Who were the victims?
What we know about the victims of the Nazis’ “central execution site” in Munich-Stadelheim
Stadelheim Prison was a “central execution site” under the National Socialists. A total of 1,188 people were executed there in the Nazi period, 97 percent of them during the Second World War. Most of the executed prisoners were from Germany, but there was also a large group of men and women from Poland who accounted for around 16 percent of victims. Other prisoners had Czech, Greek, Hungarian, Yugoslavian or Italian roots. People from 18 different countries were executed in Stadelheim, most of them on the scaffold. Non-Germans accounted for nearly half of all executed prisoners during the war years, and they made up the majority in 1942.
The death penalty under National Socialism
While the number of death sentences rose slightly after the Nazis took power in 1933, the death penalty was still rare until 1939. Not a single death sentence was carried out in Munich between 1933 and 1936.
At first glance, it seems surprising that the number of executions was much higher in the early 1920s than between 1933 and 1937. One reason is that although the years after the First World War were violent and there were many more homicides, public opposition to the death penalty also grew toward the end of the 1920s. As a result, almost no executions took place in the German Reich between 1929 and 1931.
German judges were also given an arsenal of new weapons to fight ordinary crime. One crucial piece of legislation was the Decree against National Pests (5 September 1939), which specifically targeted three criminal ‘types’: the ‘plunderer’, the ‘black-out exploiter’ and the ‘anti-social saboteur’. The decree gave German judges far-reaching powers to sentence property offenders to death, thanks to the typically vague definition of these ‘types’. State Secretary Freisler described the measure as an important weapon to ‘exclude, and if necessary exterminate…the inner enemy’
Nikolaus Wachsmann, in: Hitler’s prisons: legal terror in Nazi Germany, New Haven 2004.
Special courts escalate the situation
The situation changed dramatically when the war started in 1939. Until then, death sentences for capital crimes had mostly been passed by ordinary courts. But now new special courts were established which sentenced defendants to death for a wide range of actual and alleged crimes. Tougher laws paved the way for racist legislation which was less interested in evidence and more concerned with checking whether a defendant matched a certain “type” or fit in the National Socialist “people’s community.”
The special court in Nuremberg was especially aggressive, as was the special court in Munich. Many of the people sentenced to death were guilty of only minor offenses, such as collecting scattered food after an air raid or taking a few old blankets from an air-raid shelter.
Polish forced laborers were particularly vulnerable to being targeted by the special courts. A dispute with an employer, an affair with a German, or non-conformist behavior were often enough for the judges to sentence a Pole to death regardless of the evidence.
Prisoners condemned by the People’s Court
The court that condemned the most prisoners to execution in Stadelheim was the People’s Court. It sentenced 347 people to death, which accounted for nearly 30 percent of all executions. The People’s Court frequently tried defendants outside of Berlin, and the condemned prisoners were then sent to the nearest execution site.
One group of victims particularly stands out. After the attempted assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in May 1942, the court that always held sessions in Nuremberg for this purpose sentenced numerous Czech resistance fighters to death. The 198 Czech prisoners executed in Stadelheim made up the largest group of non-Germans who were killed there. However, German resistance fighters, such as the seven members of the White Rose who were sentenced to death in Munich and Donauwörth, were also executed in Stadelheim.
Finally, there was a group of 57 French and Belgian prisoners who were executed in Stadelheim from 1943 onward following Hitler’s “Night and Fog” decree. The purpose of this decree was to sow terror and break the resistance to the Germans in Western Europe. All trace of these prisoners was lost after they were arrested ─ their families never learned their fate.