When a series of murders shook the Schongau area in 1946

Created: 01/14/2023, 16:00

Ilmar Kala, the letter writer, was able to recover from his gunshot wound in the former Schongau district hospital on Münzstrasse, now the headquarters of the Sparkasse Oberland.

© Repro: City Archives

A few years ago the Schongau Police received a letter from Ilmar Kala from Montrose in Tasmania/Australia.

In it he describes an attempted and a completed murder by robbery in November 1946 in Schongau.

After various research, Schongau's city archivist Franz Grundner wrote an essay about it in "Welf".

Schongau

– The post-war period is usually characterized as a period of reconstruction and the so-called economic miracle.

Less present is the fact that continued violence and crime were part of the accompaniments of liberation.

At the end of 1946, in what was then the district of Schongau in particular, there was a special mix-up of around 3,000 evacuees, 9,000 displaced persons and 6,000 foreigners.

The 6,000 foreigners were so-called “displaced persons” (DP): those who were uprooted, abducted, prisoners of war and former forced labourers.

"These were mostly Poles who were crammed together by the Americans in the former anti-aircraft barracks in Altenstadt," reports Grundner in "Welf", the yearbook of the Schongau Historical Association.

Dated barracks and poor care

In particular, the accommodation in shabby barracks and the poor care embittered many of those housed there.

Apparently, the unbridled violence of the war carried over into the post-war period and led to excessive, serious crime, which reached its bloody climax in November 1946 with robberies and six murders in what was then the Schongau district.

A sad start was on November 3, 1946, when two Estonian workers were murdered and attempted to murder them near the Lech barrage 7. On November 17, on the way between Peiting and Kreut, a triple murder followed.

The victims were two large farmers and a cheese maker from the hamlet of Kreut, which belongs to the market town of Peiting.

Deeds also at Epfach and Hohenpeissenberg

Franz Josef Strauss, the district administrator at the time, summarized the course of events in his report to the government of Upper Bavaria: "The murders consistently happened in such a way that the respective victim was forced to get off his bicycle, hand it over to the bandits and then was shot in the head and neck.”

At the end of the month, on November 25, 1946, a Ukrainian was murdered near Epfach and another young miner was murdered in Hohenpeissenberg.

Regular gangs were on the move

At the beginning of the occupation, property and black market crimes took up a large part of the police reports, but increasingly serious burglaries and robberies involving the use of armed force were dealt with.

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From the late summer of 1946 onwards, the situation worsened dramatically: gangs with criminal energy had formed in the Altenstadt DP camp.

Letter writer survived and emigrated

"In order to differentiate, however, it must be taken into account that the vast majority of the 'DP's' did not commit any violent crimes, and many crimes were also committed by American soldiers and the German population," explains Grundner.

With a few exceptions, however, murders and looting can be attributed to a few Polish “DPs” organized in gangs.

They remained in the collective perception of the population as a massive threat to their personal security.

Ilmar Kala, the letter writer from Australia, miraculously survived these violent excesses.

After he had recovered from his gunshot wound in the Schongau district hospital, he emigrated to Australia and was able to enjoy his life there.

However, his comrade at the time, Heldur Kaljurand, did not; he found his last resting place in the Schongau city cemetery in November 1946.

Welf yearbook:

The Welf is available for 14 euros in Schongau in the books gallery and at Seitz stationery, in Peiting at Buch am Bach and in the Schongau town museum.

You can find more current news from the region around Schongau at Merkur.de/Schongau.

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