On September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, beginning the Second World War. After defeating the Polish Army, Nazi officials carried out indiscriminate retaliatory operations in response to resistance activities. These pacification operations were designed to terrorize civilian populations in areas with partisan activity.
The operations included mass arrests and executions of civilians. Approximately 825 Polish settlements were targeted. Among the victims were children as young as one and a half years old, as well as women and fathers attempting to protect their families.
One of the main perpetrators of these atrocities was a German officer who became known as the Butcher of Wiślica. His name was Albert Schuster.
Albert Hugo Schuster was born on February 13, 1912, in Płön, then part of the German Empire. From 1926 to 1928, he completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer and carpenter. In 1929, the Great Depression began in the United States, and its effects spread across Europe, especially in Germany.
Over the winter of 1929 to 1930, unemployment in Germany rose from 1.4 million to over 2 million. Because his father became unemployed and could no longer support him, the 19-year-old Schuster had to leave the state construction school in Płön in 1931, where he had planned to take the master builder exam.
By the time Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, one in three Germans were unemployed, with the figure reaching 6.1 million. By that time, Schuster had received his police training at the police academy in Meißen and continued at the gendarmerie academy in Ratzeburg.
On May 1, 1933, Schuster joined the Nazi Party and worked in the Schutzpolizei, the state protection police of Nazi Germany. In October of the same year, he was appointed to the rank of Wachtmeister, a British equivalent to corporal. In October 1937, he was promoted to Oberwachtmeister, equivalent to a sergeant in the UK Army.
After a six-month officer training course in Berlin-Köpenick, Schuster was promoted to lieutenant in the Schutzpolizei and Untersturmführer in the SS, equivalent to second lieutenant.
When the Second World War began on September 1, 1939, Schuster was working at a motorized traffic department in Berlin-Brandenburg, where he remained until October 1940. He then served as adjutant to the police president in Płön from March until October 1941.
From October 1941 to January 1942, he was the platoon leader of the gendarmerie platoon 7 at the field gendarmerie school. There, he trained members in measures against the so-called combating of gangs and the extermination of partisan fighters, designated as bandits and bandit supporters in the occupied Eastern territories.
Schuster lost this position when he was sentenced by the Düsseldorf SS and Police Court to an indefinite prison term for insulting the commander of the gendarmerie school. He served his sentence from January to March 1942 in a building in the commandant’s area of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, without contact with the camp’s inmates.
After serving his sentence, by order of SS leader Heinrich Himmler, Schuster was ordered back to the field gendarmerie school. He began forming gendarmerie battalions, to which he belonged until mid-April 1943, and with which he committed war crimes in many Polish towns.
First, however, Schuster was deployed to Belarus with the task of fighting partisans and shooting Jews. In the spring of 1943, he was sent to the Holy Cross Mountains in central Poland, where his brutality earned him the name the Butcher of Wiślica.
He commanded the 62nd motorized gendarmerie regiment, whose main objective was the liquidation of partisan groups. The first pacification actions took place immediately after the arrival of the unit, as early as April 1943.
The group used carts instead of motor vehicles so they could launch surprise attacks on their targets. They were extremely active, practically every day combing the surrounding areas in search of suspects. Men, women, and children discovered by chance during patrols were summarily executed.
The pattern of village pacification carried out by Schuster’s unit was always the same. At night or early in the morning, soldiers and gendarmes surrounded the entire village. They would round up the residents in one central location, dividing them into women with children and men.
When a list of everyone was available, more names were read out and passed to Schuster’s subordinates. When someone missing from the list was not found, a random person was selected, often more than were on the list. Schuster’s men then carried out the executions, usually by a single shot to the back of the head.
The platoon commander primarily searched for people who had clothing similar to uniforms or who were not exactly known by name. Civilians were arrested as hostages for family members who could not be found and were later shot.
After a failed attempt by partisans to destroy his post, Schuster moved to the monastery in the village of Święta Katarzyna, believing partisans would be less likely to shoot at a church. There, he tortured and murdered approximately 80 people, as well as hundreds of residents in the surrounding villages.
Victims had to dig their own graves. After the massacres, a so-called final speech was usually held about how necessary his action against the bandits was. As a reward, he would order himself and the gendarmes to put out lunch afterwards.
The villagers were ordered to thank Schuster for not killing them all and for freeing them from what the Germans called bandits.
On May 25, 1943, the pacification of the village of Wola Szczygiełkowa was carried out. The entire population was gathered in front of the local school. Schuster gave the assembled people 15 minutes to give information about the partisans. Receiving no response, he declared that every seventh man would be shot. The execution was carried out on 21 people.
On June 1, 1943, gendarmes organized a raid in Bantin. A public execution was carried out, shooting 39 men. At the end of June, the village of Dęborz was pacified, and 28 people were killed, including 10 women.
Between March and July 1943, Schuster and his men murdered over 400 people. On one occasion, he burned two children alive.
In January 1944, Schuster went on a death rally in the Opatów area, driving from village to village. He and his men kidnapped, robbed, tortured, and killed people who were unlucky enough to be in his way.
After being ambushed by a Home Army unit near the village of Ożarów, 12 of Schuster’s men were killed, and Schuster himself lost an eye. Fifteen local people were killed in retaliation.
In January 1945, Schuster left for Germany on sick leave. World War II in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. By then, for killing innocent Jews and Poles, Schuster had been awarded the Iron Cross second class and the War Merit Cross first class with swords.
After the war, Schuster was arrested on suspicion of war crimes but released due to lack of evidence. He settled in Rasha, East Germany. In 1951, he was hired by the East German secret police, the Stasi, as an informant.
He did not escape justice. The hunt for Schuster began in 1967 when a Polish war crimes commission conducted an investigation into his crimes. It was completed a year later, and after the files were sent abroad, it turned out that Albert Schuster was still alive and living in the vicinity of today’s Chemnitz.
After East German officials were officially informed about Schuster, the Stasi ceased contact with him. In December 1970, Albert Schuster was arrested.
Schuster’s trial started in January 1973. Schuster attempted to deflect blame onto the Gestapo for the shootings.
At one point during his trial, Wacław Juba, a surviving witness who showed a bullet scar on his neck, said he had been saved by an unexpected act of mercy by one of Schuster’s men. Juba had survived the initial massacre when the bullet only grazed his neck. One of Schuster’s men noticed he was still alive but, instead of finishing him off, whispered to him, “Lie still, everyone’s dead.”
When Schuster heard this, he suddenly stood up and shouted, “The witness is lying. It’s impossible. My gendarmes were so disciplined that no one would allow himself to be so disloyal. This is slander. This cannot be true because my soldiers were exactly following their orders, killing those forest bandits.”
The presiding judge responded by mentioning the name of one of Schuster’s victims, Wanda Piwowarczyk. Piwowarczyk was a two-year-old girl whom Schuster had personally executed as she was crying and hugging her mother.
Schuster waited for Piwowarczyk’s mother to recover from the shock of watching her daughter being murdered, then smiled at the woman and shot her in the head. She fell down while still holding her daughter in her arms. Juba witnessed the entire chain of events.
When the judge asked Schuster about Wanda Piwowarczyk, he went silent.
Albert Schuster was found guilty of participating in the rounding up and deportation of Jews in the Belarusian town of Nowogródek and the murder of at least 400 villagers in Poland. He was sentenced to death on May 31, 1973.
Schuster was shot at Leipzig prison. He was 61 years old. His body was cremated and buried in an unmarked grave.
There were no mourners for Albert Schuster.