Confronting the legacy of Josef Vallaster

Kyt · Feb 17, 2008

Austrian village faces down its Nazi past

Austria - The mayor of this tiny Alpine village, where Ernest Hemingway once skied down majestic slopes, has started an unprecedented project that most Austrians would rather forget: confronting the nation's Nazi past.

Mayor Willi Saly is intent on finding out whether there's anything in the historical record that would provide a clue to what drove a village farmer named Josef Vallaster to become one of the most brutal concentration camp guards of World War II. The records, which surfaced last summer, show that Vallaster was a mass murderer. The data say he participated in the deaths of 250,000 Jews at the Sobibor and Belzec death camps in Poland, and of 20,000 mentally and physically disabled persons at a clinic in Nartheim, Austria.

For Saly, 62, who has been mayor of this picturesque ski resort of 900 residents for 23 years, it makes no difference that Vallaster died 65 years ago or that the Austrian media has ignored his efforts.

"At first, we couldn't believe that a man from our village could be such a dreadful monster," said Saly at his modestly furnished office. "But after seeing the evidence, we decided to confront our own history and find out what prompted him to commit such ghastly crimes."

Most observers say Saly's mission is unique in a country that has long been reluctant to acknowledge its Nazi past. Unlike most European countries occupied by the Third Reich, many Austrians welcomed Germany's annexation in 1938, seeing integration as a remedy to soaring domestic unemployment, and a solution to the fractious politics that had caused a 1934 civil war between socialists and rightists.

"Even though the habit of ignoring the complicity of many Austrians in Nazi crimes has dwindled somewhat in recent years, what Silbertal is doing is unprecedented and unusual for Austria," said Gerhard Botz, history professor at Vienna University.

To date, only two newspapers have covered the landmark project - Vienna's Der Standard and the leading daily in Silbertal's province of Vorarlberg.

"Like the rest of Austria, Vorarlberg province prefers to see itself as a victim of the Nazis rather than as perpetrators," said an editorial in the daily Vorarlberger Nachrichten. "The Austrians' complicity in the Nazi crimes is largely ignored or concealed. But then, it hurts to acknowledge how one has hurt others."

As an example, some historians point to a Vietnam-style war memorial near Silbertal's church, which includes Vallaster's name as a victim. Saly says he will soon dismantle the monument, which was built in 1968 by a local veterans association, and build another in the town cemetery without names.

At the same time, Saly and seven other Silbertal residents have set up a history workshop that organizes lectures and forums by historians and Holocaust survivors.

"We should all help the mayor clear up a dark chapter of our history," said Brunhilde Mangeng, a young mother of two, as she swept the terrace of her neat bungalow.

The first workshop, which occurred just before Christmas, included a historian who lectured to 120 villagers on Vallaster's job at the Nartheim clinic, which included piping gas into gas chambers to kill inmates.

At another session, villagers were given recently released documents on Vallaster's Nazi career, beginning with his joining the local chapter of the Nazi party in 1933, and his travel to Germany to join a paramilitary force especially organized for Austrian Nazis. During the conference, a few village elders remembered him as a hard worker who spent most days tending to his cows grazing on mountain pastures.

Saly's history project was prompted by the discovery of new files at Harthein, about 300 miles east of Silbertal, and the site of a clinic where the Nazis murdered 20,000 mentally and physically disabled people in a euthanasia program conceived by Hitler to stamp out what he called unwertes Leben or "unworthy lives." The findings eventually led researchers to track Vallaster to the death camps at Belzec and Sobibor in Poland, according to Werner Bundschuh, a noted Austrian historian specializing in the Nazi era.

At Sobibor, where the Nazis killed 250,000 Jews, documents show Vallaster operated the motor that funneled deadly gas into shower rooms. He was also the chief engineer for trains that took the elderly and disabled to camp gas chambers.

The former farmer was eventually killed during the most successful uprising by Jewish prisoners at a Nazi extermination camp during World War II. In 1943, about 300 of Sobibor's 600 prisoners escaped, killing 11 SS officers and several Ukrainian guards. Most of the prisoners were killed as they fled; only 50 survived the war.

But if the Austrian media has ignored Silbertal's history project, historians and Holocaust survivors have not.

"Thanks to Saly, Silbertal is far more open and honest now about a native who became a Nazi mass murderer than many other Austrian communities," Bundschuh said in an apparent dig at Braunau, the Austrian village where Hitler was born in 1889.

In Vienna, the Rev. Leo Kuchar, a Czech-born Roman Catholic priest, who almost died in a concentration camp and whose Jewish mother was killed by Vallaster, said Saly "deserves great admiration, but not all villagers support them and a cold wind is blowing in their faces."

Indeed, an elderly Silbertal resident working on a tractor who refused to give his name said many villagers believe the mayor "shouldn't be stirring up things from the past. He should let bygones be bygones."

Elizabeth Stemer, 80, Vallaster's sister, was even more irate. "A lot of filthy lies are being spread about Josef. ... I knew Josef as a very decent man who just did his duty as a soldier and died for his country."

Meanwhile, Saly says he hopes his campaign to find out why a simple farmer became a notorious mass murderer will eventually resonate around the country.

"We want to convince our fellow Austrians that it is morally wrong to simply ignore the Nazi past," said Saly.

Austria starting to come to grips with the past

Since the end of World War II, Austria has been slow to atone for its Nazi past, even electing Kurt Waldheim, the former secretary-general of the United Nations, as head of state from 1986 to 1992 despite revelations that he had been a Nazi officer in a unit implicated in war crimes.

Over the years, many Austrians have taken comfort in the idea of their country being "the Nazis' first victim."

"Considering that Germany and Austria were the two core countries of the Nazi terror regime, the longtime Austrian doctrine of being a Nazi victim is really unique," said Oliver RathkolbIn, one of the nation's leading historians.

With few exceptions, postwar governments have neither restored nor given compensation to Austrian Jews. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, about 120,000 of Vienna's 190,000 Jews were expelled or forced to flee. More than 65,000 were killed, many of them at the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps.

Despite demands by a small Jewish community and some politicians, the city of Salzburg has yet to rename streets bearing the names of Josef Thorak, Hitler's favorite sculptor, and Heinrich Damisch, the editor of a Nazi hate sheet.

In 2006, the ruling Social Democratic party released a 333-page study that detailed how postwar party officials courted many of the 700,000 Austrians who had become members of Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers Party to work in industry, the judicial system and state health services rather than allowing repatriated Jews to have the jobs.

There have been recent attempts to come to grips with the past.

Last year, Interior Minister Guenther Platter honored the memory of more than 150,000 victims at the Mauthausen concentration camp near Linz. Also last year, the justice ministry posted a reward for the capture of two Austrian war criminals believed to be still alive: former concentration camp doctor Aribert Heim, 93, and SS officer Alois Brunner, 95.

More recently, parliamentary President Barbara Prammer voiced hope that payments to Holocaust victims from a $210 million restitution fund will be completed by the end of the year.

And just last month, Austrian prosecutors examined new allegations against 85-year-old Erna Wallisch, a female concentration camp guard who evaded prosecution in 1968 for lack of evidence, according to the Associated Press. The new material alleges that Wallisch fatally beat a man at the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland.
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Confronting the legacy of Josef Vallaster

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