Eigruber, August

Eigruber, August, born on 16-04-1907 Steyr, Austria, in November 1922 joined the National Socialist Worker Youth of Austria, whose leader he became in 1925. In April 1928, he joined the Nazi Party , (see Adolf Hitler) (did you know)  whose Steyr-Land district leadership he took up in October 1930.  Now Nazi Gauleiter of Reichsgau Oberdonau (Upper Danube) and Landeshauptmann of Upper Austria,  For his activities in the NSDAP, which was banned in Austria, Eigruber was sentenced to several months in prison, a very disputed man and a real Nazi.  From May 1935, Eigruber was the Gauleiter for the banned Party in the Upper Austria Gau, and he took over complete leadership of the Gau as of 1936. After Anschluss, he was appointed Landeshauptmann on 14-03-1938. Eigruber was a particularly enthusiastic Nazi. He was on good terms with Hitler and Reichsleiter Martin Bormann and was successful in asserting his ideas about the rebuilding of Linz over the head of the official architect Roderich  Fick. In March 1938, Eigruber joined the SS, in which he bore the rank of Brigadeführer   and on 22-05-1938, he is transferred to the SS as a Standartenführer, under Reinhard Heydrich . In June 1943, Eigruber was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer

  In April 1945 Eigruber was ordered by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler to organize the killing of all imprisoned Upper Austrians, anti Nazis, in the gruesome concentration camp Mauthausen in Austria.  Right after Germany’s unconditional surrender in May 1945, Eigruber was arrested in the Salzkammergut by the United States Army and he was questioned as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials.

In the Mauthausen-Gusen camp trials,   Eigruber was sentenced in March 1946 by the Dachau International Military Tribunal to death by hanging for his responsibility for crimes at Mauthausen concentration camp. The available Mauthausen inmate statistics from the spring of 1943, shows that there were 2.400 prisoners below the age of 20, which was 12.8% of the 18.655 population. By late March 1945, the number of juvenile prisoners in Mauthausen increased to 15.048, which was 19.1% of the 78.547 Mauthausen inmates. The number of imprisoned children increased 6.2 times, whereas the total number of adult prisoners during the same period multiplied by a factor of only four. These numbers reflected the increasing use of Polish, Czech, Russian, and Balkan teenagers as slave labour as the war continued. (see Settela Steinbach)   Statistics showing the composition of juvenile inmates shortly before their liberation reveal the following major child/prisoner sub-groups: 5.809 foreign civilian laborers, 5.055 political prisoners, 3.654 Jews, and 330 Russian POWs. There were also 23 Roma children, 20 so-called “anti-social elements”, 6 Spaniards, and 3 Jehovah’s Witnesses. Because the Germans destroyed much of the camp’s files and evidence and often gave newly-arrived prisoners the camp numbers of those who had already been killed, the exact death toll of the Mauthausen-Gusen complex is impossible to calculate.

       The sentence was carried out in the prison yard at Landsberg am Lech on 28-05-1947, age 39.  He first was buried on the prison cemetery, Spöttinger Cemetery  and later reburied in the family grave of Richard Drauz on the Stadtfriedhof in Heilbronn. Richard Drauz,  the Kreisleiter, Area leader of Heilbronn, was found guilty of killing a downed American Airman who had surrendered in the village of Dürrenzimmern and Drauz was sentenced to death on 11-12-1945. Transferred to Landsberg Prison, he was executed also by hanging on 04-12-1946, age 39. Eigruber was married and had five children. His son Hermann  was a politician after the war and died age 82, on 25-03-2013.