandant , staffs and the leadership of the NSDAP fled to the other side of the Rhine. It was intended to blow up the ferry upon the arrival of the US Army. As early as March 18, with the assistance of Niersteiner NSDAP local group leader Georg Ludwig Bittel, six Niersteiners were arrested who were considered opponents of the Nazi state, and one person's family was also of Jewish faith . Some of these Nazi opponents had already spent some time in the Osthofen concentration camp in the early days of National Socialism . But they lived relatively unchallenged in Nierstein until the end of the war.

They were Georg Eberhardt, Ludwig Elbling, Nikolaus Lerch, Jakob Schuch and the married couple Johann and Cerry Eller. The arrested were taken by ferry across the Rhine to Kornsand to the NSDAP district leadership in Groß-Gerau . They had to cover most of the distance with their escort on foot. In Groß-Gerau she was put in the police prison.

The police sent them to the Gestapo in Darmstadt on March 20 - a distance that they also had to walk. Since the Darmstadt Gestapo was busy with destroying files and packing suitcases in view of the approaching American troops, who were expected in Oppenheim after the evacuation by the Wehrmacht on March 21, and knew that the transport of the arrested was a private action by the local group leader, the Released home without papers on the morning of March 21st.

The murders

By tram and on foot, the six people reached the ferry at Kornsand on March 21, 1945 at around 11 a.m. and wanted to go back to Nierstein. But civilians were already forbidden to do so at the time because of the military situation. When the group waited there on the ferry, after they had previously tried to get to Nierstein on their own with a small boat, the Nierstein lieutenant and NSDAP functionary Heinrich Funk noticed them there. The NSDAP local group leader Bittel, who also fled across the Rhine, had previously seen the group on the road from Darmstadt to Kornsand when he was driving along there in a car and informed Funk of the imminent arrival of these people. Funk arrested the group because the people could not prove that they were rightly at large and because he wanted to prevent them from escaping to the freedom that would prevail when the Americans marched into Nierstein. During the arrest, Ludwig Elbling was overlooked, who tampered with the ferry as if he belonged to the ferry staff. The ferry then went back to Nierstein and Ludwig Elbling was able to flee to the other side of the Rhine, where the Americans had just arrived. The ferry was blown up around 3 p.m. Funk handed the arrested people over to the former head of the NSDAP training camp in Oppenheim, Alfred Schniering, who had arrived on one of the last ferry trips on the Kornsand. Funk stated to Schniering, whom he regarded as a kind of superior, that the arrested were "Nierstein's greatest criminals". Schniering, although a civilian, claimed the role of a military leader on the grain sands when the military commander was absent. Schniering claimed to be the representative of the Gauleiter and Reich Defense Commissioner of the military district XII Jakob Sprenger (politician) . He then presumed to punish those arrested without "judicial or civil proceedings". He interrogated the five arrested persons or had them interrogated. They were brutally mistreated in the process. Then Schniering "sentenced" her to death . Shortly thereafter met Schniering by the ferry crossing to the Volkssturm Oppenheimer employed citizens and clockmaker Rudolf Gruber, who wanted once more to Oppenheim. Gruber had forgotten his Volkssturm rucksack in Oppenheim and wanted to bring it to Kornsand. Schniering accused him of desertion and sentenced him to death as well.

Schniering had those who were destined for death taken to a field near the flak position on the Kornsand and forced them to dig their own graves. Then he tried to find someone who would carry out the sentence. All the Volkssturm men and soldiers present refused to carry out the execution . Only Hans Kaiser, a young lieutenant who was deployed with the flak in Kornsand, was ready to kill the six people. Allegedly Kaiser had agreed with the words: "If the others are too cowardly, then I'll do it". The group was led into a field. Kaiser killed every person with a shot in the neck with his pistol. The victims were then placed in the graves.

The offender

Those involved in the act were:

  • Lieutenant Hans Kaiser, b. October 19, 1926 in Mayen as the son of a Reichsbahn wagon master. From 1932 to 1940 he attended the Mayen elementary school and then the state “Advanced School for Boys” in Münstermaifeld. Kaiser was the youth leader in the Hitler Youth . Before completing his school education, he was drafted into the Reich Labor Service in autumn 1943 , which at that time also included basic military training. He was also used to fight partisans in the border area of ​​Carinthia. At the end of January he was taken over by the Wehrmacht and, after four months of basic training, deployed to the central section of the Eastern Front. In the summer of 1944 he took part in a non-commissioned officers' course and saw how officers suspected of participating in the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944 were murdered without trial by shooting in the neck near Thorn. In September 1944 Kaiser was seriously wounded. After recovering and completing a course at a war school, he was promoted to lieutenant on March 1, 1945. b. V. ("for special use") seconded to the combat commander of the Oppenheim-Nierstein bridgehead. After the war, Kaiser was sentenced to ten years in prison for killing grain sand, but was released after six years. Then he went back to the advanced school in Münstermaifeld and passed the Abitur there. His teacher attested him good leadership. He then married a woman from Nierstein, had five children with her and lived in good circumstances in a large city in West Germany. Everything seemed forgotten until 1985, when the magazine Stern reported on the grain sand crime and the perpetrators.
  • Lieutenant Alfred Schniering. Schniering, who was born in Essen in 1911 and was dismissed from the Wehrmacht because of a war injury in 1944, had already joined the NSDAP in 1929. In the early days he was employed by the Gaupropagandaleitung in Cologne and worked as a propaganda speaker. He then worked as a subordinate civil servant in the army administration. In 1939 he signed up for military service. In 1942 he was promoted to lieutenant. A short time later he was seriously wounded and discharged from the Wehrmacht. In 1944 Schniering became head of a Reich training camp of the NSDAP for air raid protection in Wiesbaden, where the party's chief officers were instructed in air raid protection matters. From mid-1944, Schniering's management was relocated to Oppenheim. From January 1945 Schniering worked as a clerk for position construction at the staff of the Reich Defense Commissioner West in Frankfurt a. M. busy.
  • Georg Ludwig Bittel (* 1902). Winemaker and wine commissioner . Bittel joined the NSDAP in 1931 and was local group leader of the NSDAP in Nierstein from May 1933 to March 1945. Bittel was largely unpopular in Nierstein. He was considered choleric and violent as well as unpredictable. His power was shown in a letter of August 1934 in which he forbade the mayor of Nierstein to allow the Jewish couple Flora and Willy Wolf to leave Germany, when the expulsion of Jews was an official goal of German politics. From the “hateful and discriminatory” letter, Bittel's arbitrary rule in Nierstein became clear. After the anti-Semitic policy against the Jews was reinforced, Flora and Willy Wolf committed suicide in Mainz in 1942 - shortly before their deportation. Bittel was not fit for military service.
  • Lieutenant Heinrich Funk. Born in Nierstein in 1911, Funk had been a member of the NSDAP since 1930 and later attended its cadre schools, the NS-Ordensburgen Krössinsee and Vogelsang . In March 1945 he was in a hospital in the Taunus. When he heard of the formation of the Oppenheim-Nierstein bridgehead, he was immediately transferred there.

The Kornsand murders are qualified as one of the many crimes in the final phase of the Third Reich . After the war, the perpetrators were sentenced to several years in prison from September 24, 1949. However, after several revision proceedings, they were pardoned early .

Prosecuting the perpetrator

The murders were initially not known after the fact in the turmoil of the war. The previously missing persons were only exhumed about a month after the crime. The coroner assumed that three of the dead had been physically abused with blunt objects while they were still alive. Investigations into the perpetrators began as early as 1945. But for various reasons, a trial against the perpetrators took place before the Mainz Regional Court in 1949 . The penal provisions of occupation law, which had been laid down in Control Council Act No. 10 , also applied. The verdict was passed on September 24, 1949. Schniering and Kaiser were convicted of crimes against humanity . The sentence for Schniering was life imprisonment and for Kaiser ten years in prison, Bittel was acquitted. Bittel had not been able to prove that he initiated the arrests of March 18, 1945 on his own initiative or that he contributed to them in any other way. Even in the case of Bittel's communication of March 21 about the group of Niersteiners on their way to the Kornsand to Lieutenant Funk, according to the court it could not be proven that Bittel was aware of the “possibly dire consequences” of his action. Schniering acted as Commander-in-Chief, pronounced the verdict and issued the order to murder Kaiser. He was the "driving force" of the act. Kaiser was credited with an early confession, his youth, and his Nazi delusion.

The public prosecutor appealed against Bittel's acquittal, Schniering and Bittel because of the sentence. The higher regional court rejected the appeal in its decision of March 2, 1950.

Lieutenant Funk initially went into hiding after the war and did not return to his hometown of Nierstein until the beginning of 1950. On January 31, 1950, radio arrest warrant was issued and criminal proceedings began. Kaiser had testified against him. Among other things, he made the arrest of those who were later killed at the ferry on the morning of March 21st with the words "they would be the biggest rags and criminals from Nierstein". Among other things, he was accused of having participated in the murders because he had prevented the victims from continuing to Nierstein and had fed Schniering. Funk was also sentenced to three years in prison for crimes against humanity. Funk also went into revision. Since in the meantime the authorization to apply the Control Council Act No. 10 had been revoked by the French occupation authorities, German criminal law was applied. According to Winfried Seibert, this set in motion an end to denazification. On September 14, 1953, Funk was sentenced to 11 months in prison for negligent homicide and failure to provide assistance. Funk was then released immediately, taking into account his pre-trial detention.

The victims

The names of the victims are listed on the memorial stone in the section below .

  • Georg Eberhardt (* 1886) and Nikolaus Lerch (* 1891) were members of the KPD . Georg Eberhardt, his wife Helene and a daughter, belonged to a group of emigrants from Rheinhessen who had traveled to Brazil in 1924 to start a new life there. But they and the whole group had been cheated out of their savings and were therefore unsuccessful in Brazil. They returned two years later. Eberhardt and Lerch were interned in Osthofen concentration camp shortly after they came to power in 1933 . Eberhardt was then sentenced to nine months' imprisonment for continuing his “communist” activities, which he had to serve in Butzbach prison. He then worked at Opel in Rüsselsheim until 1945. Nikolaus Lerch was a skipper and joined the KPD at an early age.
  • Jakob Schuch (* 1888) was raised in a Christian family and participated in the First World War . He worked as a salaried winemaker who was laid off during the economic crisis in 1923. He too had belonged to the unsuccessful group of emigrants to Brazil. In the early 1930s, Schuch had joined the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold , which was closely related to the SPD , and was imprisoned and abused in 1934 in the Dachau concentration camp . He was released in late 1935. Jakob Schuch's son Jakob Schuch was beheaded on September 24, 1942 in Berlin-Plötzensee for resisting the Nazi regime .
  • Caroline (Cerry) Eller (* 1891 in Chicago ) and Johann Eller came from a humble background. They had been married since 1911. Cerry's father, Hermann Hirsch, an old goods dealer in Oppenheim, was a Jew . Cerry Eller joined the Evangelical Church on marriage. Johann Eller was a bricklayer. He and his wife ran a junk shop. The Eller family had also belonged to the Brazilian expedition. She resumed her junk shop after her return.
  • In 1907 Johann Eller was a co-founder of the SPD electoral association in Schwabsburg, a district of Nierstein. Johann Eller was considered brave. He had criticized the NSDAP local group leader Bittel several times. The Eller family was persecuted as "non-Aryan" during the Nazi era . The shop was closed, and there were several raid-like house searches by the SA . The eldest son Eller died in the war, and two other sons were deployed in the war. Cerry Eller's brother Ludwig was deported with his wife and two sons. One son died of abuse while still in Frankfurt. The rest of the family was deported to Theresienstadt and later murdered in Poland.
  • Rudolf Gruber was a master watchmaker from Oppenheim. He was a respected citizen of the city. Like many other Volkssturm men, he had not believed in the victory of the Nazis and considered the deployment of the Volkssturm in Kornsand to be nonsensical.

Memorial stone

In 1954, a memorial stone was erected on the grain sand to commemorate the victims. It is written on it:

In the sight of their homeland, the following were innocently shot:
Eberhardt, Georg from Nierstein
Eller, Cerry from Nierstein
Eller, Johann from Nierstein
Lerch, Nikolaus from Nierstein
Schuch, Jakob from Nierstein
Gruber, Rudolf from Oppenheim

In memory of the dead!
As a warning to the living!
So that what happened here
never repeats itself.

The victim has been remembered in Nierstein since 2013 with the stumbling blocks laid there .

See also

On the following day of the crime, March 22, 1945, units of the Third United States Army began to cross the Rhine near Nierstein .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hans Berkessel, Hans-Georg Meyer (Ed.): The time of National Socialism in Rhineland-Palatinate. Verlag Hermann Schmidt, 2000, ISBN 3-87439-453-0 , pp. 151-155.
  2. ↑ a b c d e Winfried Seibert: The grain sand crime and the justice - A "Junker" of the Ordensburg Vogelsang in court. August 17, 2008, last amended on January 10, 2017, accessed on October 7, 2017.
  3. ↑ a b Wolfgang Kemp: Nazi crimes of the last few days - the murders on the grain sand . In: Hans-Georg Meyer, Hans Berkessel (Ed.): The time of National Socialism in Rhineland-Palatinate. Hermann Schmidt, Mainz 2001, ISBN 3-87439-453-0 . P. 150 ff.
  4. ^ Wolfgang Kemp: Documentation Oppenheimer and Niersteiner Jews 1933–1945. Corrected, supplemented and significantly expanded new edition, Verlag der Rheinhessische Druckwerkstätte, Alzey 2009, ISBN 978-3-87854-221-6 , p. 319.
  5. ↑ a b Wolfgang Kemp: Nazi murders of the last few days - the crime on the Kornsand near Nierstein on March 21, 1945 . (First publication Kemp 2001) in Wolfgang Kemp: Documentation Oppenheimer and Niersteiner Jews 1933–1945 . Corrected, supplemented and significantly expanded new edition, Verlag der Rheinhessische Druckwerkstätte, Alzey 2009, ISBN 978-3-87854-221-6 .
  6. ↑ Justice and Nazi crimes ( Memento from May 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Amsterdam and Munich 1968, Volume 5. The criminal sentences passed from June 3, 1949 to December 21, 1949: serial no. 148–191, 1970 - Volume 11. The criminal judgments issued from June 17, 1953 to December 4, 1953: serial no. 360–383, 1974.
  7. ^ LG Mainz, September 14, 1953 . In: Justice and Nazi crimes . Collection of German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes 1945–1966, Vol. XI, edited by Adelheid L. Rüter-Ehlermann, HH Fuchs, CF Rüter . Amsterdam: University Press, 1974, No. 371 pp. 357–378 Shooting of five Nierstein citizens who were arrested and released shortly before as “political opponents” and a Volkssturm man from Oppenheim for alleged desertion ( Memento from December 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  8. ↑ including Winfried Seibert: The grain sand crime and the justice.