The Deportations of Hungarian Jews to Austria
Deportations of Hungarian Jews to Austria began immediately after Hungary was occupied by the Wehrmacht in March 1944. Together with anti-fascist intellectuals, politicians and public opinion leaders, up to 8,000 Jews were detained. These Jewish prisoners included victims of random arrests, as well as influential people from the political, economic and cultural spheres.
These prisoners were either interned in Hungarian camps or sent over the Austrian border to the Gestapo prison in the Rossau barracks and to the Arbeitserziehungslager of Oberlanzendorf outside Vienna. Some of these prisoners were later transported either to the Mauthausen camp near Linz, or to other concentration camps, such as Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz.
Between May 14 and July 9, 1944, more than 430,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz by means of Eichmann’s SS-Sondereinsatzkommando Ungarn (SEK). The SS were assisted by the Hungarian rural police under Major László Ferenczy, with the tacit connivance of the Hungarian puppet regime. Some 75 percent of those who were deported to Auschwitz were sent to the gas chambers either immediately or soon after their arrival. Of those selected for labor, 8,000 were deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp and its satellites between May 28 and June 19, 1944, followed by several thousand more after the final evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945. The subsequent fate of these two groups of deportees to concentration camps will not be discussed in this article.
With the loss of the Eastern territories, the reservoir of so-called “Eastern workers,” i.e., civilian workers who had come to the German Reich more or less “voluntarily” for deployment as laborers, also disappeared. In Austria, this led to a catastrophic labor shortage that was felt not only in the war industries but also in agriculture, civilian industry, and trade. The Jews who were crammed together in the Hungarian ghettos waiting to be deported to Auschwitz were an obvious replacement for the Eastern workers.
When 289,357 Jews were shipped out from the Carpatho-Ukraine, northern Transylvania, and the formerly Yugoslavian Bacska between May 4 and June 7, 1944, several of the trains did not proceed to Auschwitz. Instead, they were rerouted to Gaenserndorf on the northern railway line near Vienna. There, at the station, some 3,000 strong young women and men were pulled from the freight cars and forced into slave labor in agriculture and forestry. Some were also assigned to work in large and small industrial firms in the Lower Danube Gau.
Administratively, they were still under the overall control of Eichmann’s SEK, and thus were not absorbed into the concentration-camp system. Rather, they were “distributed” out to employers directly by the labor-exchange offices. The employers were responsible for their housing, food, and detention. Those left in the trains were transported to concentration camps, presumably Auschwitz.
This deployment of Jewish slave laborers in the Lower Danube Gau occurred between the end of May and the beginning of June 7. On June 7, 1944, the mayor of Vienna, SS-Brigadefuehrer Karl Blaschke, sent a request to the head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), Ernst Kaltenbrunner, to provide workers for Vienna. Regierungspraesident Delbruegge of the Vienna Gau administration had already submitted a similar request to the RSHA in Berlin. On June 30, 1944, Kaltenbrunner informed Blaschke that four evacuation trains, with some 12,000 Hungarian Jews, would be arriving soon. In actual fact, some 15,000 from the ghettos in Szolnok and Debrecen arrived in Strasshof an der Nordbahn at the end of June.
The deployment of these Jews as slave laborers was not only the result of requests to the RSHA for workers by the Gau Regional Administration offices (Gauleitung) in Vienna and Lower Danube, but was also connected to the efforts of Reszoe (Rudolf) Kasztner, assistant managing director of the Budapest Relief and Rescue Committee, to bargain with Adolf Eichmann for Jewish lives in exchange for deliveries of goods from the West. In the course of these negotiations — which will not be dealt with in greater detail here — Eichmann had made Kasztner an offer on June 14, approximately two weeks after the first Hungarian Jews had been removed from the deportation trains to Auschwitz and sent as slave laborers to eastern Austria. Eichmann’s proposal was to “bring 30,000 Jews into Austria and to put them ‘on hold’ there”; half of these would originate from Budapest, the other half from the provinces. Eichmann promised Kasztner that if the negotiations yielded concrete positive results, he would free these Jews.
At the same time the deportation trains left Debrecen and Szolnok for Strasshof, the so-called “Palaestinatransport” also left Hungary. The fate of this deportation transport was clearly a signal to the Western powers of SS readiness to cooperate. The prisoners were sent initially from Austria to the special camp attached to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but were finally released to proceed across the border into Switzerland.
The 15,000 deportees from Debrecen and Szolnok were also not absorbed into the camp system. With the help of the labor-exchange offices, they were allocated to firms in Vienna, Lower Austria, Burgenland, and southern Moravia. There they were put to work at heavy manual labor and frequently had to live under very difficult conditions. Nonetheless, they were not under SS supervision but, rather, under the jurisdiction of personnel from their respective firms. The employers paid specified amounts for their labor to the Vienna-based “Aussenkommando Hungary” headed by Hermann Krumey, which had organized this scheme of labor deployment. The firms deducted the costs for accommodations and food for the family members unable to work from the “wages” of the workers.
These Hungarian Jews were also an SS bargaining chip — a kind of human collateral — in their negotiations with the Western powers. No selections were carried out in Strasshof among the arriving deportees. Therefore, employers were assigned entire families intact. A sizable proportion of the family members consisted of children, the old, or the infirm. Since able-bodied males had often been conscripted into the labor brigades of the Hungarian army, this group made up only a minority among the deportees. The workers who had already come to Austria in June were integrated into this system, sharing the fate of the Strasshof deportees.
Hungarian Jews were deployed mainly in agriculture and forestry, as well as in construction (mainly clearing rubble) and industrial firms. The Vienna municipality was the largest employer in the Vienna Gau, where approximately half of the deportees lived. Despite the harsh living and working conditions, the survival prospects for the slave laborers remained good until shortly before the end of the war. From March 1945 on, these forced laborers were evacuated to Theresienstadt on foot or by rail so as not to fall into the hands of the approaching Red Army. The train deportations to Theresienstadt came to an end when, on March 26, 1945, the station at Strasshof an der Nordbahn was heavily damaged during an Allied bombing raid.
The major proportion of deportees remaining in Vienna and the Lower Danube Gau were then transferred to Mauthausen: some were loaded onto trains; but frequently they were herded together and force-marched to the Mauthausen camp on murderous treks during which thousands perished. Some of the deportees succeeded in escaping.
In July 1944, fearful of a coup by the Hungarian right and under pressure from abroad, the Hungarian Regent Miklos Horthy ordered a halt to further deportations of Jews from Hungary. At this point, there were still some 200,000 Jews living in Budapest, along with approximately 80,000 Jewish “labor service conscripts” in the Hungarian army. Jews were permitted to serve in the army only in the “supplementary reserve” and were barred from regular military service. The Jewish “labor conscripts” were deployed as an adjunct to the engineering corps in the Hungarian defense forces and engaged in construction work and clearing land mines on the eastern front or in Hungary itself.
When Horthy declared an armistice between Hungary and the Soviet Union on October 15, 1944, the fascist Arrow Cross (Nyilas), led by Ferenc Szalasi, seized power, aided by the German troops stationed in Hungary. On October 17, 1944, Eichmann returned to Budapest in order to complete the “Final Solution,” which, for all practical purposes, had come to a standstill in Hungary after Horthy had forbidden further deportations on July 7. However, by this juncture in mid-October, the machinery of annihilation in Auschwitz had already been disrupted and shut down. On October 7, 1944, prisoners in the Sonderkommando had destroyed at least one of the gas chambers. A short time later, gassings were halted, and Himmler gave the order to tear down the gas chambers and crematoria. This was carried out in November and December 1944.
On the other hand, Hans Kammler, head of the construction department in the WVHA (SS-Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt; the Economic-Administrative Main Office), urgently needed workers for the construction of subterranean production facilities for fighters and V-2 rockets. Along the border between Hungary and the German Reich, work had also begun, in early October 1944, on construction of the so-called Southeastern Wall (Suedostwall), a system of tank ditches and heavy fortifications intended to halt the Red Army in its advance toward Vienna.
On October 18, Hungarian Interior Minister Gabor Vajna declared his readiness to provide the German Reich with 50,000 Jewish men and women as slave labor. Since there were not enough trains, the Jews forcibly recruited in Budapest were marched, at the end of October, toward the border to Hegyeshalom. Between November 6 and December 1, 1944, the fascist Arrow Cross handed over 76,209 Jews to the Germans “on loan” until the end of the war. After this, deportations were not halted, but the counting of Jews “on loan” to the Germans was. However, since the Budapest Jews who were marched from Budapest to Hegyeshalom by foot suffered such murderous ordeals on their journey, they reached their destination in such a weakened condition that they were hardly able to work. The deportations were therefore later carried out by rail.
In Hegyeshalom — today the border crossing on the Hungarian-Austrian frontier — the Hungarian guards handed over their “Jews on loan” to the SS. The SS brought them to Zurndorf, from where many were shipped on to concentration and labor camps in the Reich. The remaining men and women were distributed by the SS units under Rudolf Hoess to Austrian industrial enterprises, but mostly to camps along the frontier. There, together with German and Austrian civilians, Hitler Youth, foreign workers, and POWs, they were forced into hard labor, digging trenches and excavations for the Southeastern Wall.
The Hungarian-Jewish trench-diggers were under the command of the Lower Danube Gauleiter Hugo Jury and the Styrian Gauleiter Siegfried Uiberreither, who, in their capacity as Reich defense commissioners (Reichsverteidungskommissare), were responsible for the construction of the Southeastern Wall. From November 1944 on, Hungarian-Jewish construction laborers were deployed in the area of Sopron and Koeszeg, as well as in the Lower Danube Gau. From Christmas in 1944, groups of Jewish labor conscripts were also sent to work in the Gau of Styria.
The SS continued to have a certain influence on the deployment of Jewish slave laborers. They thus remained “Schutzhaeftlinge” (under Gestapo jurisdiction) and their labor deployment was organized by Rudolf Hoess, the former Auschwitz commandant. The numbers of the Jewish forced laborers had to be regularly reported to the Gestapo.
Living conditions in the western Hungarian and Austrian labor camps were, for the most part, absolutely inhuman. Szabolcs Szita states that approximately one-third of the 35,000 Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers in the Lower Danube Gau died during deployment as a result of starvation, sheer exhaustion, and epidemics, or were murdered by guards. When a typhus epidemic broke out in February and March 1945 in camps in Gau Styria, the infected were systematically shot by order of the Gau Regional Administration by the SS and Volkssturm — at times with the assistance of the Hitler Youth.
The Organization of the Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria, Spring 1945
At the end of March, with the approach of the Red Army, the order was given to “evacuate” the camps along the “Southeastern Wall.” The Jewish trenchworkers were to be transported to Mauthausen. These marches were organized by the Gau Regional Administrations, which also provided most of the guard personnel. The transports were escorted by members of the Volkssturm, who were changed at the respective regional borders. In addition members of the Hitler Youth and the rural police were used as guards. In contrast with evacuations from concentration camps, the SS or Gestapo provided only a small number of personnel in charge of running the evacuation operations. These men accompanied the column of prisoners for the entire journey, or at least for substantial stretches. It should be noted that their inhuman living and working conditions had completely exhausted the slave laborers prior to their departure. If means of transport were available they were put on trains or ships. In most cases, however, they were forced to travel at least part of the way on foot. The daily routes and their lengths, as well as the composition of their escorts, were determined beforehand.
A written “Secret Order” (Geheime Dienstanweisung), dated March 22, 1945, for the Fuerstenfeld Kreis in eastern Styria, given by the Kreisorganisationsleiter, the district party organizational manager, has been preserved and provides us with a good description of the planning and organization of these marches. The order stated that, in the event of an alarm, which indeed was sounded six days later, Jewish slave laborers in the Fuerstenfeld district were to be assembled on the first day of the march in two camps — in Strem and in the Buchmannmuehle camp near Poppendorf. They would then be marched on foot the following day to an assembly camp in Bierbaum. The escort was to be composed of Volkssturm members, and the march was to be supervised by local Nazi party leaders (Ortsgruppenfuehrer). The latter had been in charge of the “subsection” of the “Southeastern Wall” within the area of their jurisdiction. After the alarm they were responsible for the removal of the Jewish laborers from their subsection to the next assembly point. The local Kreis organizational manager was responsible for organizing the work of fortification and worker coordination in this Kreis, in addition to planning evacuation. He received his orders from the local district party chief (Kreisleiter), who reported directly to the Gauleiter in his capacity as Reich defense commissioner.
In Gau Styria the “Southeastern Wall” was subdivided into two sections (sections V and VI), each of which was under the jurisdiction of a Kreisleiter. Thus in section VI, located in Kreis Oberwart and Kreis Fuerstenfeld, the Kreisleiter of Oberwart, Eduard Nicka, had chief responsibility. Section V, Kreis Feldbach and Kreis Mureck, was under the supervision of the Feldbach Kreisleiter, Anton Rutte. The Kreis-level leadership responsible for the construction of the Southeastern Wall thus also planned and organized the evacuation marches, while the Gau Regional Administration gave the immediate orders for starting the march.
Interestingly, there is no indication whatsoever in these instructions that the SS was involved in the evacuation of Jewish fortification workers. This does not mean, however, that the SS had no hand in the operations; they had overall supervision of the “evacuation” transports in the same way as they had kept control over the labor deployment of the Hungarian Jews. During this labor deployment, members of the Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, the SA, and so-called “political leaders” (Nazi party functionaries) had been the guard personnel. In Gau Styria, Croatian Waffen-SS men were also deployed as guards for the Hungarian Jews. The Waffen-SS also had their own leadership and were not under the jurisdiction of the party or the SS. That separation of competence areas was largely maintained on the evacuation marches.
Surprisingly, this juxtaposition of SS, Gestapo, and Gau Regional Administration personnel, each with their own leadership echelon and chains of command, led in only a few instances to clashes, encroachments, or quarrels over who was in charge and where. While the SS made up but a small core group, most of the guard units consisted of members of the local Volkssturm. These Volkssturm men, and the Hitler Youth members, who sometimes reinforced them, were not subordinate to the SS, but rather to their own commanders. In turn, they were under orders from the local party leadership, which was also responsible for organizing food and housing. As a rule, the prisoners had to sleep out in the open. The still low temperatures and damp weather sapped their strength, as did the constant lack of food.
The order to evacuate the Jewish forced laborers was issued by Reichsfuehrer - SS Heinrich Himmler to the Gauleiters. According to all the statements of the participants in this discussion, Himmler, sometime around March 28, 1945, in Vienna, is supposed to have ordered the Gauleiter of Lower Danube and Styria to proceed with an “orderly” evacuation. While an orderly evacuation meant that Jewish lives should be protected if possible, such an order left itself open to highly arbitrary interpretation. Perhaps it was intentionally meant to be ambiguous.
Just how little the actual implementation of the evacuation had to do with Himmler’s order, is illustrated by the evacuation of Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers from the Southeastern Wall construction section Bruck an der Leitha in the Lower Danube Gau. The man in charge of the section, Alfred Waidmann, gave the following testimony at a police interrogation in 1947:
Gauleiter Hugo Jury had given the order to treat the Jews as decently as possible and to provide them with sufficient food for several days on the road. Stretchers were to be prepared to carry the sick Jews, since the Jews were to be transported in a special train separate from the foreigners [foreign laborers]. I was not informed about the destination. The evacuation was to be carried out by the SS, to which the Jews were subordinate. Since no trains arrived, the order was changed: the Jews were to be assembled at the dock in Deutsch-Altenburg where they would be put on ships and sent on. So the Jews were gathered together for that purpose in Deutsch-Altenburg.
Despite the Gauleiter’s supposedly unambiguous instruction to treat the Jews “as decently as possible,” numerous murders were committed during the night of March 29-30, 1945, in the course of the evacuation of the Engerau camp (today Petrzalka, a district of Bratislava) that belonged to this section. Before the slave laborers departed for Bad Deutsch-Altenburg, all those sick or unable to walk were brutally shot or stabbed to death in their quarters. The guards, who had been given several liters of wine before leaving, murdered 102 persons during the march. In contrast to the murders which took place during this march, the “evacuation” of other camps in the Bruck an der Leitha section were executed without atrocities. All the prisoners of this section were assembled in Bad Deutsch-Altenburg and loaded onto barges. Approximately 2,000 prisoners were given neither food nor water. When the ships arrived in Mauthausen on April 6, many of the prisoners, now suffering from total exhaustion, were only able to crawl ashore. The weakest among them were thrown immediately into the Danube by the SS guards who took over the evacuation group in Mauthausen upon its arrival.
While the routes and relief of the escort personnel were carefully planned and organized, the most basic provisions for the prisoners were not, as in the case of the evacuation of slave laborers from the section of Bruck an der Leitha, and elsewhere. The Jewish death marchers were forced to go hungry for days on end during their exhausting ordeal.
In his 1946 interrogation by the head of the British Legal Division in Austria, Lord Claud Schuster, Siegfried Uiberreither, former Gauleiter in Styria, explained how he had interpreted Himmler’s order to bring the Jewish slave laborers from the Hungarian-Austrian border to Mauthausen “in an orderly fashion”:
I mean by that that they [the Jews] were supposed to arrive in Mauthausen, taking into consideration all the difficulties of transportation and communication, which had been disrupted at the time, in such a manner that they could be housed properly and suffer no damage.
According to the interpretation of the leading Nazi functionaries, of which Uiberreither’s testimony is an excellent example, the murder of thousands of Hungarian Jews during the evacuation was due to war-related “difficulties of transportation and communication”. Yet in actual fact, the murders immediately before and during the death marches were perpetrated on the basis of clear and uniform orders. The shooting of the sick and those unable to walk was commonplace in concentration-camp evacuations. It was now also applied in evacuation operations for the Hungarian Jews from the Southeastern Wall. Furthermore, there was another order that had been a longstanding practice for the SS and Waffen-SS: Jews near combat zones were to be shot. These instructions were passed on by the Gau administrations and local Kreis head officers to their subordinates, i.e., the guard units attached to the evacuation transports of Hungarian Jews. These were the Volkssturm, rural police, and Hitler Youth. The murders were thus blueprinted in advance; some circumspect commanders of transport appointed burial squads even prior to the beginning of the march.
Before departure, the sick and those who were unable to walk were frequently liquidated in order to avoid having them fall into the hands of the rapidly approaching enemy forces. The murders in the Engerau camp were no isolated incident. In March 1945, at the Ziegelofen camp in Koeszeg, the only gas chamber on Hungarian territory was installed. It was put into operation on March 22-23, 1945, in order to liquidate sick inmates from the Koeszeg camps Ziegelofen and Brauhaus. When the last Koeszeg slave laborers were loaded onto rail cars and transported toward Styria on March 25, 1945, and the camps were finally dissolved, there were still a large number of sick prisoners left behind. These prisoners were then brutally shot by the guards and SS, or, according to the testimony of one of the murderers, hanged in order to leave less incriminating evidence.
In several camps, the sick remained behind after the evacuation. Thus, on March 30, the doors of the school in Kloech in Styria, where the sick who were unable to walk had been herded, were simply nailed shut when the others departed. After local residents discovered the inmates who had been left boarded up inside, some women looked after them and brought them food. But five days after the evacuation column had departed, an SS commando unit showed up in Kloech and proceeded to execute these sick prisoners in a nearby forest. Already several weeks earlier, Jewish forced laborers with typhoid fever had reportedly been shot by guards on orders from the local Kreisleiter.
During the evacuation of the forced-labor camp for Hungarian Jews in Balf in western Hungary on March 28, 1945, some 200 sick inmates were left behind together with several nurses. On March 31, an SS unit rounded up the sick and shot 176 of them, tossing them into a tank ditch. The massacre took place only hours before the Soviet forces captured Balf. Since the SS carried out the murders in haste, there were several survivors who later were able to describe what had taken place.
The forced laborers who were evacuated when the camps were disbanded were also extremely weak as a result of the severe regimen of labor and their appalling living and working conditions. As a rule, they were forced to walk at least a portion of the way to Mauthausen. Many evacuation columns from the camps near the border in Styria were marched solely on foot through eastern Austria. During these death marches, the inmates went without food or water for days and had to spend the night out in the open. All guard units, whether members of the Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, rural police, or SS, were given strict orders to shoot prisoners trying to escape and anyone unable to continue the march. This gave ample opportunity to satisfy the bloodlust felt by many guards; again and again, they shot Jews who had stooped down to defecate or who were merely begging for a scrap of food. However, most of the murders were committed out of a mix of blind obedience combined with disregard for the lives of Jews. Exhausted marchers or stragglers would initially be brutally prodded to go on, and if they did not comply, they were then executed.
Since the evacuation was to proceed in an “orderly” fashion, massacres were not permitted once the march was underway. To shoot anyone unable to walk was considered a measure necessitated by the war, while massacres were regarded as overstepping the bounds. However, the fine distinction between authorized and unauthorized murders apparently was rather unclear even to high party functionaries. This is why the murders of prisoners who were fully able to walk were generally neither prevented nor later punished. When a large evacuation column numbering some 6,000-8,000 Hungarian Jewish men and women crossed the Praebichl Pass near Eisenerz on April 7, 1945, men of the so-called “alarm commando”, a SA unit from Eisenerz escorting the evacuation in the framework of the Volkssturm, fired at random into the marching column, murdering more than 200. They had been given instructions to open fire by the Leoben Kreisleiter Otto Christandl. However, the SS transport chief intervened in the massacre, demanding an immediate cessation of fire, and filed a formal complaint with his superiors in Graz. Ludwig Krenn, the commander of the “alarm commando,” was briefly taken into custody. Yet just two days later, on orders from the local Kreis head office, he was again assigned to duty with another evacuation group. In this instance, the SS transport chief had heeded the order stipulating an “orderly” evacuation — which did not preclude the shooting of exhausted marchers on the way to Eisenerz — while the local party leadership had not.
The main culprits in mass murders of Hungarian Jews in areas near the front lines were units of the Waffen-SS. As mentioned above, groups of Jews from the “Strasshof evacuations” were also forced to march to Mauthausen toward the end of the war, often guarded by the police. In Hofamt-Priehl in Lower Austria, a transit camp for such deportees had been set up in April. During the night of May 2-3, unknown members of the Waffen-SS murdered 223 inmates of this camp. It was impossible to determine who had perpetrated these murders, and so their motives could not be clarified. They may have acted based on general standing orders (no Jews in areas near combat zones), but without any direct order from superiors. The Waffen-SS also massacred prisoners from the “Strasshof evacuations” in Goestling and in Weissenbach an der Triesting.
The National-Socialist organizers of the evacuation marches had planned and ordered both the mass deaths and murder of the exhausted prisoners. Yet “excesses” — such as massacres of prisoners who were able to walk, or firing at random into moving columns — were regarded at least as undesirable. In postwar court proceedings, leading Nazi functionaries tried to disprove their share of the responsibility by making repeated reference to Himmler’s order regarding an “orderly” evacuation. In April 1945, Jews who were already in the process of being pulled back from the Burgenland-Hungarian border were forced into slave labor once more on entrenchments at Lassnitzhoehe near Nestelbach in Styria. By this point, a number of the Jewish prisoners were so weak they could no longer work. The commander of the Volkssturm battalion there, Oskar Reitter, handed over the sick, who, on his orders, had gone without food or drink for days, to members of a Waffen-SS unit also stationed there. They then proceeded to liquidate these prisoners. After the war, eighteen bodies were exhumed. Reitter was not prosecuted until 1960; Tobias Portschy, the former deputy Gauleiter of Styria, testified as a witness for the defense. He stressed it was impossible for Reitter to have given an order to murder Hungarian-Jewish forced laborers, since in his capacity as a high ranking functionary of the Kreis (Kreisamtsleiter) he had to know:
…that on orders from the Reichsfuehrer-SS, the Jews were to be brought or transported if at all possible unscathed [unversehrt] to the concentration camp in Mauthausen.... So if there were any shootings of Jews at Easter 1945 ... these must have been instances where subordinate bodies had overstepped the bounds.
The trials in the British military courts in 1946 and 1947 against various Styrian Kreisleiters — such as the first murder trial in Eisenerz dealing with the abovementioned massacre at the Praebichl Pass, or the trial on the shooting of Jews sick with typhoid fever in Kloech — had proven that even when the immediate perpetrators were “subordinate bodies,” the murder orders had come straight from these local party leaders. The testimony given by members of the Volkssturm and Hitler Youth as defendants and witnesses in the numerous trials before special Austrian People’s Courts after the war (see below), also left no doubt that the orders to shoot stragglers or “prisoners attempting to escape” had been issued by the local Nazi party bosses. For the SS, this approach had long been the standing practice in evacuation marches from concentration and labor camps. But the Waffen-SS evidently also had general orders to murder, at least when it came to Jews near the front lines. From the end of March 1945, Austria was indeed at the front. When the orders regarding the treatment of Jews during evacuation marches were passed on to the Volkssturm, Hitler Youth, and the rural police at the end of the war, they were largely accepted, precisely because they came from the highest authorities.
The Death Marches Through the Lower Danube Gau
As early as February 1945, large groups of Jewish labor conscripts of the Hungarian army were transferred to camps in western Hungary. After a short stay there, they were shipped out to camps in present-day Austria or, in frequent cases, transported by rail to Mauthausen. The final evacuation of Jewish forced laborers from the western Hungarian camps commenced on March 23, 1945. There were still some 10,000 Jewish forced labors deployed in the Sopron area and about 8,000 in the Koeszeg region. While the forced laborers from the Sopron camps were marched on in the direction of Lower Danube, the evacuation from Koeszeg and the more western Hungarian camp (further to the south) Bucsu proceeded through Styria. Rechnitz was the first assembly point for evacuees in the Gau of Styria.
The Jewish forced laborers from the ten Sopron camps were escorted along Neusiedlersee via Breitenbrunn to St. Margarethen, the first large assembly point in the Lower Danube Gau. There they met up with evacuations from the northern Burgenland camps Donnerskirchen and Schattendorf. In addition to the routine shooting of prisoners who were unable to walk, two massacres occurred in the course of this evacuation. The SS first perpetrated a large-scale bloodbath in the stone quarry at St. Margarethen by rolling down stones onto the prisoners resting below. Eighteen victims of this massacre, whose bodies were later exhumed, are buried in Eisenstadt. In a second incident, six Jews in a small group of stragglers were shot on a farm near St. Margarethen.
From St. Margarethen, the route went on via Eisenstadt and Stotzing to Loretto, where additional evacuation groups joined the columns. These had probably been directed there from Hungary as well, following the route through Hof and Au. The columns did not reach Loretto until after nightfall. There they encountered a formation of SS men, who began to beat the marchers furiously, killing many. A survivor from the Schattendorf camp passed through Loretto unscathed, but he and his comrades saw the bodies of the massacre victims ying at the edge of the road. The route then continued on via Seibersdorf to Gramatneusiedl, where the marchers, by then totally exhausted, were crowded onto freight cars and shipped off to Mauthausen. The trip by rail to Mauthausen took just under three days. During this time the prisoners were given little or no provisions.
The Death Marches Through the Gau of Styria
The evacuation of the Jewish forced laborers from the camps in Koeszeg to the German Reich, present-day Austria, was usually by rail. Once in Austria, the prisoners were generally forced to trek the remainder of the long distance to Mauthausen, on foot through what are today Burgenland, Styria, and Upper Austria. On these marches, they were consolidated together with evacuation groups from camps in the Gau of Styria. Wolf Gancz participated in such a death march from Eberau, and was among approximately 6-8,000 men and women forced laborers who crossed the Praebichl Pass on April 7, 1945, at the time of the notorious massacre there that claimed the lives of more than 200 prisoners. Among other things, Gancz described how his column, reported to have numbered 3,000 persons when it left Eberau on March 30, 1945, was consolidated with evacuation columns from the camps of Strem, Feldbach, Heiligenkreuz, Jennersdorf, Fehring, Schachendorf, Neumarkt a.d. Raab, Bucsu, and St. Anna am Aigen. As will be shown below, there were also forced laborers from the Koeszeg camps among the “evacuees” in the transports.
The data given by Gancz does not appear to be completely reliable, since the route he indicated does not correspond to the one in the Secret Order of March 22, 1945. Thus, his figure for “evacuees” is probably also not exact. Nevertheless, it does permit us to assume that there were more than 10,000 individuals who were brought in this evacuation alone from the HungarianAustrian border to Graz. During the trek from Eberau to Graz, the prisoners were given no provisions aside from half a loaf of bread.
Judith Hruza came from Koeszeg to Rechnitz on March 23 from where she was marched in the direction of Graz on March 28. She, too, survived the Praebichl Pass massacre on April 7, 1945. The camp in Buscu was dissolved on March 28, 1945. The forced laborers interned there crossed the Austrian border near Rechnitz. On April 7, they also were caught in the mass shooting at the Praebichl Pass.
Some of the forced laborers from Koeszeg and Bucsu had already been brought to Rechnitz and Burg several days before by rail, presumably in order to be deployed as laborers in Gau Styria. Although hundreds of sick forced laborers in Koeszeg had been murdered before the “evacuation” left, there were still some 220 workers unfit for work who arrived in Burg on March 24. These sick prisoners were then taken out and shot near Rechnitz in the early hours of March 25. Sick prisoners from the group from Bucsu are also reported to have been murdered in a wood near Rechnitz. As Judith Hruza testified, the Jewish forced laborers brought from Koeszeg to Rechnitz and housed there in two camps were treated relatively well, until they were forced several days later to continue on their trek through Styria and Upper Austria. Their route led from Rechnitz to Markt Neuhodis, Markt Allhau, and Hartberg, where they met up with the evacuation column from Deutsch-Schuetzen.
This evacuation column had been heavily decimated even before departing on March 28, 1945, since eighty Jews, even though fit for the journey, had been shot by three members of the Waffen-SS “Wiking” division and five military policemen. On orders from their unit commander Alfred Weber, the boys from the Hitler Youth who had been assigned to guard the Jews after the SA men previously guarding them had fled, brought the victims from the camp and handed them over to their murderers. Together with men from the Waffen-SS, members of the Hitler Youth were also assigned to escort the column. During the march they murdered more exhausted prisoners. On the first day, the evacuation column traveled over minor roads through St. Kathrein, Kohfidisch, Kirchfidisch, and Mischendorf to Jabing. From there it continued on the following day to Rotenturm a. d. Pinka, Oberdorf, Litzelsdorf, Wolfau, and Hartberg. In Sebersdorf, the Hitler Youth handed over the column to members of the Volkssturm, who then took it on to Gleisdorf, presumably via Ilz and Gnies. The men from the “Wiking” division most probably accompanied the evacuation transport to Graz.
Another column of some 4-5,000 prisoners assembled in Rechnitz was marched via Hartberg and Grosspesendorf to Gleisdorf. Numerous prisoners escaped during this stretch of the march. In the small Styrian village of Kalch, at least fourteen Jews were hidden by villagers and rescued. In the vicinity of Prebensdorf, the Volkssturm, on orders from the local Kreis party leadership, pursued escaped prisoners and tracked down eighteen persons, who were then executed by members of the “Wiking” division men between April 7 and 11, 1945.
Returning to the evacuations from Koeszeg on March 24, thirteen members of the Hitler Youth, under the command of their leader Anton Strasser, took over between 1,000 and 1,200 Jewish forced laborers from Koeszeg with orders to escort them to Strem. Some of these youngsters, aged sixteen and seventeen, were armed for the very first time and had been given orders to shoot any prisoner unable to walk. In 1992, one of the former Hitler Youth who had been assigned the task of bringing Jews from Burg to Moschendorf described his experiences:
One day in March we were ordered to appear the next morning in uniform at the post office. Strasser was there too. We drove by tractor to the customs house in Strem. We didn’t know what was really going to happen. We went and got carbines. We came to the train station in Rechnitz [most probably Burg, E.L.]. We were told there that a train with 1,300 Jews was arriving. We were supposed to transport the Jews (on foot) to Strem, Moschendorf, and so on. There was a square there, the Jews were divided into two groups: those able to walk and those who couldn’t. About 300 said they were unable to walk. They thought they’d be transported on trucks. Some were beaten to the ground right off. We were assigned a hundred Jews for the two of us. You just have to imagine that: you could’ve shot three or four maybe, but I mean you’ve had it if you’re surrounded by a hundred of them and all you got is the carbine. There were only men, between 25 and 40 years old, a few old men. They were hardly able to walk even though they sure wanted to. My buddy from Feldbach was out in front. I brought up the rear. We were told: if somebody couldn’t go on, we were supposed to shoot him and throw him in the ditch next to the road. A truck would come to pick up the bodies.
The consequence was that a number of murders were perpetrated by young members of the Hitler Youth and their leaders along the route in Eisenberg, Hoell, Gaas, Maria Weinberg, and Edlitz. During the trek, members of this evacuation were also left behind in Eberau and Moschendorf, where Jews were already deployed as laborers. The last group was marched from Strem to Heiligenbrunn and Reinersdorf. Already on March 28, the forced laborers in these camps were evacuated deeper into Austria. In accordance with the Secret Order of March 22, inmates from the camps in Eberau, Moschendorf, Strem, and Reinersdorf were gathered together in Strem. The next day they were marched from Strem, to Guessing, Sulz, Rehgraben, Neusiedel, and DeutschKaltenbrunn to Bierbaum, where they met up with the evacuation columns from the camps in Inzenhof, Heiligenkreuz, and Popendorf. Their first assembly point had been the Popendorf camp, from where they were then marched via Rudersdorf to Deutsch-Kaltenbrunn and Bierbaum. From Bierbaum the column, which had in the meantime swelled to many thousands, proceeded along the route mentioned — via Ilz and Gnies to Gleisdorf.
The Jewish forced laborers from Kloech were taken via Huerth, Ratschendorf, Jagerberg, St. Stefan im Rosenthal, and Kirchberg an der Raab to Gleisdorf. From St. Anna am Aigen, the route most likely proceeded through Poppendorf and Gnas to Gleisdorf. Gleisdorf was the assembly point for all evacuation columns before being marched on to Graz, where the prisoners were divided and assigned to various camps. The Jewish laborers, whose columns had left the Hungarian-Austrian border between March 28 and 30, were given their first meal in Graz. The one or two day rest period provided an opportunity to regroup the columns for the further trek to Mauthausen.
The large evacuation column of some 6-8,000 Jews that became victims of the murderous attack by their escorts at the Praebichl Pass on April 7, 1945 left Graz on April 4. The Jewish prisoners were marched in three columns on both sides of the Mur headed toward the town of Bruck an der. Mur. It is known that, in the case of one of the evacuation columns, three Gestapo agents, Ukrainian Waffen-SS, and Volkssturm men took over the job of guarding the prisoners sometime after they had left Graz. Other evacuations of varying sizes, though smaller than that of April 4, left Graz at a later date. Thus, some 1,500 persons were marched through Gratwein on April 12, 1945. A column of approximately 500 Hungarian Jews is reported to have left Graz for Leoben only on April 26 or 28.
In all these evacuations the guard units — made up of Gestapo and SS men, police, and members of the Volkssturm — murdered numerous exhausted prisoners. Some twenty members of the column that left Graz on April 4 attempted to escape near Eggenfeld, not far from Gratkorn. Men from the “Wiking” division temporarily stationed there apprehended them in the forest near Mt. Eggenfeld and then herded them in a gully, where they were shot. One of the “escapees” had hidden in a hayloft but was also discovered by an SS man. He kept the prisoner locked up for two days in a stable and then shot him.
In general, however, the death marchers were already too run-down physically and emotionally for there to be any attempt to escape. The chronicle of the rural police post at St. Peter Freienstein near Leoben describes the misery of these forced marchers:
At the beginning of April several evacuation columns of Jews marched on through here. The largest contained 6,000 Jews. They were coming from digging work along the Hungarian border and were supposed to march on to the concentration camp at Mauthausen. The Jews were so emaciated they could hardly walk. In Unteren Tollingraben, nine Jews died in a single night and were buried there.
Josef Juwanschitz was able to rescue two Jews from a column passing through St. Peter Freienstein on April 8. He hid the two prisoners, suffering from extreme exhaustion, in his house until the end of the war, even though several SS men were also quartered there.
On April 7, with the massacre at the Praebichl Pass, the slaughter reached a horrible high point. In the later, smaller evacuation groups that passed through, the guards continued to murder those slave laborers who were sick and exhausted. The prisoner columns were marched on from Eisenerz via Hieflau, Lainbach, and Grossreifling to St. Gallen. Along this stretch, according to survivors’ testimonies, the guards committed numerous murders and acts of brutality. The civilian population also behaved with barbarity. However, even in this area there were civilians who found a way to extend a helping hand. Maria Maunz was thirteen years old when some 1,500 prisoners set up camp on her parents’ meadow near Landl. Her mother gave food to a Jew, even though the local Nazi party chief had forbidden such acts under penalty of death. A neighbor attempted to pour some milk into the mouth of a young prisoner about seventeen years old who was suffering from severe exhaustion. “He died and was buried right on the spot,” reported Maria Maunz.
After passing through St. Gallen, the evacuation columns headed north into the Upper Danube Gau, present-day Upper Austria. Between April 10 and 13, 1945, Upper Austrian rural police and Volkssturm recruits assumed guard duties for the Jewish forced laborers in Kleinreifling, escorting them to Kastenreith or Dipoldsau. Those too weak to walk were transported on carts. Nonetheless, there was a large number of shootings along this stretch as well, “carried out in the main by mobile SS and Wehrmacht units, especially involving prisoners no longer able to walk.” One of the evacuation columns reached Grossraming on April 13, where the prisoners were given food at the Enns power station. Men from the SS Sicherheitsdienst (SD) and the Gestapo tossed some of the sick into the Enns River.
Although there were more SS men among the guard units attached to the death marches through Upper Austria than in Styria, they were not the only ones who murdered Hungarian Jews along the way. As a trial in 1962 in Bonn proved, orders for murder were given to the Volkssturm by the local Kreis party leadership. After the last evacuation column had left Reichraming, headed toward Losenstein, the commander of the local Volkssturm and his deputy came across a Jew who had been left behind. On orders from his superior, the deputy commander shot the exhausted man and threw him into the Enns. As the culprit later testified in court, he still saw an enemy even in the exhausted Jewish prisoner because of being subjected to years of Nazi propaganda. Moreover, he said he assumed his superior’s orders had come from up above: “He knew only that the orders had basically come down via the Party to the local Nazi Party chief or via the SA unit Steyr to H., the local SA leader [and Volkssturm commander].”
Although H. had testified in a court interrogation in Austria that he had given no such order and that a similar order had likewise not been issued by superiors — rather, he had been assigned the task of providing food for the Jews — the court ruled otherwise:
The court considers the statement of the witness S. in his interrogation on that same day important. He stated there that he was not familiar with any order for shooting Jews who had remained behind. Yet a member of the NSDAP Kreis leadership in Steyr had pointed out to him that in the coming weeks, there would be evacuation columns of Jews moving through the Enns valley. He added that officials in public office and Party functionaries would have something to see and remember when more than 2,000 Jews would arrive in Steyr (the transport groups actually reached some 4,000). In actual fact, many Jews were indeed later killed by members of the Volkssturm. Given this state of affairs, it is likely that H. — and following him, the defendant as well — allowed themselves to be guided by the idea that no straggling Jews should be permitted to live.
In the proceedings referred to by the German court, Adolf Klaus-Sternwieser, Volkssturm commander in Losenstein, was accused of having ordered his subordinates to shoot any Jews unable to walk. The intention was to ensure that as few Jews as possible reached Mauthausen. Sternwieser’s subordinates were convinced he was acting on instructions from the local Kreis leadership. Nonetheless, most of them disregarded the order to kill.
Yet many men from the Volkssturm, the SS, and the rural police did follow the orders and perpetrated numerous murders as the columns of exhausted prisoners dragged themselves through the Enns valley. There were also acts of random murder by guards. While a column was camped in Losenstein, on April 14, the guards gave the prisoners permission to gather wood for fires. One of the men gathering wood was then shot by a member of the Volkssturm. (In February 1946, in Ternberg, the bodies of thirty victims were exhumed.) The columns finally arrived via Garsten in Steyr and were then marched through Sierning and Hargelsberg to Enns, and subsequently on to Mauthausen. Another route probably went through Gleink to Dietachdorf, Stadlkirchen, Kronsdorf, and Enns.
An additional transport column containing some 1,000 to 1,200 persons was marched from Graz to Voitsberg. It was then routed through Koeflach and on to Salla and the Gaberl Pass (Stubalpe). The columns then passed through Weisskirchen and Judenburg. After leaving Judenburg, this route continued on via Poels, Moederbrugg, and Trieben to Liezen. The Volkssturm of Fohnsdorf and Poels provided guard personnel. When men from the Fohnsdorf Volkssturm took over the column on April 9, at the Gaberl Pass, in order to escort it on to Liezen, their commander ordered them to execute anyone unable to walk. Since he anticipated a large number of victims, he put together a burial squad, which marched to the rear of the column and buried the dead.
The column arrived in Liezen on April 13, and continued on the following day. In Upper Austria, the route took the death marchers over the Phyrn Pass to St. Pankraz, through Kirchdorf an der Krems, Schlierbach, Neuhofen an der Krems, St. Marien, and on to Mauthausen.
Once they reached Mauthausen, the suffering of those who had survived the death marches was still far from over. Since the concentration camp Mauthausen was overcrowded, they were housed initially in a tent camp in Marbach. In order to make room for the newcomers, new foot marches of Hungarian Jews were organized on April 16, 26, and 28, from the tent camp to the satellite camp in Gunskirchen. The debilitated prisoners were forced to trek from Mauthausen back to Enns and Asten and from there, to drag themselves via St. Florian, Ansfelden, Weisskirchen, Schleissheim, Thalheim, and Wels to Gunskirchen. The number of victims on this last 55 km stretch of the march was horrendously high. On the first four kilometer alone, between Mauthausen and the railroad bridge close by, a reported 800 prisoners were shot. This was done in an attempt to get rid of the weakest and slowest right from the start. The exact number of victims on this death march cannot be determined, but estimates run up to 6,000. The numerous memorial sites along this stretch attest to the inhumanity and brutality of this march.
The Gunskirchen camp was also overcrowded, and typhoid fever was rampant. In the final days of the war, the system that should have sustained and fed over 20,000 inmates broke down completely. When the camp was liberated on May 5, by American troops, most inmates were not just undernourished but seriously ill. There were thousands who survived only a few days or weeks after liberation. We can only estimate the total number of Hungarian Jews who were murdered or died of exhaustion during the death marches. If Szita’s calculation that onethird of the 35,000 Jews who were deployed in the Lower Danube Gau died even before the camps were dissolved is correct, then one can assume that more than 20,000 Jewish entrenchment workers were forcibly marched from there toward Mauthausen. The number of Hungarian Jews deployed at slave labor in Styria is not documented, but more than 10,000 prisoners in various transports were marched through the Styria and Upper Danube Gaus to Mauthausen. Added to these were the Jews in the “Strasshof transports” mentioned earlier, who also suffered thousands of victims on the marches to Mauthausen.
At the end of the war, some 20,000 prisoners were liberated in Gunskirchen. To this number the survivors in the concentration camps of Mauthausen and Ebensee have to be added, though it is impossible to determine how many of them had participated in death marches. The Jewish Concentration Camp Gravesites Investigation Committee (Juedisches KZ-GrabstaettenEruierungskomitee), which had been set up in 1948 and organized numerous transfers of victims’ remains from poor, makeshift graves in Austria to dignified reburial in Hungary and Austria, estimated the number of Hungarian-Jewish victims of death marches in Austria at 23,000.
After the Allies liberated Austria, “People’s Courts” (Volksgerichte) held numerous trials involving cases of capital crimes against Hungarian Jews. The first such trial in Austria (held August 14-18, 1945, in Vienna before the District Court in session as a People’s Court) dealt with the death march of Hungarian Jews from the Engerau camp to Deutsch-Altenburg, during which 102 persons had been murdered. The trials against the murderers and torturers of Hungarian Jews were numerous, because these crimes had been committed in the final phase of the war, and the evidence was still fresh. In addition, many perpetrators were local citizens known by name and therefore could be tracked down. The situation was different when it came to the SS members involved in murders because their names and units were not known. Only in rare cases was it possible to apprehend and prosecute them.
Most of the cases were tried in the period between 1945-1948, after which, public, political, and judicial interest in punishing National-Socialist crimes waned. This was also manifest in the dwindling echo in the press. Likewise, the severity of the penalties imposed lessened in later sentences, though there were some exceptions. Thus, the defendant in the last Engerau murder trial, held in July 1954, was sentenced to life imprisonment — of which he served more than nineteen years. Nonetheless, the sentences handed down by the People’s Courts in the late 1940s and 1950s were markedly more lenient, and the number of acquittals rose. In one example, in 1946, the People’s Court in Vienna sentenced five members of the Hitler Youth found guilty of involvement in the murder of Jewish forced laborers in Deutsch-Schuetzen, to imprisonment ranging between fifteen months and three years. The sentence took into consideration the young age of the defendants. In 1955, the Hitler Youth unit commander Alfred Weber, who had given the orders in Deutsch-Schuetzen, was tried but acquitted due to insufficient evidence.
After the People’s Courts were disbanded in 1955, the prosecution of NationalSocialist capital crimes passed to the jurisdiction of district courts, with trial by jury. In these cases the juries’ readiness to hand down guilty verdicts was minimal. The murder by the Waffen-SS of Jews unfit for work in Nestelbach was mentioned above. In 1946, two members of the Volkssturm who had been in charge of guarding and providing food for the Jews there were sentenced to ten and two years’ imprisonment, respectively, for complicity to murder and excessive cruelty. Acting on the orders of their superior Oskar Reitter, they had refused to give any food to those Jews doomed to die. Reitter, the former Volkssturm battalion commander and a local high-ranking Kreis functionary of the greater Graz region, was suspected of having instigated the murders. Not prosecuted until 1960, he was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. In both cases, the courts had established in their verdict that those later acquitted had instigated the crimes. However, these acquittals were also due in significant measure to the testimony of those convicted earlier, who now were no longer willing to testify against their former superiors.
In 1946 and 1947, the General British Courts of the British Military Government in Styria tried a number of cases involving capital crimes against Hungarian Jews committed during the course of the death marches. The British verdicts were harsher than the Austrian; and the courts endeavored to conduct trials that could be regarded as models for a democratic system of justice. While the British courts succeeded in convicting a number of local Kreisleiter for incitement to murder, Austrian courts usually dropped such accusations even before bringing charges. They convicted high-ranking National-Socialist functionaries solely because of the high-ranking position they had occupied within the Nazi hierarchy. Although some of the sentences handed down were also severe, the convicted were later able to present themselves in the public eye as persons convicted for “political” reasons — not criminal ones — and thus to play down the seriousness of their actions.
Translated from the German by William Templer
Source: Yad Vashem Studies, Vol. 28, Jerusalem (2000) pp. 203- 242
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