Massacre in the Stein prison

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Prison Krems-Stein (2012)

The massacre in the Stein prison and the subsequent so-called "Kremser Hasenjagd" were crimes in National Socialist Austria , which on April 6, 1945 and the following days, killed several hundred mostly political prisoners and some judicial officers. In the post-war period, the Austrian and West German judiciary designated such criminal acts at the end of the Second World War as end- phase crimes , which was regarded as an attenuating circumstance.

prehistory

A large number of inmates in the Stein prison had been imprisoned for political reasons, e. B. because of statements critical of the regime, listening to enemy broadcasters , distributing leaflets, collecting donations for other prisoners or armed resistance against the Nazi rulers. The majority of the prisoners came from what is now Austria, the Czech Republic, Croatia and Greece. Among the prisoners were Nazi opponents from communist, social democratic and Christian social circles.

Under the impression of the Red Army approaching from the east, considerations were made within the judicial offices in Vienna as to how the prisoners in the Nazi penal institutions should be dealt with “when the enemy approached”. The result of these deliberations in February 1945 was a brief formulated vaguely in many respects, which was sent to all the prison directors. According to this, “ordinary” criminals would have to be released, but for political reasons prisoners would have to be taken away from the front area under guard. If evacuation is not possible, the political prisoners would have to be killed.

At the beginning of April 1945 the food supplies in the Stein prison ran out, and the efforts of the prison director Franz Kodré to evacuate the approximately 1,800–1,900 prisoners up the Danube by rail or barges were unsuccessful. Against this background and in a very broad interpretation of the orders from Vienna, Kodré first initiated the release of around 80 to 100 "ordinary" criminals on April 5th and finally the release of all other prisoners - including political prisoners - on April 6th Stein prison and the small branch in the village of Hörfarth .

In view of the Soviet troops already in the south of Vienna, the evacuation of the Vienna-Josefstadt prison began on April 6, 1945 and political prisoners were released, including the later Austrian Chancellor Leopold Figl .

The events in the Stein prison

On the morning of April 6th, all prisoners were taken out of the cells and informed of the impending release. The mood was accordingly relaxed and cheerful. In protest against the decision of the director, however, fanatical members of the Nazi party offered passive resistance among the overseers. They did not intervene when chaotic scenes broke out while the prisoners' garment bags were being handed over. In order to ensure peace and order during the release process, the prison management was forced to hand out rifles to reliable inmates. This measure had an effect and the release proceeded quickly, there were no acts of violence against either prisoners or guards. In the course of the morning hundreds of former prisoners, some of them with regular release papers, left the place of their captivity on foot.

Late in the morning, guards loyal to the Nazi regime reported by telephone to the Krems district leader, Anton Wilthum , of an alleged "revolt" in the Stein prison. Wilthum immediately ordered alarm units from the security police , the Kremser Volkssturm , the Wehrmacht garrison and the Waffen SS to Stein. Once there, there was no sign of an uprising, but the presence of the military units caused nervousness among the prisoners. The Volkssturm contingent was under the command of Kreisstabsführer SA-Standartenführer Leo Pilz, while the Wehrmacht unit made up of pioneer soldiers was commanded by Major Werner Pribil. Accompanied by Pribil, the Nazi command officer, Lieutenant Lorenz Sonderer, who had just arrived in Krems, appeared on the scene. Sonderer, who originally belonged to the mountain troops, was to act as a "special representative" in the area of ​​activity of Army Group South "by all means to ensure the maintenance of order and discipline". Both Pilz and Sonderer were considered staunch National Socialists. Since Director Kodré's argument that the release was covered by the administration of justice was not believed, the alarm units began to block the surrounding streets and to push the remaining inmates back into the prison grounds. Kodré and his loyal supervisors Johann Lang, Johann Bölz and Heinrich Lassky were arrested, and the guns of the armed prisoners were taken away. The deputy director of the institution, Alois Baumgartner, deliberately withheld the letter from the Nazi judicial administration relieving his superiors on dealing with the prisoners.

Panicked prisoners tried to flee into the courtyards and bolted the gates. Pilz and his like-minded guards penetrated the interior of the institution, threw hand grenades between the prisoners and allowed the executive units to enter through the gates. Immediately, the Waffen SS and the Wehrmacht opened fire indiscriminately with rifles, pistols and submachine guns on the defenseless prisoners. Dozens of prisoners were gunned down in the courtyards, after which SS units began to search the building and killed inmates hidden there. Even the wounded were dragged out of the infirmary and massacred in the open air. Only those prisoners were spared, who were brought back to the cells at the last moment by courageous guards and locked up in order to give the impression that the inmates were not supposed to be released.

The district leader Wilthum, who has meanwhile arrived on site, ordered the execution of Kodré and the three guards on the charge of having violated their official duties and facilitating a revolt of the prisoners. The four officers were shot by members of the armed forces with the personal participation of the Lord Mayor of Krems, Franz Retter , without any trial at the prison wall. It was only afterwards that, with the approval of Gauleiter Hugo Jury , a court martial was drafted as an alibi.

A total of 229 prisoners died that afternoon in the Stein prison alone, who were buried in mass graves on the prison grounds a few days later. An uninvolved overseer was "accidentally" shot by the Waffen SS. There were neither wounded nor dead among the law enforcement officers who intervened.

The "Kremser Hare Hunt"

At the same time as the violent crackdown on the prisoners in the prison, motorized grab squads of the Waffen SS began to search the area for released prisoners. They were supported by units from the local gendarmerie posts and by Volkssturm troops from the surrounding villages. Many of the prisoners marching away on the arterial roads from Krems were still in prison clothes and had no knowledge of the escalation of violence in the prison. They rocked at freedom, saw no reason to hide, and thus became easy prey for the Nazi hunters. Those prisoners who fell directly into the hands of the Waffen SS were mostly shot on the spot. The same fate suffered those whom the Volkssturm halted and handed over to the Waffen SS patrols as ordered.

  • In the early afternoon of April 6, 1945, south of Krems, 3–4 prisoners, presumably from a Waffen-SS patrol, were shot and the bodies left lying near the barracks in Mautern an der Donau .
  • In the community of Furth near Göttweig , in addition to students from NAPOLA , which is housed in Göttweig Abbey , civilians also took part in the hunt, which killed at least three prisoners in the Aigen district.
  • Waffen SS members killed a total of 25-26 detainees in the abandoned Panholz brick oven on the mountainside east of Göttweig Abbey .
  • About 25 other prisoners released from the Steiner branch in Hörfarth were stopped along the streets by the Paudorfer Volkssturm, brought back to the branch and shot there by the Waffen SS.
  • Eyewitnesses observed a motorized SS patrol that came across prisoners near Statzendorf and murdered them on the spot.
  • East of Krems, prisoners were stopped individually or in small groups by the Volkssturm or the police in Hadersdorf am Kamp , Engabrunn and Theiss , among others , and interned in Hadersdorf. On April 7th, by order of the Krems district leadership, the 61 prisoners in Hadersdorf were handed over to a local Waffen SS unit with the active assistance of local Nazi functionaries. The prisoners had to dig their own mass grave in front of the community cemetery under constant abuse by the guards and died - except for one - in the machine gun fire of the SS.

The origin of the term "Kremser Hasenjagd" is not clearly proven. While press reports as early as the spring of 1946 dealt with the " Mühlviertel hare hunt ", this euphemism was probably not applied to the Krems context before 1949.

Humanity and moral courage

Only a few isolated cases are known where prisoners managed to hide successfully with the support of courageous civilians. A family in Hörfarth gave shelter to two former prisoners and thus saved their lives. Something similar happened in Mautern on the Danube , where the family of a Steiner auxiliary overseer successfully hid a prisoner in a barn. Another auxiliary overseer from Tisza showed personal courage when he saved four inmates held in Hadersdorf from being shot with reference to their release papers and escorted them back to the institution.

Victim record

The count of surviving prisoners in the prison the day after the massacre resulted in 1,074 people. Taking into account the occupancy of around 1700–1800 inmates at the beginning of April and the 80–100 people released on April 5, around 550–650 prisoners were killed during the massacre in the institution or in the course of the “Krems rabbit hunt”. Numerous victims must still be suspected in some known, but largely still unknown mass graves around Krems.

240 criminals with prison sentences of up to five years were regularly released on April 7th and 8th. The remaining 836 inmates were locked in the holds of barges on April 8 and brought up the Danube to prisons in Bavaria under guard. There they were finally liberated by the US armed forces.

A few days after the massacre, on April 9, 44 prisoners sentenced to death from the Vienna Regional Court were brought to the empty Stein prison, where they were also shot by members of the Waffen SS on April 15, 1945. Among them were the two Franciscans Angelus Steinwender and Kapistran Peller , who were sentenced to death as members of the anti-fascist resistance. Those who were shot also included the Catholic priest Anton Granig , the leading head of the “Antifascist Freedom Movement in Austria” from Klagenfurt, and Andreas Hofer , a member of the Maier-Messner-Caldonazzi resistance group .

Legal processing

Memorial stone at the Stein cemetery
Memorial stone for murdered Polish resistance fighters

In the fall of 1945, the judiciary began investigating the events in the Stein prison. 14 ringleaders among the overseers as well as the Kremser Volkssturm commander had to answer for the crimes committed before the Vienna People's Court . District leader Wilthum and the Gauleiter jury committed suicide and thus evaded their responsibility in the courtroom. Oberleutnant Sonderer managed to get through to his Bavarian homeland and could not be found by the Austrian judiciary. The so-called "Stein Trial" ended on August 30, 1946 with death sentences for five of the accused (Leo Pilz, Alois Baumgartner, Anton Pomassl, Franz Heinisch and Eduard Ambrosch), five others received life imprisonment , one three years in prison and four were acquitted .

A separate people's court trial dealt with the massacre in Hadersdorf . In connection with the proceedings, the authorities had the victims of the shooting there legally exhumed . The local NS-Ortsgruppenleiter, the Ortsbauernführer and an official of the Krems district leadership were sentenced to long prison terms.

It seems noticeable that in the course of the post-war trials not a single one of the Waffen SS members involved was identified or prosecuted.

A comprehensive judicial and scientific review of the "Krems rabbit hunt" in the rest of the area around Krems has not taken place to this day. The mass graves of murdered prisoners south of Krems, confirmed by several contemporary witnesses, have not yet been opened by the judiciary.

Reminding and dunning

  • In Krems-Stein, a memorial stone was erected at the Stein cemetery and a memorial in memory of Greek prisoners in the immediate vicinity of today's prison. In 1995 a memorial initiative brought the events back to the public's attention by placing 386 white lacquered wooden crosses along the streets around the institution.
  • On April 12, 2015, the Ambassador of the Republic of Poland and the Mayor of Krems unveiled a memorial stone at the Stein cemetery in honor of the Polish resistance fighters who were executed in the institution on April 15, 1945.
  • Opposite the main entrance of the Stein prison, on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Gerasimos-Garnelis-Weg massacre, commemorates a survivor of the bloodbath.
"06.04.1945" by Ramesch Daha on the prison wall (photo April 2019)
  • In 2018, the Viennese artist Ramesch Daha , born in Iran, did an artistic reappraisal by painting fragments of the prisoner register from 1944 and 1945 enlarged on the prison wall under the title 06.04.1945 . The names were softened for the purpose of illegibility, at the same time "the individual stories were present in the handwritten lists, but at the same time combined into a powerful" unanimous "warning that, going beyond the pure documentation, creates a place of memory on a meta-level of formal synthesis, where perpetrators and victims meet as a collective ”.
  • The request of a private association for a memorial in the center of Hadersdorf repeatedly triggered violent controversies with local politicians. In the meantime, a memorial plaque - albeit with controversial text - has been attached to the local cemetery by the community.
  • In Panholz (Furth-Göttweig), a landowner built a wayside shrine with a memorial plaque over a presumed mass grave of the "Kremser Hasenjagd".

See also

Literary reception

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from September 20, 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. : Details on the victims of the shooting in Hadersdorf . @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.gedenkstaette-hadersdorf.at
  2. ↑ Jagschitz , p. 22 ff.
  3. ^ Franz Kodré was the uncle of the high officer of the Wehrmacht Heinrich Kodré , one of the personalities behind the Walküre company .
  4. ↑ Note: District of the municipality Paudorf , approx. 10 km south of Krems an der Donau .
  5. ↑ http://www.kvvi.at/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=24&Itemid=39 Note: Strictly speaking, Figl was not released, but dismissed. The Red Army had not yet reached the city center on April 6 in the course of the Vienna operation .
  6. ↑ Note: Members of the Pioneer Replacement and Training Battalion 86.
  7. ↑ The county leaders had been transferred to the war command skills through local military units.
  8. ↑ https://www.doew.at/cms/download/870sa/festschrift_2017_ferihumer.pdf
  9. ↑ Jagschitz, p. 110.
  10. ↑ Jagschitz, p. 115.
  11. ↑ Fischer, p. 30.
  12. ↑ Reder / Schovanec, p. 297.
  13. ↑ "Kremser Hasenjagd": Reconstruction of a Nazi crime (June 29, 2020)
  14. ↑ Fischer, p. 31.
  15. ↑ Fischer, p. 30.
  16. ↑ Fischer, p. 31.
  17. ^ For details, see Moser / Horaczek
  18. ↑ Fischer, p. 32.
  19. ↑ Reder / Schovanec, p. 308f
  20. ↑ Moser / Horacek, p. 6.
  21. ↑ Jagschitz, p. 119.
  22. ↑ Jagschitz, p. 160.
  23. ^ Matthias Keuschnigg: Johann Karl stitch. (PFD; 13.2 MB) In: The history of the gray house and the Austrian criminal justice system. Library Association in the Regional Court for Criminal Matters Vienna, 2012, p. 57 , accessed on September 28, 2017 .
  24. ↑ Angelus Steinwender and Kapistran Peller. (No longer available online.) In: www.franziskaner.at. Franciscan Orders , archived from the original on January 20, 2008 ; accessed on September 28, 2017 .
  25. ^ Memorial plaque (Federal Police Directorate Vienna). In: www.nachkriegsjustiz.at. Retrieved September 28, 2017 .
  26. ↑ Stein-Prozess (1946) on the website of the Documentation Archive of the Austrian Resistance (DÖW)
  27. ↑ cf. Jagschitz
  28. ↑ see Moser / Horacek
  29. ↑ cf. Fischer, p. 31 f.
  30. ↑ Der Kriminalbeamte, http://haftwien.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/ja-stein-marcus-j-oswald-derkriminalbeamte-02_2005-09-11-massaker-in-stein.pdf
  31. ↑ April 6, 1945 on publicart.at
  32. ↑ http://diepresse.com/home/panorama/oesterreich/296005/Ehrenschutz-fuer-Gedenkfeier-nach-Eklat-im-Vorjahr?from=suche.intern.portal
  33. ↑ Fischer, p. 36.