£30.00
A type -written letter by SS Kommandeu Walter Reder, one of the most well-known SS war criminals to Walter Strecker. This lot also includes a postcard signed and sent by Reder from the POW Camp 327 in Przemyśl (Poland) in 1975 which held belgian and Italian POWs taken prisoner after the collapse of Italy.
As commander of the Reconnaissance battalion of the ‘Reichsführer-SS’ division, in the summer and autumn of 1944 he led a number of ‘bandit-combatting’ actions involving the murder of hundreds of civilians by his soldiers which took place in Bardine di San Terenzo, Valla, and Vinca, and finally at Monte Sole.
On 31st October 1951, following a widely publicised trial, a military court in Bologna sentenced Reder to life imprisonment for his crimes in Italy. Released in 1985, he returned to Austria, where he was greeted with a handshake by Defence Minister Frischenschlager, a gesture that sparked a political crisis in the country. While Reder became a symbol of the brutality of the German occupation in Italy, he had many supporters in Austria and Germany who glorified him as a victim of Communism and the "last of the war prisoners".
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