Southeast wall
The defensive positions that the Wehrmacht High Command planned or built towards the end of the Second World War on the south-eastern border of the German Reich against the advancing units of the Red Army were designated as the south-east wall or Reichsschutzstellung .
development
After the defense in Hungary became more and more difficult, a system of positions was to be built from the White Carpathians to the River Drava . This position system was supposed to stop the troops of the Red Army , if they broke through the Susanne position upstream in Slovakia and Hungary . The staggered position system consisted of an A and a B line of defense. The positions mostly consisted of anti-tank trenches, each four meters wide and four meters deep, which had been dug with picks and shovels, as well as rear grenade launcher positions . Most of the time, the positions could only be expanded with wood, as the necessary concrete was usually no longer available in sufficient quantities at this point. The construction of the positions aimed in particular at a systematic exploitation of natural terrain obstacles (hills, mountains, etc.) in order to repel attacks by Soviet armored troops. The strategic idea for the exploitation of natural terrain obstacles was based on the fact that it represented one of the few remaining possibilities to stop a military opponent who was far superior in terms of personnel and material with the few remaining defensive forces. The opponent was to be forced out of the war of movement into a war of positions in a terrain that was unfavorable for him.
The positioning system began at the Jablunka Pass , led over the fortress sector of Sillein , then along the Waag river to south of Trenčín . From there it followed the course of the Little Carpathians to the fortress sector of Pressburg .
This Slovak section of the south-east wall was based on a German line of defense planned and partially realized from 1939. The establishment of German military installations along this line of defense had already been agreed in the German-Slovak Protection Zone Statute in August 1939. However, the outbreak of World War II at the end of 1939 meant that only a small part of the planned military facilities was actually built. In the southern Austrian section, all defensive positions had to be completely redesigned and built. This section begins at Pressburg an der Donau and follows the course of the ridge line to Lake Neusiedl . It follows this on the heights on the west bank of the lake to the southeast of Ödenburg . From here the line of defense extends over the hills east of Güns to the Pinkatal , from there it extends to the area east of Radkersburg and then roughly follows the course of the Lower Styria border (today the Slovenian / Croatian border) to the Drau river. The Drau formed the southern end point of the southeast wall.
Volkssturm battalions were often used to fill the positions , as there was a lack of fully trained and equipped Wehrmacht units to fully fill the positions. Due to its poor state of development and its quantitative and qualitative low occupation with defensive forces, the southeast wall had only a minor influence on the course of the fighting. After the Red Army was victorious in the Battle of Budapest in February 1945 and was able to repel the subsequent German Balaton offensive, it succeeded in advancing to the southeast wall and penetrating it relatively quickly in several places as part of the preparations for the Battle of Vienna .
An essential factor for the low effectiveness of the south-east wall was that the fortress section commands that were set up along the wall were only loosely connected with the troops of the field army. As a result, the expanded positions remained on numerous, militarily important sections, such as B. in the Raab Valley and south of it, unknown to the troop leaders and were therefore not occupied. In the Pinkatal, on the other hand, the south-east wall was able to temporarily halt the advance of the Red Army, in Lower Styria even until the end of the war.
Building conditions
A total of 300,000 people were involved in the construction of the wall. In addition to members of the Hitler Youth , so-called Eastern workers and the local population, 30,000 Hungarian Jews were forced to work as forced laborers to build the south-east wall from November 1944 . Inhuman treatment, malnutrition and epidemics resulted in the death of 33,000 workers from illness, exhaustion or being shot by the guards. People who had become unable to work were often shot in groups, including Antal Szerb . For the population, the plugging of food was with the classification as a public enemy and prison sentences under threat. A short time later, the survivors had to start the death march to Mauthausen concentration camp .
In the Oberwart district alone , several hundred Jewish forced laborers were shot in the Rechnitz and Deutsch Schützen massacres .
The massacres in Jennersdorf and Krottendorf near Neuhaus , which also killed more than 100 people , are less known to the public .
Museum reception
A spherical bunker from the south-east wall is exhibited in the Vienna Army History Museum . These bunkers were produced in large numbers using a simple concrete casting process. Due to the lack of raw materials at the end of the war, very little cement was used in these bunkers.
literature
- Leopold Banny: shield in the east. The southeast wall between the Danube and Lower Styria in 1944/45. Self-published, Lackenbach 1985, OBV .
- Helmut M. Wartlik: The labor camp for Hungarian Jews in Engerau (December 3, 1944 to March 29, 1945) as part of the south-east wall construction from the perspective of the trials before the Vienna People's Court 1945–1955. Thesis. University of Vienna, Vienna 2008. - Full text online (PDF; 12 MB) .
- Hermann Rafetseder: The fate of the Nazi forced labor. Findings on manifestations of the oppression and on the Nazi camp system from the work of the Austrian Reconciliation Fund. A documentation on behalf of the Future Fund of the Republic of Austria. Bremen 2014, 706 pp., ISBN 978-3-944690-28-5 ; Corrected print version of a text that remained unpublished in 2007 for data protection reasons, online (PDF) in the forum OoeGeschichte.at; therein on the construction of the south-east wall, especially on pp. 368–374, but also in other places
Individual evidence
- ↑ Entry on Reich protection status in the Austria Forum (in the AEIOU Austria Lexicon )
- ^ Gerhard Pferschy / Peter Krenn: The Styria - bridge and bulwark. Steirische Landesausstellung 1986. (= publications of the Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv, vol. 16) Graz 1986 p. 494f.
- ↑ Michael Achenbach, Dieter Szorger: The deployment of Hungarian Jews on the southeast wall in the Lower Danube section 1944/45. Thesis. University of Vienna, Vienna 1997, OBV .
- ^ Eleonore Lappin-Eppel: Special camp for Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers. In: Wolfgang Benz , Barbara Distel (eds.): The place of terror . History of the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Volume 9: Labor education camps, ghettos, youth protection camps, police detention camps, special camps, gypsy camps, forced labor camps. CH Beck, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-406-57238-8 , pp. 218-247. - Text in parts online .
- ↑ Gregor Holzinger (Red.), Jakob Perschy, Dieter Szorger: The drama Südostwall using the example of Rechnitz. Dates, deeds, facts, consequences. Burgenland Research, Volume 98, ZDB -ID 503890-x . Office of the Provincial Government of Burgenland (Department 7 - Culture, Science and Archives, Main Section for the Provincial Archives and Provincial Library), Eisenstadt 2009, ISBN 978-3-901517-59-4 . - Table of contents online (PDF; 50 KB) .
- ↑ Harald Strassl, Wolfgang Vosko: The fate of Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers using the example of the south-east wall construction in 1944/45 in the Oberwart district. With special consideration of the mass crimes of Rechnitz and German riflemen. Thesis. University of Vienna, Vienna 1999, OBV .
- ^ Südostwall section Südburgenland: The Jennersdorf massacre , website regiowiki.at, accessed on February 15, 2018
- ↑ Südostwall section Südburgenland: The Krottendorf Massacre (Neuhaus am Klausenbach) , website regiowiki.at, accessed on February 15, 2018
- ^ Army History Museum / Military History Institute (ed.): The Army History Museum in the Vienna Arsenal . Verlag Militaria , Vienna 2016, ISBN 978-3-902551-69-6 , p. 146
Web links
Coordinates: 47 ° 17 ′ 0 ″ N , 16 ° 12 ′ 0 ″ E