Josef Strauch

Josef Johannes Paul Strauch was born in 1910 into a lower middle-class family living in Königshütte (present-day Chorzów in Poland), an important industrial centre in Upper Silesia.  His father was a musician, his paternal grandfather a teacher. For a while, the family lived in Loebschütz (present-day Głubczyce) before moving to Wrocław, the Silesian capital, where the father worked as a conductor. 

Strauch’s mother died in 1921, his father then entering into a second marriage with the daughter of a Prussian railroad official. Until the age of 16, Strauch attended Realgymnasium. After graduating, he trained as a commercial clerk. 

A few months after starting that work, in April 1929, Strauch joined the Reichswehr, the Weimar Republic’s armed forces. He served in a calvary regiment first stationed in Beeskow, Brandenburg, then in Silesian Lüben (present-day Lubin). There he married a teacher, and the couple had a daughter. In November 1937, through his promotion to Hauptfeldwebel (first sergeant), Strauch reached the highest rank in the hierarchy of regular non-commissioned officers.

During the occupation of the Sudetenland, Strauch’s division was one of the first to enter Prague, taking over the bridges spanning the Vltava River. Later the division advanced toward Warsaw, fighting in the Battle of Radom. Then Strauch participated in the Battle of Bzura – the decisive battle in the attack on Poland. Following completion of the Polish operations, he was recommended as an officer’s candidate; on 1 Nov. 1939, Strauch was promoted to Oberleutnant.

As company commander of the 8^th Panzer Division’s Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion, Strauch was deployed on the Western Front and was wounded during the advance to Calais and Dunkirk. At the campaign’s end, he was awarded the Iron Cross 2^nd class. In the spring of 1941, his division was deployed in the Balkans near Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Dubrovnik. In the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, he advanced with his unit in the Eastern Front’s northern sector via Lithuania and Latvia toward Leningrad (present-day St. Petersburg). It was here that Strauch was awarded the Iron Cross, 1st class, on 1 July 1941.

A few days after receiving the medal, Strauch lost his command because of an evidently severe nervous breakdown and was moved into his battalion’s logistics section. His condition at this time underscores the considerable physical and mental pressures exerted, in the course of mobile warfare, on officers in Germany’s armoured units – even experienced and decorated officers like Strauch. Although the breakdown could have seriously damaged his career, the case was treated with good will. 

In late Jan. 1942, after confirmation of his aptitude as a trainer, Strauch was assigned to a training unit in Germany. Already in April, the army personnel office offered him a possibility to again prove himself: Strauch was now made Kommandeur of a reconnaissance company in the "Großdeutschland" Division and again sent to the Russian Front, where he spent a year. Assessment of his achievement there was highly positive, so that his career – at a standstill since summer 1941 – took on new impetus. In June 1943, he was promoted to Rittmeister and sent to a training course for battalion commanders at the school for armoured command in Paris.

In late June 1944, Strauch was posted to Italy, where on 5 July he took command of the 26^th Panzer Division’s Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion. The previous Kommandeur had been wounded in fighting northwest of Volterra. Since fighting near Rome, the battalion had been strongly weakened and at that point comprised appr. 140 men. In fighting south of Chianni it again suffered heavy losses, especially on Monte Vaso, which had to be retaken by the battalion several times. Between 14 and 20 July, Strauch’s predecessor again took command but was wounded once more, the command then returning to Strauch. At this time the battalion had shrunk to 75 men; it was located near Bientina and Santa Maria a Monte near Pisa.

On 22 Aug. 1944 the battalion was redeployed to San Rocco near Monsummano to prepare a razzia in the Fucecchio marshes. Strauch was commissioned by division Kommandeur Crasemann with the task of suppressing the "bandits" present there. Crasemann also issued an oral instruction that all affected civilians were to be considered partisans and be killed, regardless of age and sex. During his trial in 1947, Strauch asserted that he tried without success to change the general’s mind, which was confirmed by some of the interrogated officers. It is the case, however, that Strauch followed the order and led the battalion’s action. According to witnesses, officers, including a captain, personally participated in the massacre. The British investigators working on the case after the war presumed that the captain was Josef Strauch.

The massacre had no direct consequences for him or others in the division; he retained his command until the capitulation. Strauch was taken prisoner on 12 May 1945 in Bozen.

Until mid-Sept. 1945, Strauch and his men were held as prisoners of the American troops in Meran, before being handed over to British forces. He was held in Rimini, then near Naples, in Portici, and in the summer of 1946 in the Afragola internment camp. In the camp, he was interrogated in preparation for the British military trials of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and General Eduard Crasemann. Then, in Feb. 1947, Strauch was called as a witness in the Kesselring trial in Venice. During the hearing, he tried to explain how in the summer of 1944 he could consider the order to kill women and children legitimate.

In May 1947 he testified against General Crasemann. Here a confrontation took place when Strauch accused the general of ordering the ruthless killing of civilians.

In July 1947 the British court handed him over to the Italian authorities. Until the start of his trial in Sept. 1948 before the military court, he was held in the Fortezza da Basso in Florence. Strauch’s defence lawyer was Adone Zoli, a leading personality in the Florentine Catholic resistance, later a minister with various portfolios and Prime Minister between May 1957 and June 1958. 

Strauch was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in the massacre in the Fucecchio marshes. But after intervention by West Germany’s Adenauer government, he was pardoned in Dec. 1949 by Italian president Luigi Einaudi, moved to the Fraschette di Alatri internment camp (Frosinone province), and sent to Germany on 22 April 1950.

After his release, Strauch settled in Itzehoe, Schleswig-Holstein. For several months, he took on occasional jobs as a translator and personnel manager  for the local branch of the UN’s International Refugee Organization. In the summer of 1951, during a months-long period of unemployment, Strauch began to organize legal help for Walter Reder, who was standing trial in Bologna. With assistance of the West German Red Cross, he turned to the Central Legal Protection Office (Zentrale Rechtschutzstelle; ZRS) of the West German Interior Ministry. The ZRS has been established specifically to furnish legal assistance to Germans accused or convicted of Nazi crimes or war crimes by non-German courts. Strauch also contacted the private Stille Hilfe (‘Silent Help’) organization, founded by Princess Elisabeth von Isenburg to support imprisoned former Nazis, which still exists. With help from the princess, Strauch succeeded in hiring Claus-Joachim von Heydebreck as Reder’s defence lawyer. In addition, he attended the Bologna trial as a correspondent for the Deutsche Soldaten-Zeitung.

Following his return to Germany in 1950, Strauch joined the Gesamtdeutscher Block/Bund der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (‘All-German Bloc/ Association of Expellees and Persons Deprived of their Rights’). The program of this ‘national-conservative’ party was based on a call for both ‘a right to life in the West’ and ‘a right to a homeland in the East’: on the one hand, support for refugees driven out of formerly German areas in the east in the early years of the West German state; on the other hand restoration of the German borders of 1937 by peaceful means. Strauch quickly ascended the party’s ranks. From April 1952 until Feb. 1953, he was its State Secretary for Schleswig-Holstein. And from March 1952 until the party’s dissolution in June 1962, he was its Federal Secretary. Subsequently he moved to the private sector, becoming personnel manager for Uhren-Weiss AG in Frankfurt: a firm, founded by a young Hungarian entrepreneur, that manufactured cheap watches. With the firm’s closing in 1965, Strauch again lost gainful employment. But supported by the All-German Party, at the time represented by eight delegates in the state parliament, he could receive a special permit from the State of Hesse: As a result, he attained a position in the ‘adult education section’ of Hesse’s State Agency for Civic Education in Wiesbaden – one of the state’s most important institutions for the German citizenry’s postwar democratization. At the age of 55, he would otherwise have been too old to become an official. Strauch worked in this educational agency from 1 April 1966 until his death on 14 May 1970.