Günther Tribukait
German military officer of World War II (1909–1947)
Günther Tribukait (sometimes referred to as Tribukeit or Tribukayt) was a German officer in the Wehrmacht during World War II and recipient of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross. After the war, Tribukait was tried for war crimes in Yugoslavia; he was convicted and executed in 1947.
Trial and execution
Towards the end of the war, Tribukait was taken prisoner by the Yugoslav Partisans. The 118th Jäger Division – and other Mountain and Jäger divisions as well – were involved in numerous war crimes throughout the Balkans, carrying out, among others, harsh retaliations against the civilian population, especially Serbs and Greeks. Until his trial, he was held in a POW camp at the outskirts of Belgrade.
Tribukait had the lowest rank of the defendants of the fourth process of the Yugoslav War Crimes Trials Proceedings (5–16 February 1947). He was tried along with six other major war criminals: Generaloberst Alexander Löhr (commander-in-chief of Army Group E), Generalleutnant Josef Kübler, Johann Fortner and Fritz Neidholdt, Generalmajor Adalbert Lontschar and the SS-Brigadeführer August Schmidthuber. All of the defendants were found guilty of "mass executions of non-combatants, especially of women and children, destruction and razing of homes, kidnapping of Yugoslav civilians to concentration camps and torture and murder of POWs."
All of them were sentenced to death. According to a witness, Löhr and the six other convicts were imprisoned again in the POW camp outside of Belgrade – evidently, Löhr spent his last hours "in a small prison cell, bound in chains and wearing only his underwear". During the night of 25/26 February 1947, ten convicts – among them Tribukait – were picked up by a truck and were driven to the place of execution, where they were executed by hanging in the early hours of 26 February 1947.
“Günther Tribukait” enters the record as german military officer of World War II (1909–1947). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Günther, Tribukait and German can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5627086. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1947.
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This entry incorporates text from “Günther Tribukait” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.