Walter Gröger

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Walter Gröger (born June 27, 1922 † March 16, 1945)
Walter Gröger

Walter Gröger (born June 27, 1922 in Mohrau , Neisse district , province of Silesia in what was then the German Reich ; † March 16, 1945 in Oslo , Norway ) was a sailor in the German Navy during the Second World War .

In 1943 he tried to escape from any further participation in the hostilities, was arrested and initially to eight years in prison convicted. A few months before the end of the war, the verdict on the accusation of desertion abroad was converted into a death sentence and Gröger was then shot . Hans Filbinger , the then naval staff judge of the Nazi regime , made the application . In the course of the Filbinger affair in 1978, the poet Rolf Hochhuth discovered and published the case of Walter Gröger.

Life

Less than two months after Groeger's execution , the Germans (here Major Josef Nichterlein and his adjutant Hauptmann Hamel) handed over the Akershus fortress , where Groeger was executed, to Ensign Terje Rollem of the Norwegian resistance movement Milorg .

Walter Gröger was the son of a road attendant . After completing an apprenticeship as a locksmith in 1940, he volunteered for the Navy at the age of 17. He took part in the Norwegian campaign on the battleship Gneisenau , lay briefly in Kiel and was then deployed in the Leningrad blockade in 1941/42 .

At the end of October 1943 he was transferred to Sopnis near Narvik . He traveled by ship to Oslo and learned there that his onward transport would not begin for about ten days. Shortly before the end of this period, he met Marie Severinsen-Lindgren, then 34 years old. She worked as a nursing assistant in a hospital of the Todt Organization . Gröger hid with her for four weeks and planned to flee with her to neutral Sweden . However, he was arrested by the Secret Field Police (GFP) and sentenced on March 14, 1944 by a naval court martial to eight years ' imprisonment and loss of military standing. Despite 14 military criminal records, the court had awarded him a “good core” because he had got his uniform and a medal and apparently wanted to return to the troops.

Admiral General Otto Schniewind overturned the sentence on June 1, 1944, "because the death penalty should have been recognized". The then 31-year-old prosecutor Hans Filbinger then applied for the death penalty for “weaknesses in character” and Gröger's military criminal record on the basis of a “Führer Guideline” from 1940. This demanded the death penalty “in general as appropriate when fleeing or attempting to escape abroad”. Naval Chief Justice Adolf Harms sentenced Gröger to death on January 22, 1945 as the “only appropriate atonement”. On February 27, 1945, the High Command of the Navy in Berlin confirmed the death sentence and rejected the pardon from Gröger's defense attorney Werner Schön.

On March 15, 1945 Filbinger, who had been transferred to Oslo in December 1944, informed Gröger of the rejection of the pardon on behalf of the judge . He shortened the usual one-day deadline for execution to a few hours. Gröger was shot dead in Akershus Fortress at 4:02 p.m. on the same day . Filbinger was present and, as the highest officer, gave the order to shoot. According to Filbinger's protocol, the 22-year-old Gröger died at 4:04 p.m.

reception

It was only through research by Rolf Hochhuth that the fate of Groeger and the circumstances of his execution in the Federal Republic became known. He also informed the mother Anna Gröger and the friend Marie Severinsen-Lindgren about it for the first time. It was the first known death sentence that Hans Filbinger (CDU), then Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg and President of the German Federal Council , had applied for or passed as a naval judge during the Nazi era. After Filbinger's further death sentence applications became known, which he had previously denied, he resigned as Prime Minister in 1978. He denied all his life that he could have averted the death sentence for Gröger, and never apologized to Gröger's relatives. However, later research has shown that alternatives existed in comparable cases. According to today's assessment of historians, Filbinger certainly had discretion in order to avoid the death penalty for Gröger. He did not use it because he was convinced that it was justified.

Hochhuth processed Filbinger's handling of the criticism of his 1979 death sentence in his play Juristen . The songwriter Walter Mossmann published the ballad of the dead sailor Walter Gröger on his album spring start in 1979 .

Gröger was legally rehabilitated in 2002 as part of the law to repeal unjust judgments in the criminal justice system , which overturned all judgments of the military courts of the Nazi era against deserters of the Wehrmacht .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert Probst (Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 11, 2010): Hans Filbinger and the military justice
  2. ^ A b Süddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010: Filbinger and the Gröger case: Not a word of regret
  3. ↑ Thomas Rothschild: Songwriter: 23 portraits. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1980, p. 132
  4. ^ Frankfurter Rundschau, September 8, 2009: Bundestag rehabilitates "war traitors" ( Memento of September 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Groeger, Walter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German sailor and victim of the Nazi justice system
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1922
PLACE OF BIRTH Mohrau , Neisse district
DATE OF DEATH March 16, 1945
Place of death Oslo