City Councillor Vahlberg, as representative of the Reich Chief Prosecutor

Senior Prosecutor Jaeger

The defendant is sentenced to death and to the loss of civil rights for undermining the military efficiency.

He bears the cost of the proceedings.

Findings[509]

The 44-year old defendant has had German citizenship since the “Anschluss.” His deceased mother was a Jewess. After passing through primary school and a 4-year high school course, he was trained as an electrician at a trade school in Vienna which he attended for 5 years, and then held several jobs until 1924. Next, he worked independently as a radio engineer and radio dealer in Vienna. He claims to have earned about 300 RM a month lately. From 1919 to 1922 he was a member of the Social Democratic Party. Later on he belonged to the “Fatherland Front.”

The Draxler couple were among his customers in Vienna to whom he had sold a radio several years ago. At Mrs. Draxler’s request he had repaired it several times. In March 1943 Mrs. Draxler called him in again to overhaul the radio. As he left the apartment, he happened to see lying on the kitchen table an application form for employment in the total war effort. Believing this to be Mr. Draxler’s form, he asked Mrs. Draxler whether she too had filled in such a form. When she informed him that she had got the form for herself, he said: “You realize, of course, that every woman who goes out to work, sends a soldier to his death”? Mrs. Draxler who was very indignant about this remark refused to answer, and he left very soon afterward. Later on she spoke of this incident to some of her acquaintances, among others to the wife of a political leader in the NSDAP who reported it to the Ortsgruppe.

The senate considers these facts to be correct on account of the trustworthy statements made under oath by Mrs. Draxler. The defendant admits that he was in the apartment of the witness in the spring of 1943 to test the radio and to have left through the kitchen; he denied emphatically, however, during the preliminary proceedings as well as at the trial to have made the remarks with which he is charged or any similar remark. He maintains to have only discussed business matters with Mrs. Draxler as with his other clients. The woman might have been annoyed that the radio had been out of order several times and had therefore reported him. The witness might have heard the remark from somebody else and mixed it up. His attitude was not hostile to the Third Reich. He had advised a National Socialist, Walter Pindur, who during the Schuschnigg period had supplied him with cardboard out of which swastikas had been cut, to be careful. The Party members, senior customs inspectors Schmidt and Scerences would be in a position to testify to it that he had not been an enemy of national socialism. An inquiry at the Ortsgruppe Rembrandt would show that he had done repair work for them free of charge.

The defendant cannot have any success with this defense. The witness Draxler firmly maintained her statements in the face of all his objections and the senate, from her bearing at the trial, gained the conviction that the witness did not wrongfully accuse the defendant out of annoyance because her radio did not work. Furthermore, she denied to have been annoyed at all and pointed out quite rightly that she had not made the report. The senate is convinced that by his denials the defendant is only trying to avoid the serious consequences of his offense. To interrogate the witnesses Pindur, Schmidt, and Scerences and to obtain a statement from the Ortsgruppe Rembrandt in Vienna is superfluous in view of the facts, especially if one considers that for ulterior motives the defendant would not have disclosed his true opinion to these witnesses nor to the Ortsgruppe.

The way in which the accused spoke calmly and deliberately, and without any apparent cause, only an enemy of the State can think and speak.