Oberst a.D. Walter Adam

Walter Adam was born in Klagenfurt, the son of an Austro-Hungarian army officer. His childhood involved frequent changes of residence due to his father's profession. He lived in Linz, Innsbruck and Lemberg. At the age of fourteen, he attended the military school for officer candidates and later entered active military service. After attending the war school in Vienna between 1909 and 1912, he was transferred to the general staff. During the First World War, he distinguished himself in Serbia and with the 14th Mountain Brigade and was promoted to captain ahead of schedule. He later joined the staff of Field Marshal Conrad von Hötzendorf. He was appointed Chief of Staff of the Austro-Hungarian troops for a mission in Turkey.

After the end of the war, he remained in the army and worked with the new Federal Minister of the Armed Forces, Carl Vaugoin, on his tasks to restructure the army. In 1924, he left military service to become a member of the editorial team of the Reichspost, published by the Christian Social Party, in the same year. Thanks to his exceptional journalistic skills, he was promoted to deputy editor-in-chief Friedrich Funder.

The resignation of the staunch opponent of National Socialism, Walter Adam, was explicitly demanded in February 1938 in the "Dictate of Berchtesgaden" along with a list of other demands. The "Dictate of Berchtesgaden" was an attempt by Chancellor and dictator Kurt von Schuschnigg to save Austria's independence by visiting Adolf Hitler in Berchtesgaden. Adolf Hitler presented his demands to him there.

On the day the German Wehrmacht invaded Austria on March 12, 1938, Walter Adam was arrested by the Gestapo and deported to the Dachau concentration camp on April 1, 1938 on the so-called "Prominent Transport". On September 27, 1939, he was deported to Flossenbürg concentration camp and returned to Dachau concentration camp on March 2, 1940. He was finally released from the concentration camp on July 15, 1943 and banned from the Gau. The abuse he experienced in the concentration camps left him physically very weak. Walter Adam lived in Westerwald in Rhineland-Palatinate until the end of the war, where Count Eduard Walderdorff took him in. There he was in contact with the resistance fighters around Claus Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.

In April 1945, while in exile, he wrote the book "Night over Germany", in which he described the structure and nature of the Dachau and Flossenbürg concentration camps in an analytical and factual manner before the end of the war. He thus produced one of the first eyewitness accounts of life in the concentration camps.