Erwin Busta
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Erwin Julius Busta (April 12, 1905 – December 27, 1982) was an Austrian SS-Hauptscharführer and concentration camp functionary. During World War II Busta was also closely associated with the German V-weapons program; serving on the SS staff at the Peenemünde Army Research Center, the V-2 rocket production facility at Mittelwerk and the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. He was convicted of war crimes by a West German court in 1970.
Erwin Busta was born in the city of Leoben, Austria (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) on April 12, 1905, and originally worked as a mason and carpenter. He joined both the Austrian Nazi Party and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1928 and became a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1930. In July, 1933 the Nazi Party was officially banned in Austria by the government of Engelbert Dollfuss. Busta moved to Augsburg, Germany shortly afterward where he became a member of the Austrian Legion, a paramilitary group composed of pro-Nazi Austrian expatriates. He underwent military and police-training and, in 1934, was recruited into the newly established SS-Totenkopfverbände.[1]
Busta initially served as a guard at the Esterwegen concentration camp and would later go on to work in various capacities at Dachau and Sachsenhausen.[2] In the summer of 1943 Busta was transferred to the Peenemünde Army Research Center, the main research and testing site for Germany's V-weapons program. This location was also home to a small concentration camp whose inmates (mostly Soviet and Polish POWs) were employed as slave-laborers. During his time at Peenemünde, Busta worked as a Lagerführer (camp leader) of the camp's central warehouse; supervising the prisoner-laborers as they performed various tasks ranging from construction work to the actual production of V-2 ballistic missiles.[2]
