»Day After Day … Until Late at Night«

One of the main measures adopted by the Nazi occupying forces to de-nationalize Slovenians were mass arrests and deportations of the Slovenian population, which was something the Nazis considered imperative in order to achieve their goal of total Germanization of the Slovenian territory. Soon after the occupation in 1941, the Nazi security police units in Styria began making mass arrests among the Slovenian population. The Commander of Security Police “Alpenland” authorized the 72nd Reserve Police Battalion to do the job and assigned the Reserve Police Troop “Wien”, which was under the command of Captain Johann Mechels, to assist in the work.

The German career police officer Mechels (1897-1978) fought as a member of various German army units in the Western front already in World War I. After the war, he continued his career in the police ranks; he joined the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) in Bremen, in 1937 he became a member of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and was promoted to the rank of Captain. After the annexation of the Sudetenland to the German Reich, his police duties led him over the German border to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia where he became the commander of the troop stationed in Karlovy Vary.

In the summer of 1941, he arrived to Lower Styria as a commander of the Reserve Police Troop “Wien”. Stationed in Maribor, their job was to oversee the deportation of Slovenians to German camps. In doing so, Mechels frequently worked with the heads of district gendarmeries and various translators. In his letter to Anton Dorfmeister, Mechels writes that his troop helped to relocate 12,000 Slovenians to Germany (or “Altreich”). “This operation continues day after day, in snow or rain, and officers and soldiers are until late at night faced with this highly demanding task”, he adds and cold-bloodedly and convincingly continues:” … the work was carried out in an unselfish manner and in the spirit of self-sacrifice”.

After the attack of the partisan unit Revirska troop on the German gendarmerie station in Zagorje in August 1941, the Reserve Police Troop “Wien” was sent from Maribor to Zasavje region, where it fought against partisan units for a whole month. In November 1942, Mechels and his troop were deployed to a wider Celje area and were given the task of following the movements of the partisans. In doing so, they were helped by their subordinate units; motorized gendarmerie troop of Celje, ten gendarmerie stations and two armed Wehrmannschaft units. Police units under Mechels’s command are mentioned in the documents originating from the gendarmerie stations in Mozirje, Braslovče, Velenje and Polzela. At the same time, a squad of the Reserve Police Troop “Wien” was carrying out executions by shooting in the courtyard of the court prison in Maribor. “During this time, in close cooperation with the Gestapo and gendarmerie, 456 state enemies (violent communist criminals) were destroyed in almost daily combat” Mechels writes, carelessly justifying his desire for recognition and career advancement and finishing his narrative with chilling words that the year he had spent with his unit in Lower Styria and in Croatia had been the best year in his 26-year-long career; at the end of May 1942, he left for police training to Germany. In his reply to Mechels’s letter, the Regional Councillor in Celje Anton Dorfmeister expressed his “sincere thanks” to Captain Mechels and his unit for their contribution to bringing “peace and restoration to Lower Styria” despite the bitter cold and mountainous terrain.

In April 1943, Mechels, now a major, was appointed the commander of the III Battalion of the 28th Police Regiment Todt, whose security area covered the Dutch regions of Groningen, Friesland and Drenthe. At the time, the Netherlands was engulfed in a wave of strikes, following the issue of the order by the German occupier for the re-arrest of the previously released Dutch prisoners of war and their deportation for forced labour in Germany. People were outraged, and the general strike soon spread across the whole of the country, leading to a number of sabotage actions. In the village of Trimunt the locals even placed a couple of tree trunks across the road so as to unable any kind of movement of the German units. The reaction was swift and merciless – on May 3, 1943, sixteen men were shot in retaliation, including a thirteen-year-old boy. The order was executed by Mechels, indoctrinated as he was in the Nazi ideology and most probably appointed to his position because of his experience in fighting the partisans in Slovenia.

In August 1943, the III Battalion of the 28th Police Regiment Todt under Mechels’s command was withdrawn from the Netherlands and, by Himmler’s order, relocated to the south of France, to Marseille, where it again took part in the fight against resistance fighters and supervised the high-altitude border regions. In February 1944, Major Mechels and his battalion were again sent to the Slovenian territory, this time to Upper Carniola, but due to his health condition Mechels was forced to abandon his fight against the partisans. He returned to his hometown of Bremen, where he continued to work at the seat of the security police right up to the end of the war. After the British occupied the city in April 1945, he spent a little less than a year in several concentration camps, was released in February 1946, and, despite the stain left on him by his wartime activities, got a job working for the traffic police in Lower Saxony.

On the outside, the life of Johann Mechels may seem as just another of many stories of individuals, who saw Hitler’s Germany as their opportunity to achieve career success and advancement within the Nazi organizational structure, blindly following orders without any hesitation or any trace of personal responsibility. But since the new post-war authorities strove to acquire legitimacy through establishing law and just order, also by means of trials of war criminals, Mechels’s bloody past finally caught up with him. In 1949, he was arrested and convicted for his crime in Trimunt at the Groningen court in the Netherlands. Despite receiving a twenty-year sentence, he was released in 1954, after having served only six years.

Tanja Žohar