Ernst Girzick

Ernst Adolf Girzick (17 October 1911 in Vienna – date of death unknown) was an Austrian SS-Obersturmführer (1945) and an employee in Referat IV B4 of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA). Girzick was responsible for the deportation of Jews to concentration and extermination camps and was convicted in Vienna after the war to 15 years in prison.

Ernst Girzick during internment

Biography

Girzick, by profession an electrical engineer, was unemployed after the completion of his professional training. He joined the Austrian Bundesheer in 1931, and also became a member of the German Soldiers Bund and the Nazi Party. After his discharge from the army in 1933, he was again unemployed. Due to the so-called "Firecracker Attacks", Girzick was sentenced to five years imprisonment in 1934, but was released after two years from the detention center in Stein an der Donau because of an amnesty. Girzick moved to Germany and joined the Austrian Legion in the SS camp at Ranis. As of November 1937, he worked as a streetcar conductor in Dresden.[1] After the Anschluss, Girzick received the Blood Order. After 1938, he worked first in the "Property Registration Office" of the Ministry of Economics in Vienna, but he soon moved to the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna and remained there from 1939 as deputy to Alois Brunner, until March 1943. He was then in Prague as head of the main offices of the Central Office for the Settlement of the Jewish Question in Bohemia and Moravia. From March to December 1944, Girzick belonged to the Eichmann-Kommando in Budapest.[2] The purpose of this group was to send Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz. He received the War Merit Cross Second Class. Then Girzick was reinstated in Prague until the war in Europe ended. On 5 May 1945, he fled from there in a motorcade with Brunner and other RSHA staff.[3]

Post-war

Girzick was detained after the war. From the end of 1946, he had to answer to the People's Court in Vienna. He was finally sentenced on 3 September 1948 to 15 years in prison because he was involved in the deportation of Viennese Jews to Theresienstadt concentration camp and extermination camps.[4] On 18 December 1953, he was pardoned, since his wife and two children were living in poverty. He then lived in Seewalchen am Attersee.[5] Nothing is known about his life after this.

Bibliography
  • Hans Safrian: Eichmann und seine Gehilfen. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-596-12076-4.
  • Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007. ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8. (Second revised edition)
  • Jan Björn Potthast: Das jüdische Zentralmuseum der SS in Prag – Gegnerforschung und Völkermord im Nationalsozialismus. Campus, Munich 2002 ISBN 3-593-37060-3.

References
  1. Hans Safrian: Eichmann und seine Gehilfen, Frankfurt am Main 1995, p. 54f.
  2. Jan Björn Potthast: Das jüdische Zentralmuseum der SS in Prag – Gegnerforschung und Völkermord im Nationalsozialismus. Munich 2002, p. 86, 154
  3. Jan Björn Potthast: Das jüdische Zentralmuseum der SS in Prag – Gegnerforschung und Völkermord im Nationalsozialismus. Munich 2002, p. 87, 381
  4. Holocaust vor Gericht: Die Deportation der Wiener Juden in den Jahren 1941 und 1942 und die österreichische Justiz nach 1945 at www.nachkriegsjustiz.at
  5. Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 185
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