Walter Reder

* 4 February 1915 – Freiwaldau, Sudetenland (present-day Jeseník, Czech Republic)
† 26 April 1991 – Vienna

In Italy, Walter Reder is one of the most well-known of the SS war criminals. As Kommandeur of the Reconnaissance battalion of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ division, in the summer and autumn of 1944 he led a number of ‘bandit-combatting’ actions involving the murder of hundreds of civilians by his soldiers: in Bardine di San Terenzo, Valla, and Vinca, and finally at Monte Sole.

On 31 Oct. 1951, following a highly-publicized trial, a military court in Bologna sentenced Reder to life in prison on account of his crimes in Italy. Released in 1985, he was met on his return to Austria with a handshake by Defence Minister Frischenschlager: a gesture that sparked a governmental crisis in Austria. While in Italy Reder became a symbol of the German occupation’s barbarity, in Austria and Germany he had many supporters, who glorified him into a victim of Communism and ‘last of the war prisoners’.

Nationality: Austrian
Religion: gottgläubig
Formation: Hitler youth
SS Totenkopf units in Dachau concentration camp
Joined the NSDAP: 1935
Armed force: Waffen-SS
Unit: 3. SS-Panzerdivision "Totenkopf"
16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’
Years of service: 1943 – 1945
Rank: SS-Sturmbannführer
Offensive: Austrian ‘Anschluss’
Occupation of Czechoslovakia
Invasion of Poland
Western Front (France)
Invasion of Soviet Union
Eastern Front
Occupation of Italy (1944-45)
Confirmed Massacres: Bardine San Terenzo
Valla
Vinca
Bergiola Foscalina
Monte Sole
Post war period: Arrest in Austria 1945; extradition to Italy in 1948. Trial before military court in Bologna 1951, sentenced to life in prison and incarceration in Gaeta military prison. Released in 1985.

War experience

A nationalist and volkish upbringing

Walter Reder was born in 1915 in what was then the Austro-Hungarian district of Freiwaldau (present-day Jeseník, Czech Republic), into a middle-class family. Following the First World War, his native town Freiwaldau became part of the new Czechoslovakian state. The family then moved, in 1921, to Garsten, in Upper Austrian Steyr, where Reder’s father ran an adding-machine factory.

Reder was raised in a strongly conservative – as he put it, ‘strictly national’ – environment. Starting in 1922, he was a member of the Deutscher Turnerbund (‘German gymnastics league’), a volkish, antisemitic and anti-Communist organization that worked to exert corresponding influence on its young members.

In 1928, shortly before the start of the global economic crisis, his father’s firm went bankrupt. Reder was sent to an aunt in Vienna; he graduated from Realschule in 1931. The street he lived on, the Florianigasse, was the same street where the Nazi Party had its headquarters in a cellar, and Reder may have come into first contact with Nazism here.
Entry into Austria’s illegal Nazi Party and flight to Germany

In 1932, Walter Reder moved to Linz to attend a commercial college. Located only 80 kilometres from the German border, the city would play an important role in implementing Nazi policies in Austria. The Nazi Party’s nation-wide leadership and all affiliated organizations had their seats here. New members were mainly recruited from groups and associations with volkish, pan-German and German nationalist orientation, above all the volkish gymnastics associations. A few months after his move to Linz, Reder joined Hitler Youth, and on 23 Dec. 1932 he was brought into the 37th SS Regiment. On 19 June 1933, the Austrian government banned the Nazi Party and all connected organizations, the party then continuing all its activities underground. Reder never made a secret of his political affiliation. Some years later in his vita, he proudly wrote of his convictions for ‘pasting notices, throwing firecrackers, and membership in the NSDAP’.

In 1934, shortly before he was meant to take the baccalaureate exam, Reder was excluded from the Austrian school system. He avoided arrest by flight to Germany. Only a month later, Austria would see an attempted Nazi putsch and the murder of Chancellor Dollfuß.
In the ‘Austrian Legion’ and SS

In Germany, Reder was initially assigned to the ‘Austrian Legion’, a 10,000-man paramilitary organization trained in camps in Southern Germany for marching into Austria. In 1935, he was summoned to the first SS leadership-training course in Braunschweig’s SS Junker School. The SS Junker Schools were five training facilities set up in Germany for potential SS officers; the schools were stamped by a strong emphasis on ideological indoctrination. In April 1936, he was promoted to the rank of SS Untersturmführer and moved to Dachau, where he was accepted into the Totenkopf (‘death’s head’) units. Reder’s longstanding ties with Max Simon began at Dachau; until autumn 1944, he would serve under Simon’s command in various positions.
Leadership tasks in the SS Totenkopf Division

As the leader of a company of the SS Totenkopf ‘Upper Bavaria’ Regiment, Reder participated in the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the march into Austria, and the campaign against Poland. After the conquest of Poland, he was deployed for some months by Heinrich Himmler as liaison head of the SS Totenkopf Division.

In the spring of 1940, he was assigned to the staff of SS Totenkopf Infantry Regiment 2 as an adjutant and participated in the war on the Western Front. The division was responsible for the murder of British POWs and French civilians in the areas of Béthune and Arras, and for killing POWs from the French colonies in Lyon.
Wounded on the Eastern Front

Starting in the summer of 1941, Reder fought in Simon’s regiment on the Eastern Front, first as company head, then as battalion leader. On 20 Sept. 1941 he was wounded in fighting in the Valdai Hills in the front’s northern part. After convalescing, he returned to his division, fighting uninterruptedly between Jan. and Oct. 1942 in the Demyansk Pocket. In mid-Oct. 1942, as a result of heavy losses, what remained of the division was relocated to France. In Nov., Reder participated in occupation of the Vichy area, after which he attended a training course for battalion leaders at the Panzer School in Paris.

Until mid-Feb. 1943, he remained in occupied France, after which he was relocated back to the Eastern Front, taking part in the Kharkov-area fighting. On 10 March, Reder received grave wounds leaving his right arm paralyzed, his lower left arm amputated. He was awarded the Knight’s Cross and promoted to SS Sturmbannführer.

Following amputation of his lower arm Rader wished to remain on the front – as was the case with many disabled soldiers with intensive fighting experience. He made himself available to Max Simon, now leader of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’, and asked for a front-based assignment.

Kommandeur of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ reconnaissance battalion

For the most part, war-disabled SS-leaders were shifted to the SS administration and training facilities. As was the case with many disabled soldiers with intensive fighting experience, Reder wished to remain on the front. In mid-Dec. 1943, he made himself available to Max Simon, now leader of the 16th SS Panzergrenadier Division ‘Reichsführer-SS’, and asked for a front-based assignment.

Participation in massacres of civilians

'Combatting bandits' and massacres

In late spring 1944, Reder arrived on the Italian Front as head of SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 16. Reder’s battalion was among the first on the front; it was involved in heavy fighting with many losses. The battalion withdrew to positions on the Arno River and was deployed in the interior against partisans. In August 1944, it was relocated to the area of the Apuan Alps near Carrara, then to the Sarzana region. Here Reder’s soldiers began to commit many war crimes against the Italian populace, especially in massacres carried out in Bardine di San Terenzo, Valla, and Vinca.

In late August, the Allies resumed their advance, the SS-division then beginning a step-by-step withdrawal from the Apuan area in early September. This movement was also accompanied by numerous violent acts against the civilian population.

The worst events took place between late Sept. and early Oct. in the vicinity of Monte Sole near Bologna. The SS Panzer Reconnaissance Battalion 16 took part in a large-scale ‘annihilation operation’ between the Reno and Setta rivers. According to cautious estimates, Reder’s soldiers were responsible for the murder of appr. 400 persons; women, children, and older individuals comprised around half of the victims. It is almost certain that Reder’s men murdered the residents of Cadotto (49), Casaglia (85), San Giovanni di Sotto (52), Caprara (63), Cerpiano (46), Casone di Riomoneta (13), Ca’ di Zermino (5), San Martino di Caprara (55), Ca Abelle (7), Colulla di Sopra (8), Colulla di Sotto (18), and Roncadelli (15).

New fighting with heavy losses took place after this large-scale massacre. Reder maintained command of his unit until the German capitulation.

The postwar period

Imprisonment and trial in Bologna

In 1945, Reder was taken prisoner in an Austrian military hospital. He was initially kept in detention camps for presumed war criminals and Nazis: first in Glasenbach near Salzburg, then in Wolfsberg (Kärnten region). In 1948, the British authorities extradited him to Italy, where he awaited his trial in Bologna. The trial began on 18 Sept. 1951 before the city’s military court; it ended on 31 Oct. with a sentencing to life imprisonment. The prosecution had demanded the death penalty. The appeals court confirmed the sentence in 1954. Otherwise than was the case with other imprisoned war criminals, efforts to have him pardoned or released from prison failed. Reder served his full sentence, remaining in the Gaeta prison until Jan. 1985.

For the Italian public, Reder became a symbol of the German occupation and its war crimes. The assessment in West Germany and Austria was very different: Walter Reder was viewed by many as a martyr, a “scapegoat in the Gaeta fortress’, ‘buried alive’, a ‘hostage of the Italian Communists’.

Solidarity campaigns for Walter Reder

In the Italian public’s eyes, Reder was a symbol of the German occupation and its war crimes. The assessment in West Germany and Austria was very different. Immediately after his sentencing, in both countries interest groups formed to work intensively for his release.

Reder’s first supporters included former comrades such as Ekkehard Albert and former Nazi activists like the Austrian Stefan Schachermeyr. Josef Strauch, who had been the commander of the unit responsible for the massacre in Padule di Fucecchio, was likewise part of this group.

Following complicated negotiations, in 1956 Reder could regain Austrian citizenship, which he had lost after his flight to Germany in 1934. Starting then, the Austrian Foreign Ministry paid for his defence.

In Germany, a ‘Gaeta Relief’ organization was established under the direction of former high-ranking Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS officers. The organization reported having collected the signatures of 280,000 persons from 35 countries, including 20,000 former members of forces that had fought against Germany. A delegation handed the signatures, collected in 26 volumes, to the Italian president in 1958. Alongside fundraising, Reder’s supporters now began a campaign aimed at convincing Austrian and German politicians to intercede for his release – as well as for the release of Herbert Kappler, likewise imprisoned in Italy for war crimes.
The Reder trial and its media echo in Germany and Austria

Over decades, in organs with names such as ‘Deutsche Soldatenzeitung’ (The German Soldier’s Paper), ‘Alte Kameraden’ (Old Comrades), ‘Wiking-Ruf’ (Vikings’ Call), and ‘Der Freiwillige’ (The Volunteer), organizations for former SS and Wehrmacht soldiers regularly published appeals for Reder. In doing so, they downplayed the scope of the 1944 massacres. They attributed exaggeration or lying to the witnesses who had appeared at the trial, for example referring to them as Communist agents. The defamation of Reder’s trial would be carried forward in a group of right-wing publications widely distributed in both Germany and Austria.

Even respected liberal German papers took up Reder’s cause. In 1955, the renowned Hamburg-based weekly Die Zeit described the appeal court’s confirmation of the verdict in the Reder trial as ‘the wrongful conviction in Bologna’. In 1985, on the eve of the SS-leader’s release, Hans-Joachim Fischer, Rome correspondent of the equally renowned, conservative-leaning Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung, referred to Reder, a legally sentenced war criminal, as a ‘scapegoat in the Gaeta fortress’ and ‘the last German war prisoner in Italy’. Marzabotto was in his eyes a ‘small town south of Bologna that feels affected by the ‘war crimes” of Reder’. Its citizens, he indicated, declined to grant the former SS-leader ‘any mercy’.
German and Austrian reception of the ‘Reder Affair’

Following the trial, the wave of solidarity with both Reder and Kappler did not abate. To the contrary: it reached highly disparate circles extending well past the right-wing nationalist camp.

Soon, not only the soldiers’ organizations and former Nazis were speaking up for Reder but also state institutions and those representing civil society, churches, labour unions, Austria’s Social Democratic Party (SPÖ), even former victims of the Nazi regime. In the 1980s and into the 1990s, the conviction that the charges levelled against Reder were exaggerated, the responsibility for the killing of civilians lying with the partisans or the Allies, was widespread in both the Austrian and German publics.

In the course of the decades following the war, the vast majority of imprisoned Nazi criminals were released. Reder’s incarceration was increasingly viewed as anachronistic and unfair, his release as an imperative of humane decency. On 30 April 1967, in a letter to relatives of the victims, Reder asked for forgiveness. But his motivation was manifestly hypocritical, and nearly all Marzabotto’s residents rejected it outright. In Germany and Austria, the rejection was seen as stubbornness. In Austria, on a political level the ‘Reder Affair’ was considered an obstacle along the path to national reconciliation. Reder’s support by different Austrian governments, putatively on humanitarian grounds, was in fact aimed at neutralizing and integrating what was termed the ‘third camp’.

On 24 Jan. 1985, after long governmental negotiations, Reder was released and transferred to Austria. He was met at the airport with a handshake by Austrian defence minister Frischenschlager. This gesture sparked a crisis within the governmental coalition between the Social Democrats and the right-wing, national-conservative Freedom Party (the FPÖ).

Return to Austria

Reder repeatedly tried to bring about his release from prison, the last time in 1978. The application was again turned down, but the military court in La Spezia referred the proceedings to Bari. Here Reder’s lawyers finally had some success: in 1980, a military court in Bari attested to Reder’s ‘remorse’ and to ‘exemplary behaviour’ during his long imprisonment. But the judges ordered that subject to certain conditions, “for his personal benefit” (Staron, 2002, pp. 314f.) Reder was to remain incarcerated for an additional five years. In 1984, in an open letter to the town of Marzabotto, he again acknowledged his guilt and asked for forgiveness, which was again denied. Then, on 24 Jan. 1985, after long negotiations between both the Italian and Austrian governments and the Catholic Church, at the instruction of Italian prime minister Bettino Craxi (Italian Socialist Party) and with the agreement of Austrian chancellor Fred Sinowatz (SPÖ), Reder was released and transferred to Austria.

A military airplane brought Reder to Graz. At the airport, he was greeted with a handshake by Austrian defence minister Frischenschlager (FPÖ): a gesture that sparked a crisis within Austria’s governing SPÖ-FPÖ coalition.

Over the following years, Reder regularly took part in ‘comrades’ meetings’. Shortly after arriving in Austria, he retracted his declarations of remorse. He died in a Vienna hospital on 26 April 1991 and was buried in the Upper Austrian cemetery of Gmunden. The ceremony was attended by many right-wing extremists and representatives of SS ‘comradeship’ organizations.

Sources

The main sources for reconstructing Walter Reder’s military career and biography until 1945 are the personnel files kept in the Bundesarchiv in Berlin (German Federal Archives in Berlin) (R 9361-III/159357, R 9361-III/549431). The Italian court files are kept in the archive of the Rome military court. All the important events tied to the Reder trial, incarceration, release, return to Austria, and death were reported on extensively in the press. While Reder’s biography until 1945 seems to have been sufficiently examined, a close reconstruction of his long imprisonment is still needed, as is an examination of the prolonged negotiations between Austria, Italy, Germany, and the Vatican concerning his release.

Literature

Felix Bohr, Die Kriegsverbrecher-Lobby. Bundesdeutsche Hilfe für im Ausland inhaftierte NS-Täter, Berlin, Suhrkamp, 2018.

Carlo Gentile, Wehrmacht und Waffen-SS im Partisanenkrieg: Italien 1943-1945, Paderborn, 2012, Schöningh, 466 pp.

Christian Ortner, Am Beispiel Walter Reder. Die SS-Verbrechen in Marzabotto und ihre „Bewältigung“, Vienna, Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands, [1985].

Christian Reder, Deformierte Bürgerlichkeit, Vienna/Berlin, Mandelbaum Verlag, 2016, pp. 278-290.

Joachim Staron, Fosse Ardeatine und Marzabotto. Deutsche Kriegsverbrechen und Resistenza. Geschichte und nationale Mythenbildung in Deutschland und Italien (1944-1999), Padeborn etc., Schöningh, 2002.

Barbara Tóth, Der Handschlag. Die Affäre Frischenschlager-Reder, mit einem Nachwort von Friedhelm Frischenschlager, Innsbruck, Studien-Verlag, 2017

Authorship and translation

Author: Carlo Gentile

Translated from German by: Joel Golb

2023

Text: CC BY NC SA 4.0

Walter Reder

War experience

A nationalist and volkish upbringing

Entry into Austria’s illegal Nazi Party and flight to Germany

In the ‘Austrian Legion’ and SS

Leadership tasks in the SS Totenkopf Division

Wounded on the Eastern Front

Kommandeur of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ reconnaissance battalion

Participation in massacres of civilians

'Combatting bandits' and massacres

The postwar period

Imprisonment and trial in Bologna

Solidarity campaigns for Walter Reder

The Reder trial and its media echo in Germany and Austria

German and Austrian reception of the ‘Reder Affair’

Return to Austria

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