"Executive of violence"

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s father targeted

Arnold Schwarzenegger and his father Gustav

(Bild: Krone KREATIV/Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, LPD Tirol © BIK Stoffers, APA/Getty Images via AFP/GETTY IMAGES/Phillip Faraone)

When Austria joined the German Reich in 1938, the police formed an essential part of the National Socialist terror regime. The officers were significantly involved in war crimes and the Holocaust. Exactly how this worked was a secret for a long time. Now the police archives have been opened - for the first time, they provide a comprehensive insight into the workings of the executive of violence. Particularly explosive: Hollywood star Arnold Schwarzenegger's father also features in the book.

"It's a dark subject. So, when we talk about the Austrian police under National Socialism, we are dealing with a particularly dark chapter of Austrian contemporary history," said editor and contemporary historian Barbara Stelzl-Marx from the University of Graz and head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War.

The police were responsible for arrests and war crimes from the very beginning. Of course, there was the entire spectrum: perpetrators and accomplices, but also victims and resistance fighters. The personal scope for action was central here - something that could also be of interest for today and for the training of police students.

From left to right: Martin Zellhofer (Böhlau), Mathias Vogl (BMI Head of Section III Legal Affairs), Gregor Holzinger (Head of the MM Research Center), Barbara Stelzl-Marx (Head of BIK), Andreas Kranebitter (Head of DÖW), Stephan Mlczoch (Head of the Historical Affairs Department within Section III)

(Bild: BMI/Gerd PACHAUER)

How people behaved in this extreme situation of violence has now been described in the book "Exekutive der Gewalt: Die österreichische Polizei und der Nationalsozialismus". The book was presented almost hot off the press last Friday at the Ministry of the Interior. The biographies in the "book with uncomfortable truths" are particularly exciting, explains Stelzl-Marx.

The story of the father of the Austrian Hollywood star and former governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has also been included: Gustav Schwarzenegger. The research was triggered by a request from Arnold Schwarzenegger to the Simon Wiesenthal Center asking them to investigate his father's involvement in the war.

Gustav Schwarzenegger

(Bild: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv)

As we now know, Gustav Schwarzenegger was accepted into the army as a musician in 1930. In 1939, he accompanied the invasion of Poland as a field gendarme. During the campaign in the Soviet Union from 1941 onwards, he was involved in battles and securing the terrain. However, as he was wounded and contracted malaria, he dropped out relatively quickly. He was discharged and from 1944 until the end of the war held the rank of chief constable in the gendarmerie in Mürzzuschlag in Upper Styria. After the war, he denied having been part of the NSDAP, which he had joined in January 1941 according to the files. He was believed. He therefore remained "unencumbered" in the Federal Gendarmerie.

The Ministry of the Interior is the first department in Austria to openly face up to its Nazi past. Through in-depth scientific research by an external consortium consisting of the University of Graz/Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Research on the Consequences of War, the Documentation Archive of Austrian Resistance and the Mauthausen Memorial Federal Institute, supported by a project team in the Federal Ministry of the Interior, a comprehensive picture of the Austrian police from the Nazi era to the Second Republic, with all its ruptures and continuities, has been compiled.

Innenminister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP)

Austrian police officer executed in Moscow
The life of Johann Scheiflinger, who was employed by the police in Vienna from 1938, is particularly sensational. In 1941, he was sent to Stryj in Galicia (western Ukraine) with a protection police regiment. When the German troops withdrew in July 1944, he joined the Wehrmacht and was taken prisoner of war by the Soviets. He returned to Austria in 1947 and worked again as a gendarme in Carinthia. Shortly afterwards, however, he was arrested on suspicion that he had been involved in war crimes. He was subsequently handed over to the Soviet occupying power, which initiated proceedings against him and other former police officers from Stryj. In the indictment, he was accused of having participated in killings as part of the campaign to make the area "free of Jews". During mass shootings, he was part of the cordon that cordoned off the scene and shot the fugitives. The Soviet military tribunal in Baden near Vienna sentenced Scheiflinger to death. He was the only police officer to be executed in Moscow for the crimes in Stryj.

(Bild: Böhlau)

Book tip

• Editors: Barbara Stelzl-Marx, Andreas Kranebitter, Gregor Holzinger

• Published on 6.5.2024
• 824 pages

The role of the police in the Holocaust
Today we know that the police played a central role in enforcing and maintaining National Socialist rule. The basis of this "order" was surveillance, repression and terror.

Political "opponents" or people classified as "criminal" or "asocial" were imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp and its satellite camps, which were established in 1938. The prisoners suffered hunger and were forced to do hard labor. The senior officers of the "Political Department" stationed there were mostly criminal police officers. They kept records of the prisoners, interrogated them and decided who had to go to the gas chamber or be shot in the neck.

"The police also came into play when there were escapes from the camp," explains co-editor Gregor Holzinger from the Mauthausen Memorial. The most famous of these was the mass escape of Soviet prisoners of war in February 1945, which cynically went down in history as the "Mühlviertel Hare Hunt". Police teams from all over the area were involved and also took part in the other murders.

But there was also resistance in the police force during the Nazi era, explains co-editor Andreas Kranebitter from the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance. This resistance was all the more courageous because "it had to go against its own institutions, it had to go against its own colleagues. And he was also persecuted by his own colleagues."