Maximilian Grabner

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Guarded by two police officers, Grabner was questioned by the head of the Vienna State Police, Heinrich Dürmayer (seated on the left) in September 1945

Maximilian Grabner , also Max Grabner (born October 2, 1905 in Vienna , Austria-Hungary , † January 24, 1948 in Krakow ) was an Austrian SS-Untersturmführer and war criminal who was the head of the political department in Auschwitz . After the end of the Nazi regime , he was because of his responsibility for numerous Nazi Crimes in Auschwitz Trial sentenced to death and executed.

Early years

Grabner had a simple school education and worked as a lumberjack in the 1920s . After a short police training, he was accepted into the Austrian police from 1930 and worked first as a police officer and later as a criminal investigator at the police headquarters in Vienna. Grabner became a member of the NSDAP as early as August 1932 ( membership number 1.214.137). After the " Anschluss of Austria " to the German Reich in 1938, Grabner joined the SS at the beginning of September 1938 and rose there up to SS-Untersturmführer .

In Auschwitz concentration camp

After the beginning of the Second World War , Grabner worked from November 1939 in Katowice, annexed by the German Reich , as a criminal secretary at the State Police Office. At the end of May 1940 he became head of the political department in the newly established Auschwitz concentration camp, as this was in the area of ​​his police district. His position in the camp hierarchy was ambivalent because on the one hand he had to obey the disciplinary and administrative orders of the camp commandant , but on the other hand he was only subordinate to his higher-level Gestapo offices in the exercise of his official duties . His main tasks included fighting the camp resistance movement, preventing escapes and contact with the outside world, preparing and managing prisoner files and correspondence with the Gestapo, the criminal police and the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). In this role Grabner was feared as the “Lord God of Auschwitz”; he was considered arrogant, arbitrary and brutal. In the presence of his superior, the head of the Gestapo in Kattowitz Rudolf Mildner , he took part in the notorious negotiations of the police and court martial in Auschwitz. Grabner's employees, including Wilhelm Boger , carried out the " intensified interrogations " he had ordered with suspected inmates, who were systematically tortured and then imprisoned in the bunker in Block 11 . Together with the head of the protective custody camp , he carried out so-called “bunker emptying”, during which inmates in the courtyard between blocks 10 and 11 were randomly shot on the so-called black wall .

In September 1942 he was awarded the War Merit Cross, Second Class with Swords . This award suggests participation in executions. According to Filip Müller, a survivor of Auschwitz, and a member of the Political Department, Pery Broad , he gave speeches to reassure Jews at the old crematorium in the main camp in front of Jews destined for gassing . He urged people to undress for bathing so that they could then grab food and take up work in the camp.

On November 30, 1943, Grabner was released from his position as head of the Political Department in Auschwitz and arrested. His successor in this post was then SS-Untersturmführer Hans Schurz . Grabner, like other concentration camp personnel, was targeted by SS judge Konrad Morgen . Morgen investigated crime and corruption in the concentration camps and brought these criminal offenses to bear. After several months in prison, the trial against Grabner was opened before the SS and Police Court in Weimar on October 13, 1944. Grabner was accused of arbitrarily shooting 2,000 prisoners for whom no execution orders from the RSHA were available. In addition, Grabner, whose job as head of the Political Department also consisted of fighting theft and corruption, is said to have enriched himself to a considerable extent in the effects of prisoners . The Prosecutor requested a prison sentence of twelve years for aggravated theft and murder in at least 2,000 cases. However, the head of the Gestapo Heinrich Müller refused to cooperate in clarifying the matter, so the process was postponed and never concluded. Then he came back to the Gestapo in Katowice and finally to Breslau . Since investigations in this regard were started again, Grabner was supposed to report to the Reich Criminal Police Office (RKPA) in Berlin towards the end of the war with an accompanying officer , but this no longer happened.

After the end of the war

After the war, Grabner emerged from a farmer as a servant disguised near Vienna under and was arrested on August 4, 1945 during the fieldwork in Soviet prison custody in the police prison Vienna. The arrest was carried out by a department for investigating war criminals at the Vienna Police Department. The head of this department, the lawyer Heinrich Dürmayer , had been a prisoner in the Flossenbürg , Auschwitz and Mauthausen concentration camps for many years . Dürmayer subjected Grabner to a police interrogation at the beginning of September 1945, which was also shown in the newsreel .

After his arrest, the Auschwitz survivor Hermann Langbein perceived Grabner as a wailing man and a coward. Grabner testified in custody in 1946: “I only participated in the murder of 3 million people out of consideration for my family. I was never an anti-Semite . ”In January 1947, during a cell check, breakout materials were found that indicated that Grabner was preparing to escape. After being extradited to Poland on July 12, 1947, Grabner was sentenced to death in the Kraków Auschwitz Trial before the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland on December 22, 1947 . The sentence was carried out by hanging on January 24, 1948 in Montelupich Prison in Kraków .

literature

  • Ernst Klee : Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. A dictionary of persons . S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2013, ISBN 978-3-10-039333-3 .
  • Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 .
  • Hermann Langbein : People in Auschwitz. Frankfurt am Main, Berlin Vienna, Ullstein-Verlag, 1980, ISBN 3-548-33014-2 .
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. Oswiecim 1998, ISBN 83-85047-35-2 .
  • Wacław Długoborski , Franciszek Piper (eds.): Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studies on the history of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. Verlag Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau, Oswiecim 1999, 5 volumes: I. Construction and structure of the camp. II. The prisoners - conditions of existence, work and death. III. Destruction. IV. Resistance. V. Epilog., ISBN 83-85047-76-X .
  • Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. Oswiecim 1998, ISBN 83-85047-35-2 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 198.
  2. ↑ a b c Aleksander Lasik: The organizational structure of KL Auschwitz , in: Aleksander Lasik, Franciszek Piper, Piotr Setkiewicz, Irena Strzelecka: Auschwitz 1940-1945. Studies on the history of the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp. , Volume I: Construction and structure of the camp , Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum , Oświęcim 1999, p. 200f.
  3. ^ Norbert Frei (ed.): Location and command office orders of the Auschwitz concentration camp 1940-1945 , Munich 2000, ISBN 978-3-598-24030-0 . P. 172.
  4. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices and victims and what became of them. An encyclopedia of persons , Frankfurt am Main 2013, p. 146f.
  5. ^ Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz ; Frankfurt am Main, 1980; P. 373f
  6. ↑ Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider , adopted by the Moscow conference on November 1, 1943 "Declaration on Responsibility of Hitlerites for Committed Atrocities" - Genesis, the context, impact and significance , Vienna 2003
  7. ^ Hermann Langbein: People in Auschwitz ; Frankfurt am Main, 1980; P. 373f
  8. ↑ Maximilian Grabner's statement in custody in 1946. Quoted in: Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich: Who was what before and after 1945 . Frankfurt am Main 2007.
  9. ↑ Maximilian Grabner at www.doew.braintrust.at
personal data
SURNAME Grabner, Maximilian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Grabner, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian SS-Untersturmführer and head of the political department in Auschwitz
DATE OF BIRTH October 2, 1905
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH January 24, 1948
Place of death Krakow