Woman is wanted Nazi criminal

Kyt · Oct 23, 2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/10/22/wnazi122.xml

She looks like someone’s harmless grandmother waiting for the man to come to read the meter or repair the boiler. But this little old lady is one with a dark past and a unique claim to infamy.

For Frau Erna Wallisch, 85, ranks number seven on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s list of Nazi war criminals still at large.

Tracked down by British historian and author Guy Walters for his book 'Hunting Evil', about the escape and pursuit of Nazi war criminals, she lives in a small apartment on the bank of the Danube in Vienna. Incredibly, her surname is printed on the bell-push for her apartment.

When found by Mr Walters last Friday, Wallisch refused to comment on his investigation into her past as a brutal concentration camp guard.

Other residents in her apartment block said they knew nothing about her history, and most told Mr Walters that they supported the Austrian government’s decision not to prosecute her.

"It’s all in the past and should be forgotten," said Frau Durchhalter, one of Wallisch’s neighbours. "People should learn to forgive."

"I do not find this attitude surprising," said Mr Walters. "For too long, the Austrians have been unacceptably lenient with these evil men and women in their midst. I suspect their reluctance to confront these criminals is because it would only highlight the extent of Austrian complicity with Nazism."

Rarely leaving her home, Wallisch is cared for by her family who bring her groceries and sit drinking coffee and making small talk with their elderly relative.

Born Erna Pfannenstiel, the daughter of a postal clerk in eastern Germany in 1922, Wallisch joined the Nazi party when she was still a teenager and became a camp guard at the Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp near Berlin - where British SOE agent Violette Szabo was among the tens of thousands murdered .

Wallisch later transferred to the Majdanek death camp in Poland where she was based between October 1942 and January 1944. Some inmates claim she beat prisoners to death.

The testimony of at least four has been gathered in a bid to bring justice for her victims.

They allege that Wallisch used "violence and illegal threats for reasons of race and nationality, against women and children weakened physically and psychologically, from peoples within regions under civil occupation ... she treated them in an inhumane way."

In Lublin she had a romance with Georg Wallisch, a Nazi guard, who she later married in March 1944.

Jadwiga Landowska, a former prisoner, recalled how the then-pregnant Wallisch beat people to death.

"The pregnant Nazi monster woman who went crazy and attacked us did not appear among those tried in Duesseldorf after the war. The pregnant one hit a young boy lying on the floor with something harder than a whip. Blood was pouring from his head and he gave no sign of life or reaction. The sweating, breathless face of that monster was something I will never forget."

But Austria’s Justice Ministry has officially informed the head of the Wiesenthal Centre, Dr Efraim Zuroff, that Wallisch’s crimes come under the statute of limitations and she would therefore not be prosecuted.

This reinforces the Centre’s claims, and those of other Nazi hunters, that the Alpine republic has been a haven for Nazis who settled there with little fear of being called to account for their crimes.

In his meeting with Justice Minister Gastinger, Dr Zuroff argued that Wallisch had admitted participation in the mass murder of inmates at Majdanek. But Austria says it can take no legal action against her.

As a result, Dr Zuroff has appealed to the Polish authorities to take action against her based on her own admission that she had committed crimes in Poland and against Polish citizens. There is no statute of limitations for such crimes in Poland.

Dr Zuroff said: "It is unthinkable that a person who was part of the mass murder of at least thousands of innocent civilians should be protected by Austrian law, and we therefore urge the Polish authorities to try to achieve justice in this case."
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spidge · Oct 23, 2007

The grief of the defenceless in those terrible times continues!

Kyt · Nov 2, 2007

Update of the above story:

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=1746372007

How Himmler's daughter helps Nazi death-camp guard beat justice

A SINISTER group of Nazi sympathisers is aiding a former death-camp guard, tracked down by a British historian, to avoid prosecution.

Last month, the historian Guy Walters revealed he had traced Erna Wallisch, 85, who lives alone in a flat outside Vienna.

She looks like a harmless old grandmother, but is wanted for beating prisoners to death at the Majdanek extermination camp in Poland during the Second World War, when she worked as an SS guard.

She is on the Simon Wiesenthal Centre's list as one of the top surviving war criminals still at large - but now it has emerged she has been supported in recent years by Stille Hilfe - Silent Help - which numbers the daughter of former SS overlord Heinrich Himmler among its members.

Wallisch has told neighbours she had received "warnings" that journalists would try to get her to speak - and that she needed to keep a "low profile" if she wanted to avoid prosecution.

When contacted by phone she confirmed: "I do not speak to journalists. I do not want anything to do with reporters. It is all in the past." She hung up.

After the war, an organisation called ODESSA was said to have been formed by former SS personnel to help the Third Reich's most notorious criminals to flee. It is unclear if it still exists - but Silent Help does.

Silent Help, which claims to be a charity, is partly run by Himmler's daughter, Gudrun Burwitz. It has helped some of the Third Reich's most prominent officers, including Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie - "the Butcher of Lyons" - and Erich Priebke, the slaughterer of Italian civilians and partisans.

Burwitz, now aged 77, does not deny her involvement with Stille Hilfe, describing herself in one of her rare interviews as simply one of the few members in a dying organisation: "It's true I help where I can, but I refuse to discuss my work."

She is the only child of Himmler - the architect of the Final Solution. He nicknamed her "Puppi" - little doll.

The group was established in 1951 and branded by the Wiesenthal organisation as an organiser of the "ratlines" - secret escape routes out of Germany to South America and the Middle East for former Nazis, and later of helping those that remained to evade discovery and prosecution for their crimes.

Now it is accused of helping Wallisch.

Walters, who tracked Wallisch for a book on a history of Nazi- hunting, said: "It is obvious that the fugitive Nazis could not have escaped without a significant amount of assistance.

"To my mind, those who knowingly helped these criminals are not only criminals themselves, but are also condoning some of the foulest crimes of the last century.

"There is no doubt that Stille Hilfe has been providing aid and advice to help keep criminals like Wallisch under the radar of the authorities. Not that Austria wants to be bothered in prosecuting her anyway."

Recently, the Austrian newspaper Heute demanded the government reopen the case against Wallisch and that it refute allegations that links with groups like Silent Help were behind the decision to take no action.

The Austrian justice ministry spokesman, Thomas Geiblinger, told the paper: "We will not give up and will examine every piece of new evidence in the Wallisch case."

That latest evidence includes eye-witness accounts collated by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles of Wallisch beating prisoners to death in Majdanek.

Stille Hilfe, which operates out of Munich, gets most of its cash from Third Reich sympathisers both within and without Germany.

Burwitz, who reveres the memory of her father despite the fact that he has the blood of six million on his hands, is fêted by SS veterans and has attended one of their rallies in Austria.

Like the children of Martin Bormann and Hermann Göring, she knows the infamy attached to having such a man as a father. Unlike them, she keeps alive the memory of her father - the architect of history's greatest industrial-scale mass murder.

Himmler killed himself with a cyanide pill minutes after capture by British soldiers in 1945. It has fallen to "Puppi" to keep his memory, and his fanatical ideals, alive among the monsters the group still aids.

She, like Wallisch, is grandmotherly in her appearance. But when she attended the rally in Austria in the 1990s, no-one who saw her was not in awe of her.

"They were terrified of her," said Andrea Ropke, an authority on neo-Nazism who attended the rally in Ulrichsberg, northern Austria, with Frau Burwitz.

She lives in the Munich suburb of Furstenried with her husband and student daughter. She carried her family surname until she married in her late thirties.
'NICE' TRIP TO DACHAU

GUDRUN Burwitz, née Himmler, was born in 1929.

When she was 12, she was treated to a trip to Dachau, outside Munich, upon which all concentration, labour and death camps were modelled.

More than 30,000 inmates perished there, many in experiments.

In her diary, Gudrun wrote: "Today we went to the SS concentration camp at Dachau. We saw the gardening work. We saw the pear trees. We saw all the pictures painted by the prisoners. Marvellous. And afterwards we had a lot to eat... it was very nice."
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Kyt · Feb 22, 2008

Erna Wallisch dies

English News from Austria

Concentration camp guard dies without trial as Poland demands that she be handed over.

A female death camp guard has cheated justice for Nazi war crimes after dying peacefully in a hospital bed.

Erna Wallisch, 86, lived a life of obscurity after WWII until she was named by Nazi hunters as one of the top surviving war criminals from the Third Reich.

Wallisch was a guard at the Majdanek death camp in Lublin in Poland from October 1942 to January 1944 where she was feared and hated for her brutality.

Tracked down to a quiet suburb of Vienna by British historian Guy Walters for his book Hunting Evil, Wallisch still continued to live untroubled by Austrian authorities.

Under pressure from the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Israel and the Polish Institute for National Remembrance (IPN) in Poland to arrest her they later agreed to look at the case again after obtaining new eye witness testimony.

Survivor Ewa Koszlowska from Lublin said: "She was so hated that people used to warn each other when she was near.

"'Erna is coming,' they would say. She would think nothing of beating someone she had not liked, punching and kicking them to the ground."

And Jadwiga Landowska said after getting pregnant from a Nazi officer Wallisch had "hit a young boy lying on the floor with something harder than a whip.

"Blood was pouring from his head and he gave no sign of life or reaction. The sweating breathless face of that monster was unforgettable."

Wallisch had reportedly been involved in the mass murder to thousands of camp inmates but maintained her innocence to the end.

She said: "I was not involved in violence (against inmates) and did not witness any."

Austrian proceedings against Wallisch in the 1970s were inconclusive owing to lack of proof of her direct involvement in the murder of camp inmates. A statue of limitations prevented her prosecution on a charge of complicity in it.

Wallisch was born as Erna Pfannstiel on February 10, 1922 in Benshausen in Thuringia in Germany. She was the daughter of a postal-service official.

She had moved to Vienna shortly after World War II and became an Austrian citizen. She lived in Vienna-Donaustadt until shortly before her death.

Guy Walters who was responsible for tracking down Wallisch said: "It’s always sad when someone dies but particularly when they are an unpunished criminal. Yet again another murderer has been allowed to live in peace to the end of her days in a country that still shows no interest in prosecuting the guilty."
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