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89-year-old Nazi suspected of Jewish labourer massacre.
Search was part of final year diploma.
Vienna. A student at Vienna University has tracked down one of the world’s most-wanted
Nazi war-criminals as part of a university project.
The former SS member lives in Germany and is suspected
to have been involved in the massacre of 60 Jewish slave-labourers
in the Burgenland town of Deutsch Schützen in 1945. The
mass grave was discov- ered 13 years ago. Andreas Forster,
in the final year of his political science degree at Vienna
University’s Institut für Staatswissen- schaft (Institute
for Political Science), traced the fugi- tive, now 89,
to the Ruhr area in western Germany after realising the
man had changed the spelling of his name after World War
II. The 27-year-old from Ybbs in Lower Austria said the
man’s name had been registered in German rec- ords, although
sometimes spelled incorrectly, and been known to German
authorities since 1946.
Forster, who made the find whilst
researching his two- semester long diploma about the massacres
of Jewish people in Burgen- land, added that he had asked
the Federal Archive in Berlin to give him copies of files
on the man.
Forster’s lecturer Walter Manoschek
confronted the former Nazi at his home and recorded several
hours of an interview in which the man at first admitted
the crimes but then withdrew his confession.
The man said he could not remember
the shootings in detail and confronted with eye-witness
state- ments, he conceded that they might be accurate,
but he later denied everything, claiming he would not kill
defenceless people.
German authorities have started
an investigation.
wienerzeitung.at
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