Frederic Benson—here on the left—had his picture taken twice with his father’s murderer.

In August 1938, when he was 18, Fritz Berger—his name at the time—escaped from Innsbruck and fled to London. In 1946, he returned to Austria as Frederic Benson, Lieutenant of the British Army. His father Richard Berger had been murdered in November 1938 just weeks after Frederic Benson had escaped.

Frederic Benson managed to track down and interrogate the SS officer, who was responsible for the murder of his father and numerous other prominent Jews who lived in Tyrol. In both photographs the SS officer is the man looking straight at the camera. Both photographs were taken during the interrogations.

The Nazis had seized power in Austria in March 1938. Just a few months later, in the night from the 9th to the 10th of November, the Nazi regime orchestrated a massive outbreak of violence aimed at the Jewish population across the entire Third Reich—which is also known as the “Kristallnacht” or November Pogrom.

Two days before the Pogrom, 17-year-old Herschel Grynszpan had shot a German diplomat in Paris, to protest the Nazi violence against the Jews. This was used to justify the systematically organized violence. Nazi commanders staged a so-called “spontaneous outbreak of public outrage”.

On this night, synagogues and temples, homes and businesses were plundered and destroyed across the German Reich. Thousands of Jewish men were taken into custody and abused, transported to concentration camps or murdered on the spot. The violence in Innsbruck was particularly brutal. Four men were killed.

One of these men was Frederic Benson’s father, Richard Berger, an engineer who had recently become the head of the Jewish community of Tyrol and Vorarlberg. An SS commando, headed by a lawyer named Gerhard Lausegger, took on the task of doing away with Richard Berger “unnoticed and silently”.

The commando, which likely consisted of six officers, rang the doorbell at Berger’s apartment at two-thirty in the morning and forced their way inside. The SS officers seized Berger and took him to a place nearby the Inn River, just outside the city limits. There, they dragged him out of the car, stoned him to death and threw his body into the river. Shortly after, when the corpse was found, the officials covered up the murder. At that time, Frederic Benson had already arrived in London and his brother in Palestine.

In 1946 Frederic Benson interrogated Lausegger. Shortly afterwards, Lausegger escaped. In 1947 he made his way to Argentina, where, like many other Nazi perpetrators, he could remain free of punishment. He lived there without being tried for his crimes until his death in 1966.

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