42 Facts About Eduard Roschmann

Eduard Roschmann was an Austrian Nazi SS-Obersturmfuhrer and commandant of the Riga Ghetto during 1943.

Eduard Roschmann was responsible for numerous murders and other atrocities.

Eduard Roschmann was born on 25 November 1908, in Graz-Eggenberg, in Austria.

Eduard Roschmann was reputed to have come from the Styria region of Austria, from a good family.

From 1927 to 1934, Eduard Roschmann was a member of the Fatherland's Front, which in turn was part of the Austrian home guard.

Unlike Krause, Eduard Roschmann did not execute offenders on the spot, but, in most cases, sent them to Riga's Central Prison.

At that time, Eduard Roschmann held the relatively low rank of Unterscharfuhrer.

Historian Schneider, a survivor of the German ghetto, has stated that it is certain that Eduard Roschmann was a murderer, otherwise he never would have risen as high as he did in the SS.

On 20 May 1943 the Commandant of our ghetto, Eduard Roschmann, came to Sloka together with his adjutant Gymnich and the SD man Migge.

Eduard Roschmann was much too proud to beg for mercy.

Eduard Roschmann was killed immediately with a shot to the back of the neck.

Survivor Nina Ungar related a similar incident at the Olaine peat bog work camp, where Eduard Roschmann found three eggs on one of the Latvian Jews and had him shot immediately.

Eduard Roschmann heard rumours about the "good life", and attempted to prevent it by putting some of the workers into one of the prisons or transferring them to Kaiserwald concentration camp.

Eduard Roschmann himself was not above accepting bribes, or at least pretending to accept bribes.

In one instance, a shoemaker whose two children had been incarcerated in the Riga prisons as a result of Eduard Roschmann's investigation, attempted to secure their release by paying Eduard Roschmann a large number of gold coins.

Eduard Roschmann took the coins, but did not release the children.

Eduard Roschmann was later transferred to the Lenta work camp, a forced-labour facility in the Riga area where Jews were housed at the workplace.

Eduard Roschmann participated in the efforts of Sonderkommando 1005 to conceal the evidence of the Nazi crimes in Latvia by exhuming and burning the bodies of the victims of the numerous mass shootings in the Riga area.

Eduard Roschmann is sometimes described as the commandant of the Kaiserwald concentration camp, which was located on the north side of Riga.

One day Eduard Roschmann came into the barracks with his dog.

Eduard Roschmann then ordered the chief of police, a German Jew, to bring my father to the kitchen.

Historian Bernard Press, a Latvian Jew who was able to hide outside of Riga and avoid confinement in the ghetto, describes Krause, Gymnich and Eduard Roschmann as having engaged in random shootings of human beings.

Eduard Roschmann had her confined in the Central Prison, where she was not in fact executed but released based on the recommendation of Krause, who had previously wanted the woman to become his mistress.

Eduard Roschmann was a careful and meticulous investigator who would incarcerate and interrogate suspects and implicate and arrest many more people than Krause had.

In 1945, Eduard Roschmann was arrested in Graz, but later released.

Eduard Roschmann concealed himself as an ordinary prisoner of war, and in so doing obtained a release from custody in 1947.

Eduard Roschmann was sent to Dachau concentration camp which had been converted to an imprisonment camp for accused war criminals.

Eduard Roschmann succeeded in escaping from this custody; in the process while running in hiding from a British patrol at the Austrian Border he was shot through the lung and lost two toes of one foot to frostbite.

Eduard Roschmann travelled first to Genoa in Italy, and from there to Argentina by ship, on a pass supplied by the International Red Cross.

Eduard Roschmann was assisted in this effort by Alois Hudal, a strongly pro-Nazi bishop of the Catholic Church.

Eduard Roschmann arrived in Argentina either on 10 February 1948 or 2 October 1948.

Eduard Roschmann founded a wood import-export firm in Buenos Aires.

In 1955 in Argentina Eduard Roschmann married, although he was not divorced from his first wife.

However, the post-war Austrian legal system was ineffective in securing the return for trial of Austrians who had fled Europe, and no action was ever taken against Eduard Roschmann based on this charge.

Eduard Roschmann was in fact still not under arrest at the time the communique was issued.

The public and undiplomatic handling of the Argentine announcement concerning Eduard Roschmann raised speculation that it was a political move designed to placate the West Germans of human rights complaints and throw off charges of anti-Semitic attitudes within the government.

Emilio Wolf, a delicatessen owner in Asuncion who had been a prisoner under Eduard Roschmann, positively identified the body as Eduard Roschmann's.

Simon Wiesenthal was sceptical of the identification, claiming that a man matching Eduard Roschmann's description had been spotted in Bolivia only one month earlier.

Eduard Roschmann describes this fiction novel as "lurid" and containing "many inaccuracies".

Eduard Roschmann was writing a thriller, not an historical essay.

Eduard Roschmann did murder many people, but not a Wehrmacht captain.

Ironically Eduard Roschmann was eventually identified and denounced by a man who had just watched The Odessa File at the cinema.