Eduard Roschmann - Character

Character

According to Gertrude Schneider, Roschmann was clearly a murderer, but was not uniformly cruel. She records an instance where Krause, Roschmann's predecessor as commandant, had executed Johann Weiss, a lawyer from Vienna, and a World War I veteran, for the "crime" of having hidden money in his glove. A year later, when Roschmann was commandant, his widow and daughter requested of him that he allow them the Jewish custom of visiting the grave. Roschmann allowed the request. Historian Schneider, in describing this incident, characterized Roschmann as "that most peculiar SS man."

According to Schneider (a Riga ghetto survivor) on occasion, Roschmann would order food abandoned during searches for contraband to be sent to the ghetto hospital. Schneider particularly objected to Roschmann's modern image as the so-called "butcher of Riga". In this connection, it should be noted that up to the time of the publication of the Forsyth book in 1972, Herberts Cukurs, a famous Latvian pilot, had been the person known as "the Butcher of Riga" as a result of his actions during the occupation of Latvia from 1941 to 1944. :

t would be a mockery to single out Roschmann as "butcher" and ignore all the others. Roschmann ... probably preened himself in front of his SS cronies when citing The Odessa file as proof of his ruthless efficiency three decades earlier. Actually, however, he was hardly a "mass murderer." The atrocities mentioned in The Odessa File occurred long before he came on the scene. What he actually did in the ghetto was far less exciting: he would spend hours on end just standing in front of the Kommandanteur, not knowing what to do with himself. From time to time he would sneak a look inside the hospital, but mostly he would walk around aimlessly, growing fatter by the day, more or less ignored by everyone.

Other accounts assign a more malignant role to Roschmann. Historian Bernard Press, a Latvian Jew who was able to hide outside of Riga and avoid confinement in the ghetto, describes Krause, Gymnich and Roschmann as having engaged in random shootings of human beings. Press describes an incident where a woman was condemned to death for "illegal correspondence" with a friend in Germany. Roschmann had her confined in the Central Prison, where she was not in fact executed but released based on the recommendation of Krause, who had previously wanted the woman to become his mistress.

Max Michelson described Roschman, Rudolf Lange and Kurt Krause as all being "notorious sadists." Michelson, a Riga ghetto survivor, described Roschmann:

When Krause was replaced by Roschmann in early 1943, we were happy finally to be rid of this madman. Roschmann, a lawyer, was indeed more deliberate, less likely to react by killing his victims on the spur of the moment. Roschmann, however, was a careful and meticulous investigator who would incarcerate and interrogate suspects and implicate and arrest many more people than Krause had. As a result, our situation did not improve, and the number of people killed under Roschmann was even larger than under Krause.

Max Kaufmann, a survivor of Latvian ghetto, compared Roschmann to Krause, coming to a similar conclusion as Max Michelson:

Krause, a psychopath and a sadist, acted suddenly and spontaneously, handing down his verdicts without a detailed explanation of the situation and executing them immediately. Roschmann, the jurist, deliberated for a long time, investigated thoroughly, and thus pulled down more and more people to their destruction.