On March 25, 1945, the wealthy Thyssen family organized a macabre human safari for capitalist oligarchs at one of their lavish parties in the courtyard of their castle in Rechnitz, Austria, where they killed at least 180 people for sport.

After the banquet, the Thyssens and their wealthy guests locked 180 prisoners, taken from Nazi concentration camps, in a stable. They forced them to undress and run around the mansion’s courtyard, as if it were a macabre game. They distributed weapons among themselves and began shooting at the prisoners from the balconies until they were all dead… and then continued drinking and dancing until dawn.

These prisoners had been at the Thyssen castle to defend it from the “Soviet threat.” They had been brought there as slave labor to fortify the castle, and with the inevitable end of Nazism approaching, the 180 weakest prisoners were chosen to be the victims of this human safari.

In the photo: Countess Margit von Thyssen receiving a trophy from a Nazi official at the Vienna Horse Show in 1942.

Source -> https://xcancel.com/DaniMayakovski/status/2036727101781389478#m

  • Anarcho-Bolshevik@lemmygrad.mlMEnglish
    14·
    2 months ago

    I thank you for sharing this. It is frustrating what little information in English there is on this atrocity. With the apparent exception of ‎Caroline Schmitz’s & David R. L. Litchfield’s The Thyssen Art Macabre (which I cannot access), the few English sources that mention this at all have little to say about it. One example from Edward B. Westermann’s Drunk on Genocide, pg. 197:

    On the eve of Palm Sunday, March 24, 1945, [Axis] administrators and female guests gathered for a party in the town of Rechnitz. Franz Podezin, the local Nazi Party leader, received a phone call in the evening concerning the execution of some two hundred Jews confined at the town’s railway station.¹

    Taking a break from the party, a group of ten [Axis] administrators and a female teacher left the festivities and participated in the murder of the Jews, after which they returned to continue their revelry. After the war, a German press story detailed the murders using the catchphrase “massacre as a party game.”²

    Then the author quickly moves on to betalk the wider context. I don’t resent him for doing that, but it is mildly irritating when trying to research this atrocity more.

    In any event, it remains important to have evidence of the upper classes’ diuturnal depravity. Antisemitism is a bourgeois vice.

    • rainpizza@lemmygrad.mlOP
      9·
      2 months ago

      Have you tried this book?

      • One night in March of 1945, on the Austrian-Hungarian border, a local countess hosted a party in her mansion, where guests and local Nazi leaders mingled. The war was almost over and the German aristocrats and SS officers dancing and drinking knew it was lost. Around midnight, some of the guests were asked to “take care” of 180 Jewish enslaved laborers at the train station; they made them strip naked and shot them all before returning to the bright lights of the party. It was another one of the war’s countless atrocities buried in secrecy for decades–until Sacha Batthyany started investigating what happened that night at the party his great aunt hosted.
  • SlayGuevara@lemmygrad.ml
    9·
    2 months ago

    I’m always baffled how a family that makes mundane stuff like elevators and escalators turns into this absolute embodiment of evil. Like, my building has an elevator made by this company. Why can’t we humans be normal.

    • knfrmity@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
      9·
      2 months ago

      All the big German companies that profited so immensely from the Nazi regime are still big companies today (ThyssenKrupp is even involved in weapons). None of the owners were held responsible for their crimes in the west, nor how could they have been without citizens of western allied countries looking at their own capitalist class and wondering if they’re not so different after all.