Wilfried Krallert

Wilfried Krallert (born January 23, 1912 in Vienna , † March 16, 1969 in Vienna) was an Austrian geographer and historian . As a staunch National Socialist , he played a key role in the planning and implementation of ethnic cleansing in Southeastern and Eastern Europe during the Second World War and also worked as a secret service agent after the end of the war.

life and career

Education

Krallert was the son of a government official. After graduating from high school in 1930, he began studying history, geography and art history at the University of Vienna . In 1933 he was accepted into the Institute for Austrian Historical Research and received his doctorate in 1935 under Hans Hirsch . Between 1936 and 1938 he was employed by the Monumenta Germaniae Historica , for which he obtained editions of the documents of Conrad IV and Frederick II . In 1937 he moved to the Southeast German Research Association in Vienna as secretary . Later he headed their publication office (P-position).

Political commitment

Even as a teenager, Krallert was involved in the extreme right-wing political camp. In 1928 he built the Viennese cell of the German Association of Middle Schools (DMB), a school organization monitored by the SA . Between 1930 and 1932 he was a member of the Deutsche Wehr and the Tannenbergbund Erich Ludendorff and became regional director Vienna of the DMB. In April 1933 he joined the NSDAP (membership number 1.529.315) and a few months later began to get involved in the newly founded “Mittelstandarte Wien”, since April “SS-Standarte 89” (membership number in SS 310.323).

Actually, Krallert was supposed to take part in the National Socialist July coup against the corporate state under Engelbert Dollfuss in 1934 as an official NSDAP historian . Due to a misunderstanding, it did not come to that. Krallert was promoted to Hauptscharführer . He organized secret correspondence with the National Socialists interned in the Wöllersdorf detention center . At the same time he was accepted into the security service of the Reichsführer SS (SD) as a full-time employee.

Agent for the SD and the RSHA as well as employees in the SS Race and Settlement Main Office

For the SD and later for the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Krallert traveled camouflaged with research assignments between 1934 and 1941 to south-eastern Europe. From 1938 on he called himself "Fritz Bergmann". After the " Anschluss of Austria " he became a member of the Vienna Blockstelle and in spring 1939 of Office VI of the RSHA. The RSHA used Krallert's contacts during the negotiations between Hungary and Romania in the run-up to the Second Vienna Award in 1940.

From 1940 Krallert also worked for the Race and Settlement Main Office. There he worked in the Vienna office of the Volksdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft .

Member of the Künsberg special command

During the Balkan campaign , Krallert, as Sonderführer "Z" and the Sonderkommando Künsberg (named after their commander Eberhard von Künsberg ) of the Foreign Office in April 1941 in Yugoslavia, confiscated maps and documents, including the unpublished data of the Yugoslav censuses of 1931. Based on these data Ethnographic maps were created by employees of the P-office and made available to the SS and the Wehrmacht . The P -stelle Vienna also participated in the planning of ethnic cleansing. Immediately after his assignment in Belgrade, Krallert advised the State Secretary of the Reich Ministry of the Interior (RMI), Wilhelm Stuckart , on negotiations with Italy on the future demarcation of borders and on questions of national politics in Yugoslavia.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union , Krallert was employed as a clerk in the "Potsdam" task force of the Künsberg special command. As in the Balkans, files and archival materials were mainly requisitioned, which were later to be processed into ethnographic ethnographic maps by the Vienna P office. Krallert initially organized the viewing and forwarding of the captured material. He then took part in forays into the Ukraine and the North Caucasus as a member of the “Nuremberg” task force, which later became the task force South A and South B (Volga) . Formally, the members were not assigned to the SD, but to the RMI. An involvement of the Sonderkommando Künsberg in the killing actions of the SS is not excluded, however, a direct involvement of Krallert in the killings has not yet been proven.

Group leader of the Office VI G of the RSHA

In 1942 Krallert was awarded the War Merit Cross 2nd Class with Swords for his missions in the Balkans and Russia .

In the late summer of 1943 Krallert took over the function of a group leader of the RSHA VI G ("Scientific-Methodical Research Service") under Walter Schellenberg , his deputy in Office VI G was Jürgen von Hehn . In doing so, he not only directed the training of young people for the foreign intelligence service, but above all the intelligence gathering and the confiscation of cultural assets and libraries for the research institutes of the RSHA. In this context, Krallert initiated, planned and implemented, for example, the looting of Jewish bookshops and second-hand bookshops in Hungary in favor of P -stelle Vienna in 1944, an action in which he not only personally, but also his wife Gertrud and his brother, SS-Untersturmführer Reinhold Krallert and SS-Obersturmführer Alfred Karasek took part.

Western secret service employees

In 1945 Krallert organized the evacuation of the P-point from Vienna to the St. Lambrecht Monastery in Styria . On May 30, 1945, he was arrested in Graz and placed in POW camp 373 in Wolfsberg in Carinthia . In contrast to the other group leaders of the RSHA, Krallert was not indicted in Nuremberg . He was not released until 1948, not least because he was extensively interrogated by the British and American secret services. He worked for the British Secret Service, but was fired in February 1951 because he was apparently selling his information elsewhere and was widely viewed as incompetent. He officially became a member of the “Keesing Archives for Current Events” in Vienna, where he headed the editorial department at the “Scientific Service Southeast Europe” until 1955. According to the files of the CIA , Krallert was also an agent of the French secret service. Since 1952 at the latest, he has also worked for the Gehlen organization and its successor organization, the Federal Intelligence Service and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution .

Southeast Research Networks

Krallert kept in close contact with other leading researchers in south-east research , most of whom were also heavily involved in the SS's "research on opponents" during National Socialism, such as Hans Koch , now head of the Eastern Europe Institute in Munich or Fritz Valjavec , who is now again head of the south-east Institute in Munich, both of which he supplied with material. Krallert supported the "Documentation of Displacement" by procuring statistical material. Krallert's wife Gertrud edited the “Southeast Europe Bibliography” with or in succession to Valjavec and in 1960 took over the management of the library of the Southeast Institute in Munich. Krallert himself became an employee of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Ost”, which later became the Austrian Institute for Eastern and Southeastern Europe in Vienna. Most recently he was the main editor of the "Documentation of the Laws and Regulations of Eastern Europe" in Vienna.

Publications

• (Ed.): Administrative map of the Southeast States. , Vienna 1931.
• (Ed.): The forgery of documents of the Weingarten monastery. 1938.
• History and method of population censuses in the Southeast, 1: Romania, with special reference to the 1930 census and its publication. In: German Archive for State and Folk Research. 1939, pp. 489-508.
• (Ed.): 41 ° / 47 ° Kolozsvár (Klausenburg). , Vienna 1941.
• (Ed.): 42 ° / 45 ° Râmnicu-Vâlcea. 2nd Edition. State and University Library Bremen, Vienna, Bremen 1941.
• (Ed.): 42 ° / 46 ° Sibiu (Hermannstadt). , Vienna 1941.
• (Ed.): 44 ° / 46 ° Kézdi-Vásárhely. , Vienna 1941.
• (Ed.): 48 ° / 46 ° Odessa. State and University Library Bremen, Vienna, Bremen 1941.
• (Ed.): Oíswiecim (part) and Neusohl. State and University Library Bremen, Vienna, Bremen 1941.
• (Ed.): Preszburg. 2nd Edition. State and University Library Bremen, Vienna, Bremen 1941.
• (Ed.): Trenčín. State and University Library Bremen, Vienna, Bremen 1941.
• (Ed.): Volkstumkarte der Slovakia; 9 sheets on a scale of 1: 200,000. , Vienna 1941.
• (Ed.): National map of Romania. Based on the results of the official Romanian population census from 1930 (Recensamântul general al populaøtiei României 1930, Vol. 2, Bucharest 1939). , Vienna 1941.
• (Ed.): National map of Hungary and Slovakia. , Vienna 1941.
• (Ed.): National map of Hungary and Yugoslavia. , Vienna 1941.
• (Ed.): National map of Hungary and Romania. , Vienna 1941.
• The regularity in the field of Soviet Russian cartographic work. A contribution to the knowledge of the Soviet war preparations in a scientific subfield. In: German Archive for State and Folk Research. 1943, pp. 12-44.
• (Ed.): Community map of Romania , Vienna 1943.
• The history of Eastern Europe in a cartographic representation. A contribution to the methodology of the historical map. In: Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe. 3, No. 4 1955, pp. 443-459.
• (Ed.): Atlas for the history of the German east settlement. Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld 1958.
• The history of Eastern Europe in a cartographic representation. A contribution to the methodology of the historical map. In: Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe. 6, No. 3 1958, pp. 334-351.
• (Ed.): Wiener Quellenhefte zur Ostkunde. Working group east. Stiasny, Graz 1958.
• On the current number of Germans in the southeast. In: Wiener Südost-Jahrbuch. 1959, pp. 7-18.
• Place names at the Arbeitsgemeinschaft Ost. In: Österreichische Osthefte. 2, No. 1 1960, p. 68.
• Urbanization in South Eastern Europe and its social and economic effects. In: Rudolf Vogel (Ed.): The Danube in its historical, economic and cultural significance. Munich 1961, pp. 278-295.
• (Hrsg.): Methodical problems of the national and language maps presented with examples of maps, over Eastern and Southeastern Europe. 1961.

literature

• Karlheinz Mack: In memoriam Wilfried Krallert. In: Communications of the Southeast Europe Society. 9, No. 1/2 1969, pp. 28-29.
• Richard Georg Plaschka: Wilfried Krallert. In: Österreichische Osthefte. 11, No. 3 1969, pp. 179-182.
• Michael Fahlbusch : In the service of Germanness in Southeast Europe. Ethnopolitical advisors as perpetrators for crimes against humanity. In: Mathias Beer and Gerhard Seewann (eds.): Southeast research in the shadow of the Third Reich. Institutions - content - people. Oldenbourg, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-486-57564-3 . (= Southeast European Works 119), pp. 175–214.
• Michael Fahlbusch: Wilfried Krallert (1912–1969). A geographer and historian in the service of the SS. In: Karel Hruza (ed.): Austrian historians 1900–1945: CVs and careers in Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia in portraits of the history of science. Vienna 2008, pp. 793-836.
• Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld: The Training of Imams by the Third Reich In: Willem B. Drees, Pieter Sjoerd van Koningsveld (Ed.): The Study of religion and the training of muslim clergy in Europe. Academic & religious freedom in the 21st century. Leiden UP 2008 ISBN 978-90-8728-025-3 , pp. 333-347; Appendix: Extract of a document from the Bundesarchiv , pp. 348–368.
• Petra Svatek: "Vienna as a gateway to the south-east" - The contribution of Viennese humanities scholars to the exploration of Southeast Europe during National Socialism. In: Mitchell G. Ash, Ramon Pils, Wolfram Nieß (eds.): Humanities in National Socialism. The example of the University of Vienna. Vienna 2010, pp. 111–139.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Kartographische Nachrichten , Vol. 18 (1968), p. 166.
2. ^ Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 334.
3. ↑ Brief reference to Reinhold Krallert also in: Frank-Rutger Hausmann : "Even in war the muses are not silent": the German Scientific Institutes in the Second World War . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001 ISBN 3-525-35357-X , p. 163