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Article: My Aunt Had a Dinner Party, and Then She Took Her Guests to Kill 180 Jews

S

skullmuffins

Banned
One morning in April 2007 journalist Sacha Batthyany was approached by an elderly colleague at the Swiss daily where they both worked at the time.

The colleague waved a newspaper clipping in front of him. It was an investigative report entitled, “The Hostess from Hell,” published by a German daily.

Glancing at the headline, Batthyany didn’t understand why he was being shown this article, but then he looked at the picture of the hostess and recognized it immediately. It was Margit, his father’s aunt —someone to whom the family demonstrated the utmost respect and also around whom they tended to tread carefully.

So he started to read the piece. In March 1945, it said, just before the end of World War II, Margit held a large party in the town of Rechnitz on the Austrian-Hungarian border to fete her Nazi friends. She, the daughter and heiress of European baron and tycoon Heinrich Thyssen, and her friends drank and danced the night away.

At the height of the evening, just for fun, 12 of the guests boarded trucks or walked to a nearby field, where 180 Jewish slave laborers who had been building fortifications were assembled. They had already been forced to dig a large pit, strip, and get down on their knees. The guests took turns shooting them to death before returning to the party. The organizer of this operation was Margit’s lover Hans Joachim Oldenberg. Margit’s husband, Count Ivan Batthyany, Sacha’s grandfather’s brother, was also at the party.

It was the first time that Batthyany, then 34, had heard about this incident. He was shocked. “Let’s set aside that it was my aunt,” said Batthyany, who visited Israel last week as a guest of the Jerusalem Book Fair. “It’s just an incredible, brutal story of this night. I mean, I know there are hundreds and thousands of other [violent stories] from the war — I don’t want to compare, but if you read what happened that night it is just unbelievable.”

In the article in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, the writer, David Litchfield, describes the party as a celebration of death. Killing for dessert. “I was in shock. I was shocked and surprised that I had never heard of this. And I had studied history, I knew more than the average person, but I’d never heard about this massacre or about Rechnitz, or about my family’s connection to any kind of story connected to the Holocaust.
“I remember that I had to finish a stupid assignment I was working on but all I was thinking was that I couldn’t wait to talk to my father.

“This area between Budapest and Vienna is where my family comes from, where my family owned land and castles and stuff. I remember asking him, ‘Did you ever hear of Rechnitz?’ And he said, ‘Yes, of course.’ Then I asked him, ‘Did you know about the massacre?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, yeah. I knew about it. I heard about it, of course, I’m not stupid.’ So I asked, ‘Did you know that Margit was at the party that night when it happened?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, everyone knew it.’

“So I wasn’t talking as logically as I am now, but I said more or less, ‘So you knew A and you knew B, but you never made the connection?’ And he said no. I asked him why not and he said, ‘I don’t know why not.’

“And it was this moment that was the starting point of all the emotional stuff about not drawing the connection. Why not? Who has the power to decide not to ask? He said he never thought about it. He never thought there was a connection between the people in the castle and what happened there. Everyone knew that [Margit] had affairs with Nazis, she was a German who was very much into the Nazi regime and she had affairs, but no one ever wanted to ask the questions.”
Click to expand...

The article is pretty long, but the rest of it is basically recounting the story of how he went around researching more of his family history for his book A Crime in the Family.
 
G

gnomed

Member
theignoramus said:
Disgusting and evil. Stories like this are why I'm a firm believer in retribution and settling scores. Some people just deserve to be on the receiving end of vengeance.
Click to expand...
I read this and don't really agree with you. But reading this horror makes me understand your reasoning a little. It does make me feel a bit hopeless with travesties such as this.
 
E

EGM1966

Member
theignoramus said:
Disgusting and evil. Stories like this are why I'm a firm believer in retribution and settling scores. Some people just deserve to be on the receiving end of vengeance.
Click to expand...

Justice is fine - and it can be harsh - but revenge simply brings further problems down the line and it behind most of the troubles globally between factions with long histories of tit for tat revenge taking.
 
S

Sojgat

Member
If you saw this as a scene in a movie, you'd think it was too over-the-top to be believable. Fucking evil scum.
 
n64coder

n64coder

Member
You can sign up with a bogus email address to access the article. I did use my real one but there is no email verification. Reading the article now.
 
K

Koomaster

Member
Why would you ever spread this story? If I found out a close family member did something like this I would just quietly put away whatever article/book I was reading and never mention it to anyone ever.
 
M

Mumei

Member
I couldn't click out of the ad at first, but after I just clicked "Act Now", and then went back to the previous tab I was able to read it after exiting out of the advertisement that was below the "Act Now" button I couldn't exit before.

It makes you click to Act Now, but it doesn't actually make you sign up.
 
W

WrenchNinja

Member
Koomaster said:
Why would you ever spread this story? If I found out a close family member did something like this I would just quietly put away whatever article/book I was reading and never mention it to anyone ever.
Click to expand...
He says why in the article. He's an investigative journalist and his family kept trying to bury this past and wouldn't ask questions about their respected aunt acting like everything was normal. Theyre here throwing lavish parties while there is a real darkness in their history that they want to ignore. He goes into how Switzerland has issues of not acknowledging and talking about the past.
 
guggnichso

guggnichso

Banned
Sadly, a lot of similar stories have been buried by time, and a lot of the perpetrators of such crimes got to live a happy fruitful life after WWII.

I think a lot of people nowadays with their lackluster education especially in the U.S. do not even begin to grasp what the horrors of the holocaust entailed.
 
C

CHC

Member
And people think modern Republicans wouldn't do this with black prisoners or illegal immigrants.

Such a horrifying story.
 
B

benicillin

Banned
This is like a scene they'd put in a wolfenstein game and people would call it controversial or over the top.

Nope, real life.
 
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