#8
Post
by Skyderick » 20 Apr 2014, 14:47
Little Grey Rabbit, by the end of the day you can choose to disbelieve anything. No one is here to convince you.
Happy Easter everyone. For those interested, I have found Towiah Friedman's account of Mattner's interrogation in 1947 (source: Sixty years "Nazi hunter", edited by David C. Gross). I couldn't extract the entire text from Google Books because it offers a limited preview.
".... "This is what I found: it was stuffed in the back of the drawer,” he said, handing me a pack of perhaps 100 pages. They were letters, in German. The young Jew said he had read the letters, and had thrown up. “I brought them to you so that you'll find this Nazi murderer,” he said. “He mustn't be allowed to live another day.” The letters were from an S.S. Lieutenant, Walter Mattner. He had been stationed in Kiev and Mogilev, in Russia, shortly after the Germans entered the Ukraine. S.S. and Gestapo units were ordered into every Russian city seized by the Wehrmacht. They were ordered to shoot all Jews who had not fled eastward, toward central Russia. The order came from Himmler and was quite explicit; it was to be carried out without mercy. Mattner was apparently a sentimental fellow, for every few days he wrote a letter to his wife in Vienna. He described his life in Kiev and Mogilev, omitting no details. His wife, who was pregnant at the time, saved his letters; later on, his mother kept them. And now they lay on my desk. I read them and felt my heart pounding, with horror and fury. The letters were from October 1941 through early 1942. Mattner described, sparing nothing, how he and his men shot Jews in the two Russian cities. The Jewish children, he wrote, were hurled into the air and shot with dum-dum bullets. The first time he did it, Mattner wrote to his wife, his hand trembled; but after a few times he got used to it. “Here in Russia,” he said in one letter, “I can appreciate what it means to be a Nazi. If I weren't already a Nazi Party member, I would surely join up.” Communist leaders and party members in Kiev and Mogilev were hanged from a public square, with all the Russian compelled to watch, his letters reported. In one of his last letters to his wife, Mattner reported that in Kiev, 30,000 Jews were shot; in Mogilev, 17,000. I brought the letters at once to one of the Austrian police inspectors. He shuddered as he read. Other police officials were called to his office and they, too, read the letters. I understood the shame that these men felt. Mattner was not in Vienna, but the police found him, in two days, living in a small town in Upper Austria. They brought him to Vienna, and asked me to witness the interrogation. I hurried to the prison. He sat on a bench, his head lowered. The inspector ordered him to rise when I came in. He looked like any one of a thousand people you could see in Vienna every day. He wore glasses; we stared at him— he looked as though he was trying to sink through the floor. "Did you write these letters to your wife?" the inspector demanded, waving the letters in his face. "Yes, I wrote them," he said, almost whispering. “God damn you! How could you write to your pregnant wife that you are shooting children in Russia, without mercy?" The inspector's face was livid. "I, I wanted to look important to her." The inspector slapped his face hard. “Don't tell me those tales. We've read your letters. You even borrowed bullets from one of your men when you didn't have enough.” “No, no, I made that up, Inspector. I really fired a machine gun at Jews, but I always shot above their heads, I did.” This time the inspector's hand caught Mattner squarely in the mouth, drawing blood. "Talk, Mattner, talk. Explain to me why you were such a great Nazi lover. Why did you shoot Jews with such pleasure in Russia?" “It's not true, I swear it, Inspector. In Vienna I was the best friend of the Jews. I had Jewish friends and until 1938 I did all my shopping in Jewish stores. It was Hitler's propaganda, it poisoned people, and all that wild power in our hands.” I tumed on my heel and left the interrogation room. Another minute and I would have attacked him brutally, I'm sure. Mattner never left prison. He was tried, convicted and hanged."
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Attachments
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- Walter Mattner
[http://www.yadvashem.org/untoldstories/database/germanReports.asp?cid=234&site_id=196] - Mlattner(1).jpg (36.16 KiB) Viewed 1335 times
Last edited by
Skyderick on 20 Apr 2014, 20:17, edited 4 times in total.
