1 See the essay on Seyss-Inquart by Johannes Koll in this volume.

2 Contrary to his four younger siblings who became Austrians, after his father had adopted Austrian citizenship in the 1920s, Adolf Eichmann — being of legal age and therefore independent from his father’s citizenship — remained German citizen. See Georg Kastner, “Adolf Eichmann, German Citizen,” Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 33 (2002): 131-40.

3 Christopher R. Browing, Ordinary men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the final solution in Poland (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 159.

4 Ibid., 160-61.

5 Ibid., 162.

6 Ibid., 184-85.

7 Ibid., 188.

8 Ibid.

9 In a lecture addressed to the Union of European Journalists on 22 January 1979 in Bonn, Wiesenthal stressed that “[d] escribing the Nazi crimes as war crimes amounts to a whitewashing of the Nazi horrors and does not capture the nature of what really happened. It makes soldiers of the murderers. Yet a soldier fights against armed adversaries. He can kill and he can be killed. Those who carried out their gruesome work in the ghettos and concentration camps ‘fought’ at no risk to themselves. And because their fight carried no risks, around 90% of these criminals survived the war.” <http://www.simon-wiesenthal-archiv.at/01_wiesenthal/05_stellungnahmen/e02_warcrimes.html> (10 Jan. 2012).

10 The total number of victims of the “death marches” on Austrian soil is estimated at more than 23,000 people. The vast majority of them were Hungarian Jews who had to work as forced laborers along so called Southeast Wall, a hastily built provisional fortification of ramparts and anti-tank ditches against the approaching Red Army. See Winfried R. Garscha, “Excesses of Violence in an Apocalyptic Mood: Nazi Atrocities in the Final Phase of the War — and their Presence/Absence in Public Memory and Literature,” in Crime and Madness in Modern Austria: Myth, Metaphor and Cultural Realities, ed. Rebecca S. Thomas (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008), 268-278.

11 The provisional police existed from mid-April until the re-establishment of the regular police department on 12 June 1945. Cf. Hans Hautmann, “Der polizeiliche Hilfsdienst für die Kommandantur der Stadt Wien,” Quellen und Studien 2000 (Vienna: Alfred Klahr Gesellschaft 2000), 277-346.

12 Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, “Das Volk sitzt zu Gericht.” Österreichische Justiz und NS-Verbrechen am Beispiel der Engerau-Prozesse 1945-1954 (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2006). This model study abundantly quotes from the original prosecution and court documents and is being used therefore as source for the following paragraphs.

13 Ibid., 75.

14 Ibid., 76.

15 Ibid., 78.

16 The assignment of Jewish slave laborers along the Southeast Wall is described by Szabolcs Szita, “The Forced Labor of Hungarian Jews at the Fortification of the Western Border Regions of Hungary, 1944-1945,” in Studies on the Holocaust in Hungary, ed. Randolph L. Braham (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 175-93; for the fate of the surviving slave laborers during the last weeks of the war see Eleonore Lappin, “Death Marches of Hungarian Jews Through Austria in the Spring of 1945,” Yad Vashem Studies vol. 28 (2000), 203-42.

17 ÖNB Bildarchiv/OEGZ, Sign. O 79/1, Austrian National Library, Vienna.

18 Kuretsidis-Haider, “Das Volk sitzt zu Gericht,” 367.

19 The biographical data follow Friedensbacher’s police file and his questioning by the examining magistrate (1969-1970). Photocopied excerpts of the court record (LG Innsbruck 19 Vr 415/70) are stored at the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance, Vienna (DÖW 21221).

20 Feldpolizeikommissar (captain) Begus never got indicted for the crimes he had committed in Greece. The only punishable act that could be proved by the prosecution was his membership in the clandestine Austrian Nazi party before the “Anschluss.” On 26 April 1948 he received a conviction of three years imprisonment (LG Wien Vg 11 Vr 8262/47). Information about the shooting of hostages, the murder of hundreds of civilians and other atrocities in the Athens metropolitan area can be found in Greek documents attached to the prosecution record against Otto Begus, Franz Kleedorfer, Alfred Josef Slawik and others (LG Wien Vg 8e Vr 183/53). The prosecution and court records are stored in the Wiener Stadt-und Landesarchiv.

21 Winfried R. Garscha, “‘Taten, die den allgemein anerkannten Grundsätzen des Völkerrechts und des Kriegsrechts widersprechen’: Prozesse wegen Verletzung des Kriegsvölkerrechts,” in Holocaust und Kriegsverbrechen vor Gericht: Der Fall Österreich, eds. Thomas Albrich, Winfried R. Garscha, and Martin F. Polaschek (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag 2006), 262-78 (about Friedensbacher’s trial: 275-76). For additional information about this trial see <http://www.nachkriegsjustiz.at/prozesse/geschworeneng/friedensbacher.php> (10 Jan. 2012).

22 DÖW 06469 (a collection of papers concerning detailed information about anti Nazi resistance in Kitzbühel and other Tyrolean communities, collected in Summer 1945 to be transmitted to the Tyrolean provincial government by an Egyptian merchant living in Kitzbühel).

23 In December 1948 a French court martial in Innsbruck tried members of the Innsbruck Gestapo department who had committed atrocities in the Gestapo camp of Reichenau, close to Innsbruck. The court imposed a life sentence on Hilliges for crimes against humanity and murder. Seven years later he was released on parole, but committed suicide together with his wife in 1956.

24 LG Innsbruck 19 Vr 415/70, n° 11 (interrogation of Ferdinand Friedensbacher, Innsbruck, 17 March 1970), photocopy in: DÖW 21221/4.

25 Ibid., n° 24 (finding of the jury, 9 December 1970), photocopy in: DÖW 21221/15.

26 Ibid., n° 32 (Counter statement of Kurt and Gert Strele, attorneys-at-law, to the prosecution’s plea of nullity, Innsbruck, 1 February 1971), photocopy in: DÖW 21221/17.

27 Majdanek was the first Nazi concentration camp liberated by Allied troops. When the Soviet and Polish soldiers, who freed the last surviving prisoners on 23 July 1944, saw the mountains of ashes and shoes, they were convinced that at least 1.5 million people perished in this extermination camp. It was only after decades of research that historiography understood that what the liberators had found, were remnants of people murdered in other camps like Sobibor and Belzec. The actual numbers are 60,000 Jewish and 20,000 non-Jewish victims. For most recent research findings see Tomasz Kranz, “Bookkeeping of Death and Prisoner Mortality at Majdanek,” in Yad Vashem Studies 35, vol. 1 (2007): 81-110.

28 Joseph Poprzeczny, Odilo Globocnik. Hitler’s Man in the East (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland, 2004), 93-143.

29 Elissa Mailänder Koslov, Gewalt im Dienstalltag. Die SS-Aufseherinnen des Konzentrations-und Vernichtungslagers Majdanek 1942-1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2009).

30 “Former Nazi Camp Guard Is Now a Housewife in Queens,” The New York Times, 14 Jul. 1964, 10 <http://www.nytimes.com/images/promos/magazine/20050306braunsteiner.pdf> (10 Jan. 2012).

31 In 2000 the historian Peter Black, in the 1980s and 1990s involved in tracking and prosecuting suspected war criminals within the framework of OSI, described in an interview the impact of the Braunsteiner Ryan case on US policy towards naturalized Nazi war criminals <http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/media_oi.php?MediaId=5593> (10 Jan. 2012

32 Elissa Mailänder Koslov, “Der Fall Hermine Braunsteiner: Eine geschlechtergeschichtliche Studie,” in Das KZ Lublin-Majdanek und die Justiz. Strafverfolgung und verweigerte Gerechtigkeit: Polen, Deutschland und Österreich im Vergleich, ed. Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider et al. (Graz: Clio, 2011), 223-37.

33 Winfried R. Garscha, Claudia Kuretsidis-Haider, Siegfried Sanwald, “Der Fall Majdanek in der jüngsten österreichischen Rechtsgeschichte: Die Ermittlungen gegen Erna Wallisch,” in Ibid., 416-26; Florian Klenk, Stefan Apfl, “Der Fall Erna Wallisch,” in Falter 6 Feb. 2008 (reprinted in Das KZ Lublin-Majdanek, ed. Kuretsidis-Haider et al., 427-37).

34 <http://www.wiltshiretimes.co.uk/news/1782475.how_i_found_nazi_war_criminal_suspect> (10 Jan. 2012).

35 Bild, 29 Jan. 2008.

36 Daily Mail, 2 Nov. 2007.

37 Mailänder Koslov, “Der Fall Hermine Braunsteiner,” 235.

38 Mailänder Koslov, Gewalt im Dienstalltag, 484.

39 Ibid., 485.

40 Ibid., 491.

41 Helmut Qualtinger, Werkausgabe, ed. Traugott Krischke, vol. 1: “Der Herr Karl” und andere Texte fürs Theater (Vienna: Deuticke, 1995), 174 (ellipsis in the quotations as in the original).

42 Quoted in: Ibid., 361.

43 Daniel J. Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996).

44 Afterword to: Christopher R. Browing, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: Harper Perennial pb., 1998), 221.

45 Ibid., 222.

46 Browning’s synopsis in: Ibid., 222-23.

47 Ibid., 223.

48 Richard Mitten, The Politics of Antisemitic Prejudice: The Waldheim Phenomenon in Austria (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992).

49 First published by timesonline. co. uk on 16 Jun. 2008. Still accessible on the web site of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, Jerusalem <http://www.operationlastchance.orgAUSTRIA_110.67.htm> (10 Jan. 2012).