August Wutz (24.10.1879 Alburg near Straubing – 31.1.1963 Gräfelfing)

August Wutz grew up in Moosinning near Munich. He attended elementary school and vocational school, then worked on his parents’ farm. He joined the police force in 1904 after completing military service. Initially appointed as a police constable, he switched to the Criminal Investigation Department in 1913, where he primarily worked in the Identification Service. In October 1936, he joined the ‘Gypsy Police Department’, which he effectively headed up with the rank of Detective Chief Sergeant from 1940. That same year he joined the Nazi Party. As an executive officer, he was entrusted with the specific implementation of the persecution measures taken against Sinti and Roma. His superiors judged him to be “extremely hardworking, eager, conscientious and dutiful.” However, from 1942, he was often ill with “nervous exhaustion” (Staatsarchiv München, Personalakten 19692). Nevertheless, he took on the organization and implementation of the deportation of the Munich Sinti and Roma to the ‘Gypsy camp’ at Auschwitz-Birkenau in March 1943 and accompanied the transport.

After the end of war, Wutz was initially dismissed, then in March 1946, having been reinstated, was retired early for health reasons. In 1947, he was taken into American internment for six months. In December of that same year, a Munich tribunal sentenced him to ten years at a labor camp as a ‘major offender’. However, this sentence had no consequences for him as it was lifted by the Munich appeals chamber in March 1949. The chamber now classified Wutz as a ‘follower’ and refrained from taking atonement measures out of consideration of the internment served. It believed Wutz’s protestations that he always behaved correctly more than the numerous incriminating statements of surviving Munich Sinti and Roma.