‘My Polish Diary‘: An edition and remembrance project on the memoirs of a gendarme from Austria in Nazi-occupied Poland

The Austrian gendarme Adolf Landl was deployed in the German service in the Kielce area during the Second World War and secretly reported to the Polish resistance from 1941 onwards about planned murder operations against the Polish and Jewish population. In doing so, he saved the lives of numerous people. He was supported by his colleague Josef Rothwein, who was deployed as a clerk in the Kielce gendarmerie.

In contrast to Josef Rothwein, Adolf Landl survived the war, but struggled with an Austrian society in which former perpetrators could even return to the police force. In Poland, among the former partisans with whom he kept in touch by letter, he felt better understood and even visited Łopuszno in 1960, the place behind the Iron Curtain where he had been stationed from 1941.

Adolf Landl's memoirs, which he wrote many years after the war under the title ‘My Polish Diary’, relentlessly depict the brutal everyday life of the occupation in Poland from the perspective of someone directly involved. Discovered after his death in 1963, the diary triggered a public prosecutor's investigation in Austria against former colleagues, which led to a trial against the gendarmerie captain of Kielce, Gerulf Mayer, in 1969. Mayer was sentenced to eleven years in prison. In the course of their enquiries, Austrian police officers even investigated with Polish colleagues on the ground. Simon Wiesenthal was directly involved in the investigations into the crimes in the Kielce area.

The VWI is currently researching the ‘Landl case’ in archives in Austria and abroad and is working - together with the Documentation Centre of Austrian Resistance (DÖW) and the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe (GWZO) in Leipzig - on a critical academic edition of Landl's memoirs.