[The following takes place during the last days of the Second World War in Europe.]
Where local Nazi Party bosses were particularly fanatical and the fighting on the ground particularly intense, the local population was especially at risk.
[…]
The district Nazi Party leader Richard Drauz (later described s the ‘butcher of Heilbronn’) proved remarkably bloodthirsty, and unleashed an utterly lawless wave of terror against the local population, leading to a shooting spree by local Nazis. This left 14 people, including a local-government official and his wife, dead for allegedly having displayed white flags from their homes.
Another case was that of Erwin Helm, a career army officer who had advanced to the rank of major. During the last stages of the war, Helm became the leader of a ‘snatch squad’ of the Wehrmacht’s Seventh Army and then got his own ‘court’ which left a bloody trail across southern Germany. Helm drove around in a grey Mercedes bearing the sign ‘flying court martial’ and leaving behind numerous soldiers and civilians executed, often without even the pretense of judicial proceedings.
Author’s Note:
Drauz was tried by a U.S. Army court for shooting at least one American prisoner of war, and was executed in Landsberg on 4 December 1946.
Source:
Bessel, Richard. “Murder and Mayhem.” Germany 1945: From War to Peace. New York, NY, HarperCollins, 2009. 61-2. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
On the terror in Heilbronn, see Friedrich Blumenstock, Der Einmarsch der Amerikaner und Franzosen im nördlichen Württemberg im April 1945 (Stuttgart, 1957), pp. 29-34.
Henke, Die amerikanische Besetzung Deutschlands, pp. 847-851.
On Richard Drauz, see Susanne Schlösser, “Was sich in den Weg stellt, mit Vernichtung schlagen”.
Richard Drauz, NSDAP-Kriegsleiter von Heilbronn’, in Michael Kißener and Joachim Schlotyseck (eds.), Die Führer der Provinz, NS-Biographien aus Baden und Württemberg (Konstanz, 1997), pp. 143-159.
Further Reading:
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