Austrian student tracks down Nazi war criminal
As part of research on Burgenland massacre of Jews during WWII, political science student Andreas Forster traces 89-year-old former SS member to western Germany. In video interview, man denies involvement; student files complaint, investigation launched against man
In the last months of WWII, the Nazis enslaved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews and put them to work building a fort to stop the Red Army from entering the Austrian town of Burgenland that borders Hungary. After realizing that they could not stop the Russian troops, the SS men began killing off all the Jewish workers.
According to his research, a group of Hitler Youth members passed on several dozens of Jewish slave laborers to three SS members, who killed them with firearms. Immediately after the war the members of the Hitler Youth organization were put on trial in Vienna, however, despite their identity being known, the SS members were never tried.
As part of his research, Forster asked the Federal Archive in Berlin for copies of files on the man he was looking for, and located the 89-year-old fugitive living in the Ruhr area in western Germany. Forster discovered that the man had changed the spelling of his name after the war.
Forster's lecturer Dr. Walter Manoschek, an expert in the field of the persecution of the Jews in Austria in WWII confronted the former Nazi at his home and videotaped the interview, but the former Nazi denied any involvement in the killings.
"I got the feeling he kept checking exactly what I know so he could prepare himself for legal proceedings," Manoschek said. Manoschek and Forster filed a complaint against the man at the German complaints bureau in Dortmund, and an investigation was opened.
