Walter Reder, a Nazi war criminal who received an official welcome home from an Austrian Cabinet official after he was released early from an Italian prison, has died in Vienna at the age of 75.
The time or cause of death was not reported by the Austrian Press Agency, which indicated only that he had died in a Vienna hospital.
Reder, who spent 37 years in an Italian prison for war crimes, made international news in January 1985 when he was secretly freed. He was greeted with deference in Graz, Austria, by Austrian Defense Minister Friedhelm Frischenschlager, the son of a Nazi and himself a member of the right-wing Freedom Party.
Frischenschlager, who previously embarrassed the Austrian government by appearing at an SS memorial, received Reder just prior to a highly publicized meeting of the World Jewish Congress in Vienna.
The turmoil in the Austrian government that erupted was followed by more furor when it was disclosed that Reder had been receiving a war pension from the Austrian government since 1970, retroactive to 1964.
The Austrian Ministry of Social Welfare had said a private association of war victims had applied for the pension on Reder’s behalf because he had been injured during the war. The payments had been suspended but then resumed.
Reder, who was a major in the Nazi SS, was taken prisoner in 1948 by British occupation forces in the Austrian province of Styria and extradited to Italy to stand trial for sending hundreds of Italians to their deaths in 1944.
He was convicted in 1953 of authorizing the killings of at least 600 of 1,830 residents of the northern Italian village of Marzabotto, in reprisal for partisan attacks on German troops.
He was sentenced to life in prison and incarcerated in a military prison in Gaeta, north of Naples. In 1980, his sentence was reduced. He was to have completed it in July 1985.
His release followed several Austrian government requests for clemency and a letter he wrote in December 1984, in which he expressed “profound repentance” for the killings and acknowledged his personal role in the massacre.
Two days after his letter was made public, relatives of his victims were asked to vote on his release. They opposed it 237-1. But the Italian government disregarded this.
Reder was the last Nazi war criminal held in Italy. Its decision to release him was viewed as a means to improve relations with Austria.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
