Feb. 6, 1964

Federal Ministry

for the Interior

Department 20

Mr

Polizeirat Josef Wiesinger

Herrengasse 7

WienI.

Dear Mr. Police Councillor,

We would like to inform you that we have established a Documentation Center at the Federation of Jewish Persecutees, which is to continue the activities of the Documentation Center of the Federal Association of the Vienna Jewish Community (IKG).

In the enclosure you will find an excerpt from a diary of a former Schutzpolizist of the Wachtbatallion 171. This police battalion was formed in 1940 in Vienna-Kagran, later transferred to Brünn and sent to Ukraine after the outbreak of the German-Soviet war.

Although the events in Dnepropetrovsk and other localities took place in the summer and autumn of 1941, as well as in December 1942, (they are time-barred according to the law in force in Austria at the time), members of this police battalion who were personally involved in the events in Dnepropetrovsk, may still be active members of the Austrian executive.

We hope that in the near future we will be able to find some of the names and we will make them available as soon as possible.

With all due respect

Ing. Simon Wiesenthal

Documentation Center

Enclosure

VIII.54

Police passport

Content

Enlisted Nov. 29, 1940. Training in Guard Company No. 171 as a Reserve Guard.

Dec. 19, 1940 transferred to Brünn to Guard Battalion 217. In Brünn, promoted back to Rottenwachtm[eister] of the Reserve.

After guard duty in Brünn I was transferred to Zlin to guard the town hall there. Afterwards to Holešov as an orderly in the officers' mess.

Leaving grade very good.

In March 1941 I was transferred from Holešov to Wien because of my seriously ill wife. Single duty in the police stations 94 Meidling Revierführer Oberleutnant Fink and 93 in Unter St. Veit. Description very good.

On Mar. 27, 1942 I was sent on march with 8 more men to Kharkiv to the active Police Battalion 314/10 1st [Comp]any.

We immediately came to the front as replacements for 9 men who fell. The battle was for Kharkiv. Front was Sarasnoye-Tetlega.

My impression was the worst on the part of the whole formation. Completely demoralized. In every respect, almost criminal.

I was glad that my inner self warned me in this way. The personal attitude of the entire police force toward the reservists was immediately almost hostile.

I was assigned as a dispatcher right away in the evening after the quartering. After three days as a machine gun section with 10 men to Tetlega. There our Hauptwachtmeister shot a 15-year-old lad on his own authority by shooting him in the neck.

Our quarters in Kharkiv were a former cookie factory. There our company commander Oberleutnant O, Christ had a boy shoot a girl, allegedly for espionage. In reality she was pregnant by him.

At the end of April 1942, our Police Battalion was relieved by the Wehrmacht. Harvest mission to the area of Winica-Kolovanevsk-Grundka-Penki-Karnia- Granisa etc.

Leave from Peromomeisk from Dec. 3, 1942 to Dec. 25, 1942.

In Grushka some boasted about their deeds, which they had already spent before the Police Battalion had to go to the front.

Pole action in the area of Kielce-Camacs: Jew action!

The entire Battalion was dressed in civilian clothes and all Jews were taken from their homes. All private property confiscated. Every individual in the police force is living as if in a land of milk and honey. Every day 60 to 100 people were taken out of the ghetto, led to the open area

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and shot. That was roughly between April and September 1941.

Cleansing action in the area of Dnyerpropetovsk: Personal testimony of Staub Karl

September to December 1941 Here all Jews of any sex and age were rounded up into camps. They were robbed of all valuables and ornaments (boxes of jewelry, money and other valuables accumulated in each action).

In one day there was a procession of more than 8,000 people accompanied by our 1st company. It was all down to the I-dot. At the end of the march, it had become night, this death march stopped in the open area where there were no people far and wide, on the open road.

By day it was hot. The paths were rotten. At night, freezing cold.

At dawn, when the train was about to start moving, the poor people were frozen to the ground with their clothes and shoes and had to be torn loose by force. In the immediate vicinity, the suitable terrain had already been prepared.

A large ravine was covered with planks. They were brought in groups.

Now one of the biggest historical mass murders was going on.

The police group worked like this. They were brought in four and five at a time under guard. Here they were received by the group.

2 men had a kind of wooden fork where he grabbed the person in the back.

2 men were armed with submachine guns and gave the victim the neck shot or shot in the back. Immediately he got a mighty push with the wooden fork and the poor man rolled down into the ravine. There were scenes that cannot be described with words.

A young woman with two small children in her arms hoping that this sight could soften the men's hearts when she realized that it was the last moment to live. She calls out to those men: Don't you have a wife and child at home, that you are not ashamed to give yourselves for such executioner's work.

Down with this creature, out.

The next scene: A young lovely woman with her 6 year old girl is on the line. The girl asks with raised hands. Please Mr Wachtmeister shoot my mother first, she is so afraid. Next scene:

When guarding the large train, the police also use men from the civilian population. The man, a giant of a man, was helping to bring in the victims. There he sees

his own wife among the next victims. The two people would not part. A cry of pain from these poor people.

One policeman wanted to separate them by force. Then the other policeman was so humane and gave the other one a push of the chest and said: "that minute no longer matters, that the two kiss each other goodbye."

The man was writhing on the ground and with his fingers he scratched the hard-frozen earth in his mental pain, so that the blood splashed from his fingers.

Next scene: A young lad of 20 to 25 came to the turn. A decision was immediately made. He pulled out a hidden pocket knife, which fortunately had escaped many visitations, drove with it across the face of the policeman, a jump into the deep and he disappeared under the many bodies of the twitching and flailing people. There were riflemen lined up at the edge of this deep natural trench, still shooting at people who were still thrashing about quite a bit. After all, one is not immediately dead. There at one point a young woman straightens up, covered in blood. She tries to wipe the blood from her eyes with her bloody hands and kept screaming: Mother, mother where are you? Until one of those bullets also relieved her of this agony and she could sleep peacefully, like her good mother.

An elderly woman, whose turn it was, says to the policeman: "What is happening here will one day go down in history. You shall all be damned". Later, the trench was closed. The earth continued to ripple for several days due to the work of the crowds.

After what I had seen and heard in this harvesting operation, I could understand that these people seemed to me to be brutalized, bestialized from the very beginning.

Partisan fight.

On Dec. 28., 1942 the leave was over. On the way we were directed to Sinkiwice. This is on the line. Brest-Litovsk – Luninec in the Prypet area. From there to Durow-Tonec. That means before Tonec.

Even before that the troops had received fire from partisans and our brave police was put to flight by a few partisans. During the revenge raid, where they did not find any partisans, they had 70 people, mostly women and children, taken to the local church and shot as punishment. The church was burned down. I was able to see for myself when I arrived for the troops.

Still lying in the south-east corner of the burnt church were the bones of the poor victims.

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The order was to shoot at any person who came near the place.

I was standing guard. There was a dot approaching from afar.

It came closer and closer. It was a woman. The civilian population fled from us into the woods. It was after Christmas, a cold that the woods sang. Poor, every person who did not have a roof over their head. This poor woman could not stand it any longer. She just preferred to die in her house. Or so she thought. After all, they are only human and maybe even quite good people. I thought, how do I get out of it. Shooting is not done. I spoke with the woman, then came group leader H. and asks what is going on. The relief was already there. He sent me to the Komp. command post. On the way, the woman asked me for some water. I went with her to a bucket. She thanked me warmly. Then she asked me to go into the opposite house. I granted her this wish. Now I explained to her that we had to go further, because I was being watched. At the Gefechtsstand the woman was examined by a Zugwachtmeister, but we found nothing in her bag but old socks and a piece of bread.

Then the man said: Go with the woman behind the house and shoot her. I explained that I don't do that kind of thing. He replied, I'm ordering you to do it. I said, "You can't order me to do that”. He saw that he could not achieve anything with me, so he ordered me to go to the second platoon and take two men. I carried out this order.

I had not gone half the way when I heard two shots.

Sadly, I went on. The woman made it through, she was no more than 30 years old. Half an hour later the order came that the civilians could return to their homes. Every platoon made a daily patrol and hunted for people, whoever was found was shot on the spot.

There came another order on the second day. Everything gone. Tones will be burned down. Everything must be cleared by 5 o'clock in the morning. Anyone found after 6 a.m. will be shot. I was on guard duty at 12 o'clock at night. It was a misery. At 4.30 a.m. I was awakened by two other reservists. They told me to come immediately, there were still people in one house. You can do a little

I got dressed quite quickly. I put on my rifle. When I arrived at the house, three women and a 4-year-old boy were standing in front of me, all crying. I greeted them and said stop! You must leave in any case. There were 4 generations. The grandmother, mother, daughter and her child.

I heard the grandmother say: he is a good man, we want to be shot by his hand, they did not want to live anymore, because they would lose everything. Even the house. I was speechless, because I had never heard such a request. As I stood there the old woman said,

He doesn’t understand us”, so I pulled myself together and said: I understand very well. It would not have required any knowledge of the language. The grandmother explained to me with signs: she points to my rifle, then to her heart, on and on in that order to a heart and to my rifle. The crying little boy would have been the last to go. The time was pressing at any moment the active beasts could appear. You have to act quickly. There was a big sleigh in front of the house. Quickly put all the laundry bundles on it, put little Iwan on one of those, with two ends of the bundle knotted over his belly so that he wouldn’t fall off.

Cheered up, the woman pushed myself along, and into the forest with the sledge. And I said, go to Durow. They were saved.

On the other side of the village an active shot a woman who could leave the house no longer, because she was heavily pregnant and could give birth to a child at any moment, finished off by a rifle shot in the abdomen and leave this woman lying in her blood.

At the same time, this guy himself had a wife and a child at home. Half an hour later Tonec was a sea of flames. We moved back to Durow to await further orders. In this way countless villages were razed to the ground in the whole Prypez-Sludin area.