The day on which Adolf Landl can no longer return is July 29, 1944. The Austrian gendarme leaves the post in Łopuszno during the occupied period Poland around 6 p.m., it will later be noted in the missing person report. He is dressed in a green police shirt, black boots and a field cap with edelweiss. A comrade meets him in the village, they drink vodka together at a farmer’s, but then go their separate ways. It wasn’t until five o’clock the next morning that Landl’s absence was noticed.
Adolf Landl was 32 years old at the time, 176 centimeters tall, slim, no beard, “no special characteristics,” as it says in the Event report on the departure of the district chief constable is noted. Born in June 1912 in Wald am Schober in Styria, Landl resigned from his service as a gendarme in 1938, but was drafted into the war in September 1939 as a police officer. He was supposed to convict smugglers in Poland and fight “bandits,” as the Nazis called the resisters. In December 1940 he was transferred as a horse commander to Łopuszno, a town in the rural region between Krakow and Warsaw. When Landl disappears, his comrades suspect he is in the hands of the partisans. According to his captain, “desertion is not to be expected.” He’s wrong.
