Rechnitz massacre

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In the Rechnitz massacre on March 24th and 25th, 1945, around 200 Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers were probably murdered near the Rechnitz Castle near Rechnitz in Burgenland . The massacre was one of the final phase crimes shortly before the end of the war.

Operations

In the final days of the Second World War , around 600 forced laborers , mostly Hungarian Jews, were transported by train from Kőszeg to Burg in the area around Rechnitz in order to be used in the construction of Hitler's so-called southeast wall . Around 200 of them, who could no longer work due to exhaustion and illness, were transported back to Rechnitz.

On the night of March 24-25, 1945, Palm Sunday , 180 of them were shot dead by participants in a castle festival held by Margit von Batthyány , daughter of Heinrich Thyssens . The massacre happened just ten days before the Red Army reached Rechnitz. The dead were buried by a group of forced laborers who were shot the following day. The indictment issued by the Vienna Public Prosecutor's Office in 1947 stated:

“The victims first had to - […] - take off their overalls and sit on the edge of a pit that had already been dug in the open field near the slaughterhouse; [...]; then they were shot, some of them perhaps also killed [...] "

Mainly responsible for the massacre are the local Gestapo leader Franz Podezin , who evaded justice by escaping - he was last seen alive in South Africa in 1963 - and the estate manager Hans Joachim Oldenburg. A total of ten people are said to have been involved in the murder.

In the post-war period, a process was opened that brought few results. Two witnesses were murdered during the trial; however, these cases could never be resolved. It is therefore impossible to prove whether the murders were related to the massacre or whether there were other disputes. The files of the people's court proceedings "Rechnitz I", "Rechnitz II" and "Rechnitz III" are now kept in the Vienna City and State Archives.

Search for the victims

In the 1960s, 18 bodies were found by chance and buried in the Jewish cemetery in Graz .

The remains of the roughly 200 murdered slave laborers are still being searched for. One suspects the scene of the crime at Kreuzstadl , today only the ruins of a former homestead. Despite intensive searches and excavations in the years 1966 to 1969, 1993, 2017 and 2019, the site of the mass grave could not be found.

In 2006 alleged Russian files from the post-war period and possibly existing aerial photographs were reported.

Work-up

The events around the Kreuzstadl and the long search for the mass grave in Rechnitz were portrayed in the 1994 documentary film Totschweigen (A Wall Of Silence) by Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne .

Also the piece March, which premiered on March 24, 1995 in Oberwart . The 24th by the Burgenland author Peter Wagner is about the massacre.

The Austrian historian Eva Holpfer worked on the case in 1998 in a diploma thesis.

On October 18, 2007, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung published the article “Massacre von Rechnitz” by British journalist David RL Litchfield, who had published a book about the Thyssen family.

The historian Wolfgang Benz expressed skepticism about Litchfield's thesis that the massacre was organized to entertain the party guests Margit von Batthyánys, which, however, is defended by another party.

The play “Rechnitz (Der Würgeengel)” by the Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek , which premiered on November 28, 2008 in the Münchner Kammerspiele , deals with the events surrounding the massacre , with reference to the film Der Würgeengel by Luis Buñuel . On June 3, 2009, the play received the Mülheim Dramatists' Prize for the best new German-language play of the 2008/2009 theater season.

On December 12, 2009, Das Magazin published an article by Sacha Batthyany , a great-nephew of Margit Batthyány-Thyssen, under the title A Terrible Secret . According to his research, there is no evidence or witness that his great-aunt was personally involved in the shooting of the Jews; however, she knew about the massacre, she covered the perpetrators or helped them to escape. On the occasion of the 70th return of the Rechnitz massacre in 2015, Timo Novotny and Alfred Weidinger produced the documentary “Árpad and Géza”.

On February 6, 2016 Das Magazin published under the title And what does that have to do with me? a correspondence between Sacha Batthyany and a colleague regarding the book Batthyany wrote about what happened. The book with the same title as the published correspondence was published in February 2016.

Director Amichai Greenberg processed the massacre in the feature film The Testament (2017).

Kreuzstadl Memorial

Kreuzstadl west side (2009)

Since the beginning of the 1990s, the Rechnitz refugee and memorial initiative RE.FUGIUS (based on the Latin word refugium for place of refuge), which was founded in 1991, has been trying to preserve the Kreuzstadl as a memorial for all victims of the south-east wall construction .

The Kreuzstadl was bought by Marietta Torberg , the sculptor Karl Prantl and David Axmann in 1993 due to a fundraising campaign and handed over to the Federal Association of Jewish Religious Communities . The ruins of the Kreuzstadl have been designed as a memorial, on which a memorial event is held every year on Palm Sunday. In 2019, the celebration was held on March 24th. The President of the State Parliament, Verena Dunst, as well as the Ambassador of Hungary Andor Nagy and the Ambassador of Israel Talya Lador-Fresher took part.

An open-air museum was opened next to the Kreuzstadl on March 25, 2012 - five steles with videos in front of a curved wall with texts in German, English and Hungarian. One area is still free and should not be designed until the grave has been found.

literature

  • Walter Manoschek (ed.): The case of Rechnitz. The massacre of Jews in March 1945. With a text by Elfriede Jelinek : “In Doubt”. Braumüller, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-7003-1714-2 , pp. 1–4.
    • Review: Veronika Seyr: The case of Rechnitz. In: Zwischenwelt. Vol. 27, No. 1-2, August 2010, ISSN  1606-4321 , p. 81 f. Seyr emphasizes from the book the idea that the massacre was a targeted action in the context of similar end-phase crimes across Austria, whose commanders managed to remain undercover to this day and whose detection is still a task today.
  • Hellmut Butterweck : The silence of Rechnitz - final phase crimes. In: Hellmut Butterweck: Condemned and pardoned. Austria and its Nazi criminals. Czernin, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-7076-0126-9 , pp. 210-216.
  • Sacha Batthyany : And what does that have to do with me? A crime in March 1945 - the story of my family. Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-462-04831-5 (literary treatment of a family history).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Marco Schicker: The murder festival at Batthyány Castle. Extended excavations by the University of Vienna and the Austrian Ministry of the Interior are supposed to reveal the graves of around 180 murdered Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in Rechnitz in southern Burgenland. In: wienerlloyd.com. Wiener Lloyd , December 2006, archived from the original on November 14, 2011 ; accessed on July 17, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Andreas Farkas: … forgetting and remembering. Rechnitz Castle. In: fm4.orf.at. ORF , March 13, 2008, archived from the original on November 19, 2015 ; accessed on July 17, 2018 .
  3. ↑ a b Mass grave in Rechnitz: geographers from the University of Vienna provide database for new searches. Press release. In: univie.ac.at. University of Vienna , October 12, 2006, accessed on July 17, 2018 (scientific basis for the search for the mass grave in Rechnitz).
  4. ↑ The cook saw the murderers dance. In: FAZ . October 26, 2007, p. 46 (the documentary filmmaker Eduard Erne in an interview with Sandra Kegel ).
  5. ↑ a b Eva Holpfer: Il massacro di Rechnitz. In: Storia e Documenti. No. 6, semestrale dell'Istituto Storico della Resistenza e dell'Età Contemporanea di Parma, Numero doppio 2001, pp 205-221 ( nachkriegsjustiz.at [accessed on July 17, 2018]).
  6. ↑ Vg 2f Vr 2832/45
  7. ↑ Vg 11d Vr 190/48
  8. ↑ Vg 8e Vr 70/54
  9. ↑ a b Robert Misik : Dialectic of Silence. In: the daily newspaper . October 30, 2007 ( taz.de [accessed July 17, 2018]).
  10. ↑ APA red: After excavations. Rechnitzer Kreuzstadl: No trace of Nazi victims. During the extensive excavations near the Kreuzstadl in Rechnitz (Oberwart district), no remains of the victims of a massacre committed by the Nazis in 1945 were found. In: Burgenland People's Newspaper . December 7, 2017. Retrieved December 7, 2017 .
  11. ↑ Another excavation for Nazi victims in Rechnitz. In: burgenland.orf.at . March 6, 2019, accessed March 26, 2019 .
  12. ↑ Do Russian files shed light on the darkness? In: Burgenland People's Newspaper. No. 8, 2006 ( wk2.heimat.eu [accessed July 17, 2018]).
  13. ↑ Michael Pecovicz: Has hobby historian found the solution? In: Burgenland People's Newspaper. No. 9, 2006 ( wk2.heimat.eu [accessed July 17, 2018]).
  14. ^ Massacre von Rechnitz in the Internet Movie Database (English).
  15. ↑ Peter Wagner: March. The 24th In: peterwagner.at. Peter Wagner, September 28, 2007, archived from the original on October 14, 2007 ; accessed on July 17, 2018 .
  16. ^ Eva Holpfer: How the Burgenland Postwar Society dealt with Nazi crimes up to 1955. Using the example of the people's court trials because of the massacres of Deutschschützen and Rechnitz. Diploma thesis at the Institute for Political Science of the University of Vienna, Prof. Dr. Emmerich Tálos , 1998 ( summary ).
  17. ^ David RL Litchfield: Rechitz massacre. The hostess of hell. In: FAZ . October 18, 2007, p. 37.
  18. ↑ Interview with David RL Litchfield. In: the daily newspaper, November 8, 2007 ( taz.de [accessed on July 17, 2018]).
  19. ^ David RL Litchfield: The Thyssen Art Macabre. Quartet Books, London 2006, ISBN 0-7043-7119-7 .
  20. ^ Karl Pfeifer : Dead silence. In: jungle.world . 2007/45, November 8, 2007; accessed on July 17, 2018.
  21. ↑ Volker Ullrich : The murder of Prednitz. In: The time . 44/2007.
  22. ↑ Loud “Whispers and hearsay”. Benz: The massacre of Jews as a party pleasure is an invention. Deutschlandfunk , October 18, 2007 ( Wolfgang Benz in an interview with Christoph Schmitz; deutschlandfunk.de [accessed July 17, 2018]).
  23. ↑ “Rolling up the whole story again.” Simon Wiesenthal Center Jerusalem: The massacre of Jews in Rechnitz was a party pleasure. In: Deutschlandfunk. October 19, 2007 ( deutschlandfunk.de [accessed July 17, 2018]).
  24. ↑ Silvia Stammen: Mercilessly cheerful. Grandiose artistic complicity: Jossi Wieler stages Elfriede Jelinek's messenger piece “Rechnitz (The Choking Angel)”. In: The time . No. 50/2008.
  25. ↑ Sacha Batthyany: A Terrible Secret. Shortly before the end of the war, 180 Jews were murdered during a festival in the Austrian village of Rechnitz. Margit Batthyány-Thyssen, the author's great-aunt, was the hostess. A family story. In: dasmagazin.ch. The magazine , December 11, 2009, archived from the original on November 23, 2010 ; accessed on July 17, 2018 .
  26. ↑ Peter Angerer : The sealed memory. In: tt.com. Tiroler Tageszeitung , June 6, 2018, accessed on March 5, 2020.
  27. ↑ "Open Air Museum" in memory. In: burgenland.orf.at. October 11, 2011, accessed May 12, 2013.
  28. ^ Lecture by Walter Reise, April 4, 2017, Graz-Lieben, NMS Dr. Renner, event: Commemoration 1945–2017.
  29. ^ Commemoration for all victims of the south-east wall construction. Opening of the Kreuzstadl Museum. In: döw.at. Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance , March 25, 2012, archived from the original on July 30, 2013 ; accessed on July 17, 2018 .
  30. ↑ Sandra Kegel: The one who danced with the murderers. In: FAZ.net, April 2, 2016, accessed on July 17, 2018 (review).

Coordinates: 47 ° 18 '17.4 "  N , 16 ° 26' 30.7"  E