The Deutsch Schützen massacre

In the spring of 1945, as the Red Army approached the old Austro-Hungarian border, a series of killings of Hungarian Jews took place in Burgenland and eastern Styria; the victims had earlier been forced to build German fortifications. One of the best-researched crimes of this wave is the massacre at Deutsch Schützen, a small wine-growing village right on the Hungarian border. According to the findings of Austrian historians and the court records, soldiers of the Waffen-SS shot at least 57 Jewish forced labourers there.

The massacre is sometimes dated to 19 March, but it took place on the morning of 29 March 1945, Maundy Thursday – the date given in the records of the post-war trials and in the work of researchers, including the political scientist Walter Manoschek. The figure of “60 killed” is likewise a simplification: the sources speak of at least 57 victims, and some historians do not rule out that there were more.

Hungarian Jews on the South-East Wall

The victims’ road to Burgenland had begun a year earlier. After the German occupation of Hungary on 19 March 1944, the swift destruction of the Hungarian Jews began: by July more than 430,000 people had been deported from the provinces, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Regent, Miklós Horthy, halted the deportations in July, but after the Arrow Cross coup in mid-October 1944 power passed to Ferenc Szálasi. His government agreed to hand tens of thousands of Jews over to the Germans as labour.

In November 1944 columns on foot set out from Budapest towards the Austrian border at Hegyeshalom. The marches, organised with the involvement of Adolf Eichmann, took place in cold and rain and without food; many people died on the way or were shot. Jews from the Hungarian labour service (munkaszolgálat) – men previously conscripted into the Hungarian army’s labour battalions – were also sent to the Reich.

At the border the Germans took them over and put them to work building the so-called South-East Wall (Südostwall), officially the Reichsschutzstellung. Hitler had ordered the construction of this line of fortifications on 1 September 1944; it was meant to shield Vienna and Graz from the approaching Red Army. In Styria and southern Burgenland it was the responsibility of Gauleiter Siegfried Uiberreither. From October the anti-tank ditches and trenches were dug by the local population, members of the Hitler Youth, workers of the Organisation Todt, foreign labourers and Hungarian Jews. According to research by Austrian historians, in Section VI alone, covering the border area of the Oberwart and Fürstenfeld districts, about 4,000 of the roughly 15,000 workers were Hungarian Jews.

The Jews worked in the harshest conditions. They lived in barns and makeshift huts, received starvation rations and lacked clothes and shoes. In the winter of 1944–1945 typhus ravaged the labour camps. The sick and the weak were killed by the guards – members of the SA, the Volkssturm and the Hitler Youth – or left without help.

According to historians’ findings, in February 1945 there were between 500 and 600 Jewish labourers at Deutsch Schützen, quartered in two barns. The section was run by a Hitler Youth Bannführer, Alfred Weber, a war invalid and former SS panzergrenadier. The labourers were supervised by eight sixteen-year-old Hitler Youth leaders, and the guard was provided by four SA men from Styria, who deserted a few days before 29 March.

Maundy Thursday 1945

By the end of March 1945 the front was close. On 16 March the troops of Fyodor Tolbukhin launched the Vienna offensive west of Budapest – which had been taken in February after a long siege – and within less than two weeks they reached the border of the Reich. The Nazi authorities ordered the Jewish labourers to be evacuated from the fortification line into the interior, towards the Mauthausen concentration camp.

On the morning of 29 March Alfred Weber is said to have told the Hitler Youth boys under his command: “The Jews will be shot.” According to testimony given after the war, he divided up the tasks. Two of the Hitler Youth leaders gathered the prisoners into groups of 20–30, and two others led them westwards to St Martin’s Church (Martinskirche) on the edge of the village. There they were taken over by SS men, while two more Hitler Youth members waited by the pit in which the victims were shot.

The shooting was done by three soldiers of the Waffen-SS from broken units retreating through Burgenland; at least two of them belonged to the 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking. One of them was SS-Unterscharführer Adolf Storms. Historians differ on how the massacre unfolded. Walter Manoschek established that two groups were shot, after which the executions were halted; Eleonore Lappin-Eppel writes of four groups. According to some accounts, the order to stop the killing was given by Kreisleiter Eduard Nicka, but the testimony on this point is contradictory. What is certain is that at least 57 people were killed and that the survivors were made to fill in the pit containing the bodies.

Those still alive – 400–450 people, according to various estimates – were driven westwards by the SS that same day to Hartberg in Styria. It was the beginning of one of the death marches on which, in April 1945, Hungarian Jews were driven through Graz and the Styrian mountains to Mauthausen, and from there to the overcrowded camp at Gunskirchen. Thousands more died along the routes of these columns – of exhaustion, of disease and from the bullets of the escorts.

End-phase crimes in Burgenland

Deutsch Schützen was not an exception. Austrian historians call the killings of the last weeks of the war “end-phase crimes” (Endphaseverbrechen): as the front approached, guards, local Nazi Party officials and soldiers killed those whom they would not or could not evacuate. The most notorious of these crimes was the Rechnitz massacre (PL) on the night of 24–25 March 1945. After a party at the castle there, those present, among them local Nazis, murdered about 180 Hungarian Jews who had been judged unfit to march. Their grave has never been found. Similar crimes took place in other villages along the fortification line and, at the beginning of April, on the routes of the marches through Styria.

Behind these events lay decisions taken by the SS leadership. In the last months of the war Heinrich Himmler was conducting behind-the-scenes talks in which the fate of some of the Jewish prisoners became a bargaining chip; some researchers link this to the orders that the Hungarian Jews from the South-East Wall be marched to Mauthausen rather than killed on the spot. At the bottom of the chain of command such instructions counted for little: life and death were decided by local officials, chance SS men and teenage Hitler Youth leaders.

Trials and the discovery of the grave

A few days after the massacre the front passed through Burgenland and the region came under Soviet occupation. As early as 1946 the case was taken up by the Vienna People’s Court (Volksgericht). Seven Hitler Youth leaders, who had been minors at the time of the crime, were charged; some of them were sentenced to between 15 and 36 months in prison. Alfred Weber evaded justice for ten years. His trial in 1956 was the first trial of a Nazi criminal before a jury in Austria after the abolition of the people’s courts, and it ended in his acquittal: witnesses who had earlier incriminated him withdrew or softened their testimony. Austrian researchers who have studied the files judge that the court was not seriously interested in convicting the accused.

For half a century it was not known exactly where the victims had been buried. The grave was found only in May 1995, with the help of one of the survivors, Moshe Zairi, and through the efforts of the Jewish community of Vienna. It was officially opened on 23 August 1995. In September that year a plaque commemorating the murdered was placed on the wall of St Martin’s Church, and on 25 June 1996 a memorial stone was unveiled at the site of the crime. Only twelve of the victims could be identified by name.

The last chapter of the case was written decades after the war. In 2008 a student, Andreas Forster, working on Walter Manoschek’s project, traced Adolf Storms to Duisburg, where he had been living under his own name since the late 1940s. Storms agreed to talk to the researchers; the record of these conversations became the basis of a documentary film and of Manoschek’s book “Dann bin ich ja ein Mörder!” (“Then I suppose I am a murderer!”). In October 2009 German prosecutors charged him with the joint murder of at least 57 people and with one further murder from base motives. The case never came to trial: Storms died in June 2010, aged about 90, before the court had decided whether to open proceedings.

Its place in the history of the war

The Deutsch Schützen massacre was one of the last links in the destruction of the Hungarian Jews. People who had survived the deportations and the marches of the autumn of 1944 were killed in the last weeks of the war, less than two months after the liberation of Auschwitz, when the defeat of the Reich was already certain. The crimes along the South-East Wall show how, in the chaos of a collapsing state, violence passed into the hands of local officials, teenagers from the Hitler Youth and broken SS units – and how easily the perpetrators later escaped punishment.

The long silence surrounding these events fitted the post-war Austrian narrative of the country as Hitler’s “first victim”. The discovery of the grave in 1995, the work of historians and the belated indictment of Storms restored the memory of the victims. On the same day, 29 March 1945, units of the 3rd Ukrainian Front crossed the old Austrian border in Burgenland, while the marches of the Burgenland survivors continued into April, until the liberation of Mauthausen and Gunskirchen at the beginning of May.