Walter Dejaco

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Walter Dejaco (born June 19, 1909 in Mühlau near Innsbruck ; † January 9, 1978 in Reutte , Tyrol ) was an Austrian architect who worked in the Auschwitz concentration camp as a site manager for the central site management of the Waffen SS and Auschwitz police .

Early years

Dejaco was the son of a postal worker. He attended elementary school and later secondary school. After completing his school career, he studied at a construction school in Innsbruck and completed his training as a qualified architect in 1930. Due to the global economic crisis , after two years of employment with a construction company and later an architect from 1932 onwards, he was unable to work in the profession he had learned and earned his living as a mountain guide, ski instructor and draftsman. In July 1933 Dejaco joined the SS , which was illegal in Austria, and was active in Sturmbann 2 of the 87th SS Standard (Tyrol-Vorarlberg). Due to illegal National Socialist activities for the NSDAP , he was charged in 1934 with secret bundling. Dejaco was eventually sentenced to five months in prison. After his release from prison, he lived in France and Italy, as he spoke the local language. From the summer of 1937 he took up residence in Germany. He earned his living as a ski and sports instructor during his stays abroad. After the " Anschluss of Austria " to the National Socialist German Reich in March 1938, he returned to Innsbruck and worked again as an architect. At that time he became a regular member of the NSDAP ( membership number 6,256,697). He had been married to Herta Elsler (* 1912) since May 1939.

Second World War

After the beginning of the Second World War , Dejaco reported in November 1939 for military service with the Waffen-SS and was stationed in Krakow with the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standard . From June 6, 1940, Dejaco was a member of the SS Auschwitz Construction Office. From November 1941 he headed the planning department there. In the meantime, an SS and police court sentenced Dejaco to a three-month prison term for beating a conductor who had asked for a train door to be closed on a return trip from Katowice to Auschwitz. The Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler personally reduced Dejaco's sentence and shortly afterwards he was promoted to special leader of the Waffen SS. As construction manager, Dejaco played a key role in the planning, construction and maintenance of the gas chambers and crematoria of the Auschwitz concentration camp . The architect was described by the head of SS construction, Hans Kammler, in a personnel report from November 1941 as a “qualified construction specialist”.

On September 16, 1942, Dejaco drove to the Kulmhof extermination camp with camp commandant Rudolf Höß and Franz Hößler to study the methods of clearing up mass graves tried and tested by SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel . The background to this trip was the impending contamination of the groundwater in Auschwitz with corpse poison , as tens of thousands of bodies from the Holocaust victims were buried in mass graves in the vicinity of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp . Blobel recommended to his visitors a layer of corpses and alternately petrol-soaked wood on a railroad rail grate, in order to then burn them. Dejaco made records of this and had a corresponding construction built in Auschwitz based on it. The mass graves there were earthed by concentration camp prisoners and the corpses burned.

In 1943/44 Dejaco was the deputy head of the construction management in Auschwitz, now referred to as the central construction management of the Waffen SS and Auschwitz police . From mid-May 1944 he attended a three-month special course in the field of construction at the SS leadership school of the Arolsen Business Administration Service . He was then sent back to Auschwitz, where he was deployed until January 1945. Dejaco rose in August 1944 to SS-Obersturmführer (SS-Nr. 295.135) of the reserve in the Waffen-SS , his highest achieved SS rank.

post war period

After the end of the war Dejaco was in Soviet captivity , from which he was released in 1949/50. He then headed a small business with around 15 employees as a master builder in Reutte . According to the Auschwitz survivor Rudolf Vrba , Dejaco's company is said to have built the new rectory in Reutte, for which the Innsbruck bishop is said to have thanked him warmly. This building is the Paulusheim, built by Dejaco from 1959 to 1961 and named after Bishop Paulus Rusch , who was behind this project for the Franciscan monastery in Reutte .

Hermann Langbein , a survivor of Auschwitz , reported members of the central construction management of the Waffen-SS and Police Auschwitz Dejaco and Fritz Ertl in 1961 for their work with the Auschwitz construction management. In April 1962, Dejaco was first questioned by an examining magistrate about the accusations; the proceedings themselves were not continued until June 1971.

The trial against Dejaco and Ertl began on January 18, 1972, as the first Auschwitz trial in Austria before the jury court of the Vienna Regional Court . The subject of the proceedings was their participation in the Holocaust through "planning, construction and maintenance of the gas chambers and crematoria of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp". Dejaco was also accused of having shot or slain twelve concentration camp prisoners between 1940 and 1942.

"From the outset, their construction activities were geared towards the short-term vegetation of the prisoners, and represented a mockery of the elementary principles of construction technology. That the accused were very well aware that the barracks they had built without windows and adequate ventilation, lying close to one another, did not offer sufficient living space for people, you can see from their efforts to improve the barracks intended for the watchdogs and cows by appropriate ventilation in order to ensure that the animals are kept healthy. "

- From the indictment of June 18, 1971 against Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl before the Vienna Regional Court

The trial against Dejaco and Ertl ended on March 10, 1972 with an acquittal, since Ertl and Dejaco were not the “intellectual authors” of the gas chambers. In the media, Dejaco and Ertl were dubbed “builders of mass murder ”. However, the trial only played a minor role in the media and met with little audience interest.

literature

  • Niels Gutschow: mania for order. Architects plan in the "Germanized East" 1939–1945. Gütersloh 2001, ISBN 3-7643-6390-8 .
  • 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 .
  • Hans Schafranek : An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014 (= yearbook 2014), pp. 79–105. [www.doew.at/cms/download/b1c3n/jb2014_schafranek.pdf (pdf)]

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Death register of the Reutte registry office No. 9/1978.
  2. ^ A b Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 94.
  3. ↑ a b c d Roland Stimpel: Architects in Auschwitz. Low point in architectural history . In: Deutsches Architektenblatt, 2011.
  4. ^ A b Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 95.
  5. ↑ a b c Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons. Frankfurt / M. 2013, p. 88f.
  6. ↑ a b c d e Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS Totenkopf Standard (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 96.
  7. ^ Niels Gutschow: Ordnungswahn. Architects plan in the "Germanized East" 1939–1945. Gütersloh 2001, p. 78.
  8. ↑ Records of Rudolf Höß , in: Staatliches Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau (ed.): Auschwitz in the eyes of the SS. Oswiecim 1998, pp. 79f.
  9. ↑ Paulusheim celebrated its anniversary on meinviertel.at (accessed on August 13, 2018)
  10. ↑ Holocaust and war crimes in court. Auschwitz concentration camp: The Austrians were the worst on www.orf.at
  11. ^ Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 96f.
  12. ↑ Justice and Remembrance , Edition 10/2005, Vienna 2005, p. 23. (PDF; 867 kB)
  13. ^ A b Hans Schafranek: An unknown group of Nazi perpetrators: Biographical sketches of Austrian members of the 8th SS-Totenkopf-Standarte (1939–1941) . In: Documentation archive of the Austrian resistance (ed.): Täter. Austrian Actors in National Socialism , Vienna 2014, p. 97.
  14. ^ Austrian Auschwitz Trials - Trial against Walter Dejaco and Fritz Ertl (January 18 - March 10, 1972)
  15. ↑ Quoted in: Justice and Remembrance, Edition 10/2005, Vienna 2005, p. 24.
  16. ^ Ernst Klee: Auschwitz. Perpetrators, accomplices, victims and what became of them. Lexicon of persons. Frankfurt / M. 2013, p. 89, p. 110.
  17. ↑ Justice and Remembrance , Edition 12/2006, Vienna 2006, p. 20. (PDF; 712 kB)
  18. ^ Press echo of the trial against Walter DEJACO and Fritz ERTL. The reporting of selected newspapers on the 1st Vienna Auschwitz Trial (1972) on http://www.nachkriegsjustiz.at
personal data
SURNAME Dejaco, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian architect
DATE OF BIRTH June 19, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Mühlau (Innsbruck)
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1978
Place of death Reutte