SS-Unterscharführer Adolf Storms and the massacre of Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers in Deutsch Schützen

Abstract

Adolf Storms was not hard to find in the summer of 2008. He was listed in the German telephone book. The former SSUnterscharführer, who had been a member of the Waffen-SS Panzer Division Wiking, was accused, along with two other SS men, of having shot to death at least fifty-seven Hungarian-Jewish forced labourers on 29 March 1945 in Deutsch Schützen, a village close to the Austrian-Hungarian border. Immediately after that massacre, he allegedly executed a Jew–a man, name unknown, who could not walk any further–by shooting him from behind. Adolf Storms had lived in Duisburg under his true name since the late 1940s. In 2008, the author interviewed Storms and two Hitler Jugend (HJ) leaders who also took part in this crime, and three Jews who survived the massacre. In 2009, Storms was charged with murder and as an accessory to murder in Düsseldorf. In June 2010, shortly before the decision for the trial to commence, he died at the age of ninety-one. This case study scrutinizes the intersection of ideology, Nazi morality, motivation and situational factors in perpetrating massacres. It also analyses how the judicial system in Austria dealt with this crime.