I Swear to You, Adolf Hitler, Fealty and Obedience: Sin and Retribution 2

By Adalbert Lallier

The book is available in German edition: "Ich schwre dir, Adolf Hitler, Treue und Gehorsam"; available with Xlibris Online Bookstore.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 9, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483620176

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Copyright © 2013 by Adalbert Lallier.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2013906128

ISBN:   Hardcover   978-1-4836-2016-9

             Softcover    978-1-4836-2006-0

             Ebook          978-1-4836-2017-6

All rights reserved. I Swear to You, Adolf Hitler, Fealty and Obedience: Sin and Retribution 2 contains material protected under the International and Canadian Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized use or reprint of this Holocaust Tragedy is prohibited. No part of this novel may be used or reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission.

Eye for an Eye and Retribution Versions

The author and the publisher of this book have used their best effort in preparing this publication. They make no representation or warranties with respect to the accuracy, applicability, and fitness of completeness of the contents of this publication. The author shall in no event be held liable for any loss or damage including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Rev. date: 04/05/2013

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CONTENTS

Backdrop

Introduction

Requiescat in Pace (Rest in Peace)

Venit Summa Dies et Ineluctabile Tempus (The Last Day Has Come and the Inevitable Doom)

Necessitas Non Habet Legem (Necessity Has No Law)

Quem Di Diligunt Adolescens Moritur (He Who Is Loved by God Dies Young)

Quæ Fuerunt Vitia, Mores Sunt (What Were Once Vices Are Now Custom)

Quantum Mutates Ab Illo (How He Changed from What He Was)

Quid Fasciendum (What to Do?)

Quod Erat Faciendum? Veritatis Simplex Oratio Est (What Is to Be Done? The Language of Truth Is Very Simple)

Jus Summum Sæpe Summa Militia Est (Law Too Forcefully Enforced Is Often Unjust)

Judex Damnatur Cum Nocens Absolvitur (The Judge Is Condemned When the Offender Is Acquitted)

Epilogue

Sin and Retribution

Personal Reflections

Glossary of Terms

About the Author

Endnotes

With my forever gratitude to my dearest friends, Beryl De Lutis and Kim De Lutis-Scott, for their incessant and encouraging efforts to help me through the intricacies and complexities of English grammar and composition.

BACKDROP

On December 31, 1933, at 1930 hours, Dr. Rudolf Dollfuß, chancellor of the Republic of Austria, delivered the New Year’s address to the people of his country that was carried on all radio networks. At that time, no one could foresee that this speech was to become the prelude to a series of political, economic, and social upheavals of catastrophic consequence to the nation of barely eight million—most of whom German-speaking—and the impoverished consequence of the dismemberment of the Empire of Austria-Hungary by the Treaty of St. Germain.

The ensuing chaotic changeover during the course of 1919, from a centuries-old dynasty, with its embedded reactionary system of centralized power, to a socialist system of government, with its commitment to improve the quality of life of its working class, would result only fifteen years later in a fratricidal, bloody power struggle between the Reds (the Austro-Marxists) and the Blacks (the Christian Conservatives), a consequence of their ideology-induced hatred. Rendered even more desperate by the catastrophe of the Great Depression, the population had to endure the attempted coup by the Austrian Nazis and the continuing regimentation by the Austro-Fascist government, the agonizing prelude to the even greater tragedy of the Anschluß,¹ and the incorporation of Austria into Hitler’s Third Reich in March 1938. In spite of Hitler’s promise of a complete equality under the swastika banner of the Third Reich for the population of the Ostmark² with their Reichsdeutsche³-Parteigenossen, the Austrian-Nazi quislings of Berlin (Seyss-Inquart, Leopold, Kaltenbrunner) implemented seven years of systematic oppression, including the annihilation of Austria’s Jewish community.

During the course of Austria’s occupation by the Hitler Germans, its population was reduced by almost one million; most were killed on the Ostfront as soldiers of the Wehrmacht or the Waffen-SS by American bombers and by Stalin’s invading Red Army. Full sovereignty was attained only ten years later in 1955, finally bringing to an end the twenty-five years of chaos, oppression, and bloodletting.

Note concerning the glossary: Most of the German language terms in the wartime tragedy originated in Nazi Germany and have since been removed from postwar German dictionaries since their meaning reflected Nazi ideology. The author has decided to use them throughout this story, in seeking to authenticate their original meaning, else they would be lost in translation. The Waffen-SS, as an ideological military organization, needed to have names of ranks that reflected this fact: a Waffen-SS Untersturmführer, as well as a Waffen-SS Gruppenführer, were not simply soldiers of the nation but were principally the racially pure ideological storm troopers of Adolf Hitler (note the use of sturm in all ranks up to Standartenführer, the latter denoting a colonel in any regular army; even Gruppenführer, denoting the rank of a general, expressed the fealty of whole armies to Adolf Hitler as the absolute leader of all Germans during the Third Reich).

INTRODUCTION

Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader is a contrived illusionary story in which the author manifests a closet Nazi orientation by leading us to sympathize with a female member of the SS, a war crime perpetrator. He describes her as not being able to read or write in a country with the highest literacy rate in prewar Europe and hence could not be held responsible either for her war crime or for her postwar exploitation of a fifteen-year-old boy. Conversely, I Swear to You, Adolf Hitler, Fealty and Obedience: Sin and Retribution 2 as a historical tragedy is rooted in actual events therein described, in particular the tragedy of the killing of seven Jewish inmates in the Panzergraben just outside of the KZ-Theresienstadt. The murderer, a former Waffen-SS officer, was finally brought to court and tried and convicted in March 2001.

The authenticity of this story is also rooted in the real-life portrayal of the other side viz Hitler’s Germany: the losers of the Second World War. How the Nazi system worked as experienced by the author and as seen by other soldiers of the Waffen-SS and the Wehrmacht. Also authentic are the description of the command structure of the Third Reich, its decision-making patterns and behavior, and the absolute commitment to the Treueid to Adolf Hitler that had been forced upon all members of Hitler’s armed forces often against their will; the witness accounts of the crimes against humanity that were perpetrated by the Übermenschen, Hitler’s enforcers of his master race ideology; and the fear, shame, revulsion, cruelty, and horror of the Untermenschen⁴, whose eventual mass murder led millions of them to perish under the boots of the deliberately dehumanizing Nazis and their Hilfswillige.⁵

Adalbert Lallier was forcibly recruited at seventeen from a Hungarian gymnázium⁶ into the Waffen-SS and thrown into a cauldron of destruction. A descendant of Huguenot refugees in the Austro-Hungarian province of Bácska, he is one-quarter French, one-half Hungarian, and one-quarter Austrian German. Magyarized,⁷ he spoke almost no German yet was forced to live through three bitter years of war and continually exposed to the totalitarian nature of Hitler’s Drittes Reich.

Lallier served thirty-two agonizing months as a soldier of the Waffen-SS with the Seventh Mountaineer Division Prinz Eugen.⁸ He endured incessant indoctrination by the Reichsdeutsch officers and subalterns and their endless tirades against the diverse types of Untermenschen (in particular Jews, Gypsies, Serbians, Romanians, and Hungarians) while being repeatedly referred to as Speckfresser, Vollidiot, Lochkopf, Magyarone, and Balkaneser.

At sixteen, while still in school and just one year prior to his forced recruitment, he had been compelled to watch the execution of hundreds of Serb civilians over the course of several months following the Nazi German occupation of the province of Bánát. They were left hanging for days on the gallows in several villages and towns in Serbia. The hangings and shootings became even more frequent in early 1942, involving mainly Serb and Montenegrin civilians accused of being accomplices to the Tito partisans.

During military training with the Signal Corps (Unna, Germany, summer 1942), Lallier witnessed on numerous occasions the devout racial-ideological fervor of the Hitler Germans celebrating the glory of their frequent victories on the Ostfront, unaware that at the same time, hundreds of thousands of Red Army prisoners of war were being starved to death.

He was present in August 1944 when Reichsdeutsch officers condemned to death a drafted Volksdeutscher⁹ soldier without any possibility of an appeal. Even though he had voluntarily returned to duty, he had gone AWOL in seeking to save his family from the onslaught of the Red Army. By that time, hangings for Feigheit vor dem Feinde¹⁰ and Wehrzersetzung¹¹ (especially on the Eastern Front) had become a shameful expression of the exponential degradation of the physical capacity and spiritual strength of the Hitler Germans. An increasing number of those who had initially been so willing to serve the cause and goals of Hitler’s Eintausendjähriges Reich were accused by the roving Schnellgerichte of being traitors and saboteurs and instantly hanged from trees and lampposts.

The Hitler Germans had ceased fighting the war with any semblance of civility because it had lasted too long and had debased itself into prehistoric forms of savagery. This was a shocking discovery, considering it involved the nation with the highest literacy rate in Europe, most of whose citizens had voted freely in 1932 to elect a regime that would reveal itself just two years later as the destructive hobnails of Hitler’s Nazism with a plan to implement die Endlösung.

The Hitler Deutschen pretended to fight for two nationalistic causes: a just war to undo the shame of the Treaty of Versailles and to proceed to meet head-on and destroy the Stalinist-Bolshevik threat to Western European civilization. However, during his thirty-six months as a Waffen-SS soldier, Lallier became a participant in a conflict of ideologies in which the notion of a just war had been replaced by an infinite number of plain murders, so-called official acts of execution, indiscriminate cold-blooded revenge, physical torture, and even rape. War crimes were also being committed as a result of hate, often in a state of drunkenness.

During 1,072 days of mainly frontline duty, Lallier had been converted into a brainwashed, obedient Mitläufer,¹² fearing instant execution. His initial indoctrination, with the purpose of serving a noble cause, was gradually being eroded by feelings of shock, shame, guilt, and eventual agony. He lacked the courage to stand up and intervene in spite of witnessing for almost three years the massive and incomprehensible brutality by the Nazis and their collaborators (especially in the Balkans) that eventually culminated in the wanton murder of seven Jewish prisoners in the Theresienstadt concentration camp.

This tragic story is also meant to be a memorial to his brother, André, who had also been drafted into the Waffen-SS against his will. He attempted to run away three times during the first three months of training but was caught each time. He was eventually condemned to serve in the punishment unit of a mountaineer infantry battalion. Lallier saw him briefly in December 1944; he was totally broken in spirit and physically unable to attempt another escape.

He had since been listed as missing, his fate still uncertain. Officials in the Bundesrepublik were told that his brother had been caught and tortured to death by Tito’s partisans in April 1945, yet the same officials were unable to find his Stammkarte¹³ in the Waffen-SS files. Apparently, his name had been expunged, implying that he had gone AWOL yet again but was caught and instantly executed by a Schnellgericht.

Lallier’s pleas to postwar German agencies to discover the exact cause and date of his brother’s death and the site of his burial have borne absolutely no answers, as though he had never existed. His brother, an otherwise noble and peace-loving young man, had become another innocent, tragic victim of Hitler’s Militarismus.

Unlike George Clare’s Last Waltz in Vienna (Macmillan 1981) in which the evil of the seven-year Nazi occupation of Austria was portrayed in general terms, I Swear to You, Adolf Hitler, Fealty and Obedience: Sin and Retribution 2 explores the historical long journey of two Viennese families: the Rainers who were Catholic and the Laubers who had originally been Jewish but eventually converted to Catholicism. The journey lasts throughout the twentieth century and describes the gradual demise of both families. The Rainers had commanded highest social and political prominence right until the last days of the Habsburg Empire and preferred living a very private life during the various socialist and fascist regimes of the 1920s and early 1930s. However, after the Anschluß, the families willingly embraced Hitler’s Übermensch doctrine and transformed themselves into relentless implementers of the grand design of the Third Reich, particularly with respect to the Slavs of Eastern and Southern Europe.

Lallier contrasts the not-so-surprising nazification of the formerly ranking, conservative Christian family during the Austrian Empire. The Jewish family’s only son was nominally Christian during his adolescence but a spiritually aroused admirer of his grandfather’s uncompromising, private Jewish faith. The merciless Austrian Nazis eventually carted him off to the KZ-Theresienstadt, where he discovered the ancient teachings and eternally binding virtues that enabled the Jewish people to survive the countless pogroms, forced conversions, and mass killings from as far back as two thousand years.

Amid the reality of the daily omnipresence of death at the hands of the Nazi Germans, Bruno Lauber, heir to several generations of preeminent Jewish-turned-Catholic bankers in Vienna, gradually discovered his life’s mission: the restoration of those very Jewish values that his own great-grandparents had forsaken for practical reasons in their conversion to Catholicism, the need to secure the family’s survival, and the rewards of a prosperous, cultured material life in Vienna’s sinfully opulent,