“Dann bin ich ja ein Mörder!” Adolf Storms und das Massaker an Juden in Deutsch Schützen by Walter Manoschek (review)

On March 29, 1945, as the Red Army was approaching the Austrian-Hungarian border, at least fifty-seven Hungarian Jews were massacred in the small Austrian border town of Deutsch Schützen by three men, one of whom was ss-Unterscharführer Adolf Storms. The retreating German forces had marched hundreds of Hungarian Jews to the Austrian border to build a line of defense, which the Nazis termed the “Südostwall,” but which really just consisted of a very large trench and was completely useless at stopping the Red Army. As the Soviets advanced, the Nazis had decided to “evacuate” these approximately five hundred Hungarian Jews—who were being used as forced laborers—further West into Austria toward the concentration camp Mauthausen, but the three men in Deutsch Schützen decided to murder the Jews just ahead of the Soviet liberation. This massacre is reminiscent of the larger massacre that occurred at Rechnitz, another border town to the North of Deutsch Schützen, where around two hundred Hungarian Jews were murdered on March 24–25, 1945. The perpetrators of Rechnitz were never brought to justice and not all victims have been found to this date, largely because the people of Rechnitz refused to this day to cooperate with any investigation. The mass grave in Deutsch Schützen was discovered in 1995, but the Austrian Ministry of the Interior neither tried to identify the bodies of the victims, nor has it pursued any investigation of the perpetrators. Local Hitler Youths who were at the shooting were tried in Austria in 1946 and convicted as accessories to murder. These court documents mentioned Adolf Storms, but Austrian authorities did not investigate in 1995. In 2008, one of Walter Manoschek’s students located Storms’s name in the court proceedings and located him in the German telephone directory. A simple phone call confirmed his indentity.

Manoschek’s book “Dann bin ich ja ein Mörder!” Adolf Storms und das Massaker an Juden in Deutsch Schützen is based on the 2012 documentary film . . . dann bin ich ja ein Mörder!, which is based on more than fifteen hours of a filmed interview at Storms’s house in Duisburg. The dvd of this documentary is included with the book. Surprisingly, Storms, at the age of eighty-nine, was willing to talk to Manoschek and provided many details about his career in the Waffen-ss Division “Wiking,” though he could not recall the massacre in Deutsch Schützen. Based on this interview and other testimonies, the German state prosecutor charged Storms in late 2009, however, the trial was never opened, as Storms died in 2010. This book complements the included dvd well, as it provides important background information on the complicated historical context of how this massacre came about in Deutsch Schützen. It is not clear whether Storms pretended not remember what he did in Deutsch Schützen or whether he had actually blocked out the memory.

Although this book focuses on a single perpetrator, Adolf Storms, it is Storms’s average and commonplace background and career both during and after the Nazi period that points to another “ordinary man” who committed mass murder under the guise of the Holocaust, which is haunting because it is a reminder of the fact that many more men like Storms lived in postwar Germany and Austria and were not brought to justice, nor were their histories ever uncovered. In comparison to the larger massacre at Rechnitz, there was more of a reckoning with the past at Deutsch Schützen, because the victims’s bodies were found and Storms was at least still interviewed before he died. The failings of the postwar Austrian and German justice systems are as much a part of the message of this book as the fact that many of the victims have not been properly recognized. Unlike...