Erwin Lambert was an SS corporal who supervised construction of the gas chambers for the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar and then at Sobibór and Treblinka extermination camps. The gas chamber he built killed more people than previous efforts in the extermination program.
Erwin Hermann Lambert was born on December 7, 1909, at Schildow, a small town near Berlin, to Hermann and Minna Lambert. His father was killed in 1915 in World War I, and his mother remarried; his stepfather owned a construction company in Schildow. Lambert belonged to the Evangelical Church, and after completing elementary school, he became an apprentice locksmith. After a year, he decided to become a mason’s apprentice, qualifying in three years. He then studied a further three semesters at a Berlin construction school, working on practical jobs with various building companies. He was always employed—initially as a mason, then as a master mason, and afterward as a foreman for various Berlin construction companies.
Lambert joined the NSDAP in March 1933, and from 1938 to 1939, he worked for the party in Schildow. At that time, he was not yet a member of any of the party’s paramilitary organizations. In late 1939, on the recommendation of the local office of the German Labor Front (Deutsche Arbeitsfront), Aktion T-4 sought to recruit Lambert. In January 1940, he accepted the offer.
Lambert became a member of the Charitable Foundation for Sanatoria in Berlin, one of several front organizations. Dr. Carl Schneider, a psychiatrist who was a senior researcher for Aktion T-4, briefed Lambert about his tasks and the Reich’s requirements of secrecy. Lambert’s first assignment was the renovation of the villa at Tiergartenstrasse 4 (after which Aktion T-4 was named). The central office then instructed him to install gas chambers and crematoria at clinics at Hartheim, Sonnenstein, Bernburg, and Hadamar.
The experience gained from Aktion T-4 qualified Lambert as a specialist for murder plants wherever they were needed. In spring 1942, he was ordered to Treblinka and reported to Richard Thomalla, who oversaw the construction of Treblinka’s first gas chambers. In August 1942, Lambert was photographed demolishing a glass factory chimney, the bricks from which were used in the construction of the larger gas chambers in Treblinka. Then under the instruction of Christian Wirth, Lambert built fixed gas chambers at Sobibór and Treblinka with the help of Ukrainian volunteers, using the slave labor of Jewish inmates.
On his first visit to Treblinka, Lambert built various barracks, the fences within the camp, and the ammunition bunker. During his second visit, he built the large new gas chamber. On a subsequent visit, he undertook repair and conversion work on existing buildings.
Lambert then went to Sobibór with Lorenz Hackenholt, who built and operated the gas chamber at the Bełżec extermination camp. Reporting to the commandant, Franz Reichleitner, he was given exact guidelines for construction of the gas chambers. The warehouse was already in operation as a gassing facility, but the old installation was not big enough and reconstruction was necessary.
Lambert directed construction in several nearby labor camps, such as Dohorucza and Poniatowa in Opole. He later stated that he was an uninvolved expert dedicated exclusively to his work and not interested in the conditions that surrounded it. In the spring of 1943, however, he again carried out conversions and repairs at Treblinka and the Hartheim T-4 center. Finally, Lambert took part in the relocation of the T-4 office from central Berlin to Gut Steineck near Schönfliess.
After Aktion Reinhard ended during 1943, Lambert spent several weeks over Christmas on home leave before being transferred to Trieste in early 1944 as a police sergeant. In January 1945, he was also required to install crematoria at the Italian concentration camp Risiera di San Sabba, in Trieste. More than 3,000 corpses were cremated here, while thousands more were transported elsewhere. In order to hide the evidence of their acts as the war was ending, the Nazis destroyed the crematorium.
On May 15, 1945, Lambert was captured by the British and delivered to the Americans, who brought him to a camp in Aalen, Württemberg. During his denazification hearing, Lambert was classified as a “follower” (Mitläufer). He settled in Stuttgart, where he became a self-employed tiler.
On March 28, 1962, Lambert was arrested and tried at the first Treblinka trial. He was convicted in the district court in Düsseldorf on September 3, 1965, for assisting in the murder of at least 300,000 people and was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment. Having already served this time, he was freed. At the Sobibór trial in 1966, he denied involvement in the killing operations, claiming that he had only suspected the building would be used for killing. Lambert was acquitted.
Erwin Lambert died on October 15, 1976, in Stuttgart.
Herbert Lange was one of the main perpetrators of the Nazi murder of patients in Germany and occupied Poland during the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. At the end of 1939, he became the head of the so-called Sonderkommando Lange, and by the following summer, his unit had murdered more than 6,000 Polish and Jewish patients from hospitals and nursing homes in the area known to the Nazis as the Warthegau, in East and West Prussia, and in other annexed areas. As of December 1941, Sonderkommando Lange was using gas vans to kill tens of thousands of Jews and Roma classed as “unfit to work” in the extermination camp of Chełmno, of which Lange was the first commandant until April 1942. Later, he commanded Sonderkommando Lange in carrying out the extermination of Jews from the Łódź ghetto.
Herbert Lange was born in Menzlin, Western Pomerania, on September 29, 1909. He enrolled to study law at university but failed to graduate. He subsequently joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1932. Three months later, he enlisted in the SA, led by Ernst Röhm, and in 1934, he joined the SS. By 1935, he had become a deputy police commissioner.
In 1939, Lange joined Einsatzgruppe Naumann (EG VI), which consisted of about 150 men. In the wake of the German army’s invasion of Poland, he entered Poland with EG VI during the September campaign. On November 9, 1939, he was promoted to the rank of SS-Untersturmführer.
On September 12, 1939, as part of his duties, Lange was ordered to build a concentration camp at Posen (Poznán). This became known as KZ Fort VII and was part of the huge Prussian fortifications encircling the city. For a very short time, from October 10 to 16, Lange was the camp commandant. Once he had established the camp, however, he moved on.
From mid-October 1939, he headed up his own special unit, Sonderkommando Lange, and in early in 1940, this was tasked with the extermination of mentally ill people in the Nazi administrative area known as the Wartheland. By mid-1940, Lange and his men had been responsible for the murder of about 1,100 patients in Owińska, 2,750 patients at Kościan, 1,558 patients and 300 Poles at Działdowo, and hundreds of Poles at Fort VII, where the mobile gas chamber (Einsatzwagen) was invented. The unit, equipped with a gas van, shuttled between hospitals picking up patients and killing them with carbon monoxide.
Lange’s effectiveness in organizing these murders was highly regarded by the SS hierarchy. He was promoted to SS-Obersturmfűhrer on April 20, 1940, and his unit was permanently stationed at the Soldau concentration camp. Later, Lange was responsible for mass killing activity in the Konin region, but officially from the end of November 1940 to late 1941, he was head of the economic crimes department of the Criminal Police.
SS and police authorities established the Chełmno killing center for the single purpose of annihilating the Jewish population of the Wartheland, including the inhabitants of the Łódź ghetto. It was the first stationary facility where poison gas was used for mass murder of Jews, and Lange was tasked with the liquidation of 100,000 Jews from the region. In April 1942, Lange’s unit was renamed Sonderkommando Kulmhof and introduced improvements to the extermination process. Lange constructed cremation pits to replace mass graves. He was succeeded by Hans Bothmann, who formed Sonderkommando Bothmann later in 1942. At a very minimum, 152,000 people were killed at the camp, with later estimates charging up to 180,000 victims.
Lange held the position of commander of the Chełmno extermination camp from December 7, 1941, until February 21, 1942. He was then transferred to the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA). Here, he served under Arthur Nebe as a criminal investigator and went to the Balkans on an anti-partisan mission.
In March 1944, Lange returned to the already-inactive death camp at Chełmno as part of Sonderkommando Bothmann and resumed gassing operations for the final 10 transports of Jews.
In 1944, army officers led by Klaus von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler, and Lange aided in catching the conspirators. His work in this endeavor was so highly regarded that he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannfűhrer.
The circumstances of Lange’s death are unclear, but it is believed that he was killed in action during the Battle of Berlin, probably around April 20, 1945.
Rudolf Lange was a prominent Nazi police official and a key Einsatzkommando officer who was present at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Lange commanded the Nazi Party Intelligence Organization (Sicherheitsdienst, or SD) and the Nazi Security Police (SiPo) in Riga, Latvia. He was a mass killer who was largely accountable for the extermination of the Jewish population of Latvia. Einsatzgruppe A, which operated within his area of command, killed over 250,000 people in less than six months.
Lange was born on November 18, 1910, in Weisswasser, Saxony, the son of a railway construction supervisor. He finished high school in 1928 and studied law at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He received a doctorate in law in 1933 and joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) in November of that year, having been recruited by the Gestapo.
Feeling that this had been a bad career move, in 1936, Lange joined the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Within a year, he had absorbed the values of SS morality and ideology, leading him to resign his church membership by 1937. In May 1938, soon after the Anschluss of Austria with Germany, Lange was transferred to the Gestapo in Vienna to supervise and coordinate the fusion of the Austrian police system with that of Germany. He was then transferred to Stuttgart in June 1939, where he became a Gestapo administrator. By 1940, he was Berlin’s deputy head of police.
In 1941, Lange was promoted to the rank of SS major, and on June 5, 1941, he reported to Pretzsch, Saxony, and the command staff of Einsatzgruppe A, headed by SS-Brigadeführer Franz Walter Stahlecker. Lange was placed in charge of Einsatzkommando 2, or EK2. He was one of the few people aware of the Führer Order (Führerbefehl) dealing with the so-called Jewish problem in Latvia. Sent to Riga, he became chief of the Riga Gestapo and Criminal Police in July 1941.
From the beginning of his involvement in Latvia, Lange gave orders to squads of Latvians, such as the Arājs Kommando, to carry out massacres in the smaller cities. Another local group receiving orders from Lange was the Vagula-ns Kommando, responsible for the Jelgava massacres in July and August 1941. Lange personally supervised some of the executions and ordered that all SD officers should personally participate in the killings.
Between November 25 and November 29, 1941, Jews from the Reich itself were also sent to Riga. As construction of the Riga concentration camp had not begun, Jews coming off trains from Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Vienna, and Breslau were summarily shot without evaluating whether they were suitable for work. In addition, Lange planned and executed the murder of 24,000 Latvian Jews at the Rumbula Forest near Riga from November 30 to December 8, 1941.
By December 1941, Lange’s EK2 had killed about 60,000 Jews from Latvia, as well as those from Germany and Austria. That month, he was named commander of the Security Police and Security Service in Latvia. As his department served as the focus of all SD operations in Latvia, Lange is widely recognized as one of the primary perpetrators of the Holocaust in Latvia. On January 20, 1942, representing Friedrich Jeckeln, Lange participated in the Wannsee Conference in Berlin to discuss the Final Solution. By now, he was the deputy head of all SS task forces in Latvia. Although he was the lowest-ranking SS officer present at Wannsee, his on-site experience in conducting the mass murder of deported Jews was considered as valuable for the conference; he had, after all, been responsible for the mass killings on the outskirts of Riga that murdered 35,000 people in two days, and he was able to report firsthand on killing procedures.
Lange also carried out further killing operations against Jews, political opponents, and partisans in Latvia using gas vans. Later in 1942, he was promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer in Riga, where he remained until 1945. He assumed command of the SD and SiPo for the Reichsgau Wartheland, situated in Posen (Poznań), Poland.
In January 1945, Lange was promoted to SS-Standartenführer. Posen, which lay on the main route between Warsaw and Berlin, had to be cleared by the Red Army before the final assaults designed to capture Berlin and end the war could begin. Bitter fighting saw the outlying forts reduced and city blocks seized, as the Soviets succeeded in pushing the German defenders toward the city center. The manner of his death is unclear. One report states that he committed suicide on February 16, 1945; another states that he was killed in battle on February 23, 1945. He was posthumously awarded the German Cross in Gold for his actions in the Battle of Posen.
Pierre Jean-Marie Laval was a French politician who served twice as prime minister of France during the Third Republic. During Germany’s occupation of France in World War II, Marshal Philippe Pétain and Pierre Laval, as leading members of the French government, surrendered vast resources to the Nazi war effort and facilitated the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews to their death in Nazi concentration camps.
Laval was born on June 28, 1883, in Châteldon, in the Auvergne. His parents, Baptiste and Claudine, ran a small inn, and his father operated the local mail coach. Laval left school at 12 years old to drive for his father, and after that, his education was sporadic. Through persistence and talent, however, he attended university and earned degrees in geology and law. Drafted into the military, his term of service was cut short for medical reasons.
Laval married in 1909 and practiced law in Paris. By May 1914, he had won a seat as a socialist in the Chamber of Deputies, representing Aubervilliers in north east Paris from 1914 to 1919. He voted against the Treaty of Versailles, as, in his view, it imposed too harsh a penalty on Germany and provided no reliable mechanism of enforcement. This did not endear him to retribution-minded French voters, and with a right-wing upswing, he lost his seat. He used his subsequent period out of Parliament to focus on ensuring his income, earning money sufficient to enable him to move back into politics. In 1924, he was reelected and again represented Aubervilliers until 1927. He then served as a senator for the Seine from 1927 to 1936 and as senator for Puy-de-Dâme from 1936 to 1944. He also served as Aubervilliers’ mayor from 1923 to 1944.
On January 22, 1936, Laval resigned as prime minister after the Hoare-Laval Pact scandal, an attempt by Britain and France to end war in Abyssinia by giving Italian dictator Benito Mussolini two-thirds of the country. Many of Laval’s backers felt that the pact humiliated France, and he lost enormous support as a result. On May 5, 1936, Italy conquered Addis Ababa.
In September 1939, France and Britain declared war on Germany because of its invasion of Poland. On May 10, 1940, after several months of a “phony war” in which very little fighting occurred in the West, Germany attacked France and rapidly broke through French lines.
The French government fled Paris, establishing itself in Vichy. The victorious Nazis then divided France into two parts: occupied France, which the Nazis governed, and Vichy France, which remained nominally independent though under ultimate German authority. Although officially government for the whole of France, the Vichy regime effectively controlled only the south of the country.
Laval was brought back into mainstream French politics in support of Marshal Pétain. On July 10, 1940, Laval used his influence in the National Assembly to give Pétain full powers, and the next day, Laval again became prime minister. In this capacity, he cooperated with German policy demands, including antisemitic measures and the export of forced French labor to serve the German war effort.
Laval quickly began removing the rights of French Jews and organizing the roundup and deportation of those not born in France. In October 1940, Pétain and Laval met with Adolf Hitler at the small French town of Montoire, agreeing on a policy of collaboration, but on December 13, 1940, Pétain dismissed Laval to placate other members of his government. Laval was placed under arrest, but he was released on December 15, 1940.
On August 25, 1941, as Laval was seeing off French volunteers going to fight in Russia alongside Germany, he was shot four times by a student and seriously wounded. He was discharged from hospital on September 30, 1941, but it took him a considerable period before he regained full health.
On March 27, 1942, just three weeks before Laval’s return to power, the first convoy of Jewish deportees to Auschwitz was sent from Drancy and Compiègne. Theodor Dannecker, head of the Gestapo in Paris, then anticipated the deportation of all adult Jews living in occupied and unoccupied France. Doing so, however, would require the cooperation of police forces in the occupied zone, as well as collaboration from the Vichy government.
On April 14, 1942, Pétain named Laval chief of government with special powers in Vichy France, and on April 18, he once more became prime minister, with additional roles as information minister, interior minister, and foreign minister.
At the start of July 1942, Laval stated his intention to deliver to Germany foreign Jews living in unoccupied France, in exchange for a collective exemption of French-born Jews from both zones. When asked to reconsider his decision to include in the convoys children under 16 years (initially not asked for by the Germans), Laval refused and replied that not one of those children may stay in France. Of the 11,000 children under the age of 16 who were deported, most of them at Laval’s personal insistence, none returned.
Laval claimed after the war to have delivered the foreign Jews to avoid the deportation of French-born Jews, but he never asked for nor obtained the slightest written assurance from the Germans on that issue. Thousands of French Jews were deported later, and in 1942 alone, more than 43,000 Jews, both foreign and French born, were deported, most of them arrested by French police. The year 1943 saw 11,000 Jews deported, with another 17,000 in 1944. It has been estimated that 80 percent were arrested by the French police and that 97 percent of all those deported perished in gas chambers or were exterminated through slave labor in Nazi concentration camps.
When the Allied forces landed in North Africa in November 1942, Germany occupied the Vichy zone, reducing the Pétainiste state to little more than a puppet regime. Laval and Pétain now believed it was of paramount importance to prove that France retained its sovereignty, leading them to do much of the Germans’ dirty work for them. If Jews had to be rounded up, they considered that it would be better that the French police seize them rather than the Germans.
In January 1943, Laval oversaw the creation of the French Militia (Milice), a police force under the leadership of Joseph Darnand but with Laval officially the president. In six months, the Milice recruited more than 35,000 men and played the key role in the hunt for Jews and members of the resistance, who were either tortured and executed summarily or deported to concentration camps. That same year, Laval handed over prewar premiers Léon Blum, Paul Reynaud, and Edouard Daladier to the Nazis.
Laval encouraged French collaboration on an economic level as well. He negotiated the transfer of French skilled laborers to work in German war industries, eventually compelling compliance by drafting French workers. This measure drove many such men into the countryside to join the resistance. In addition, he organized the export of French material resources to Germany so that by 1943, more than 40 percent of French agricultural and industrial output was devoted to the Nazi war effort.
In July 1944, Laval appeared sincerely horrified by the assassination of his former friend and colleague of government Georges Mandel, liquidated by the Milice. There was a certain irony in this: Mandel, né Rothschild, was Jewish—and French born.
Laval served as prime minister until August 1944. His policy was to ensure that as much of France as possible escaped the destruction and loss of life he had seen in Poland. He did what he could to avoid giving the Germans any form of military help, but regardless of the motives underlying his efforts, many saw Laval, Pétain, and their supporters as collaborators.
After the success of D-Day in June 1944 and the liberation of Paris in August 1944, it was only a matter of time before the whole of France was liberated. The Vichy government relocated to Germany, where it fell apart as the Allied forces continued to advance.
Laval fled to Spain in May 1945. He was deported from there to Austria, where he was turned in to the French. Charged with plotting against the security of the state and collaborating with the enemy, his trial began at 1:30 p.m. on Thursday, October 4, 1945. A sentence of death was pronounced, with the execution set for the morning of October 15. Laval attempted suicide at Fresnes Prison on the day of his execution but failed, as the cyanide capsule hidden in his jacket had lost its potency. Later that day, October 15, 1945, aged 61, Laval was shot in the courtyard of Fresnes Prison.
LIEBEHENSCHEL, ARTHUR (1901–1948)
Arthur Liebehenschel was a German SS leader who commanded the Auschwitz and Majdanek extermination camps during World War II.
He was born on November 25, 1901, in Posen (Poznań). As a student, he read economics and public administration. In January 1919, Liebehenschel left Posen, and from April 1, 1919, to August 1919, he took part in Freikorps Graf Dohna, focusing on border-guard duties. He served in the German army from April 10, 1919, to October 1931 and was discharged with the rank of sergeant major.
On January 2, 1932, Liebehenschel joined the NSDAP, and on November 8, he became a member of the SS. From 1932 to August 1, 1934, Liebehenschel served as an assistant to the physicist Walter Gerlach, and then after August 4, 1934, he became a senior officer at the notorious Columbia House prison in Berlin. On leaving in 1936, Liebehenschel served at the Lichtenburg concentration camp, where he remained until August 1, 1937. From then until to May 1940, Liebenhenschel worked as chief of staff of the leader of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, Theodor Eicke.
From January 5, 1940, to June 1, 1940, Liebehenschel was the chief of staff in the Concentration Camp Inspectorate, transferring on June 1, 1940, to a roving commission visiting the camps in person. He held this position until March 3, 1942. On November 14, 1941, he sought details of all SS members involved in executions so they could receive the War Merit Cross II with Swords, but six days later, he sent out an addendum stating the award should be for “special tasks essential to the war.” The term “executions” was not to be used.
When the WVHA was founded, Liebehenschel was assigned to the new Amtsgruppe D (Concentration Camps) as head of Office D I (Central Office), and he held that role from March 16, 1942, to November 10, 1943, working under Oswald Pohl and a representative of the Inspector of Concentration Camps, Richard Glücks. During that term, he regulated the concentration camps and their processes.
On August 8, 1942, he sent out orders to concentration camp commanders to avoid the courts becoming involved in ill-treatment of prisoners, as this could negatively influence the judiciary’s view of camp conditions. In that notice, Liebehenschel noted that at Auschwitz prisoners were ill treated by German criminal inmates supported by the SS, who could incite the actions of the criminals but, for doing so, were never to be punished. Liebehenschel issued orders of various kinds to camp commandants covering a variety of topics: the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, the concealment of brothels and crematoria in camps, the immediate cessation of the transfer of ashes of Czechs and Jews to their family members, the implementation of the Nacht und Nebel (night and fog) decree, the use of gold from teeth, and the need to camouflage the incidence of deaths in the camps.
Liebehenschel had married Gertrud, with whom he had three children: a boy and two girls. The marriage failed, and Liebehenschel had started a relationship with Richard Glücks’s secretary, Anneliese. Liebehenschel had been divorced by his wife in early December 1943 and had left his family because of the affair. Annaliese had been in a sexual relationship with a Jewish man in 1935 and had been held in protective custody in Düsseldorf for three weeks for contravening the race laws (Rassenschande). Oswald Pohl wanted Liebehenschel to end the relationship with Annaliese, but as Annaliese was expecting a child in 1944, SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler approved Liebehenschel’s petition for marriage over Pohl’s opposition.
Initially, Liebehenschel was transferred out of Berlin because of the divorce and the affair, and on November 11, 1943, he was appointed commandant of Auschwitz. Liebehenschel was put in overall charge of the camp complex as well as Auschwitz I (main camp), with Friedrich Hartjenstein heading Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and Heinrich Schwarz, Auschwitz III (Monowitz). Liebehenschel did not last long as commandant of Auschwitz, however, and was dismissed on May 8, 1944. His lengthy dispute with Pohl about his divorce and rebellion against Pohl when Himmler stepped in on the question of remarriage were probably the only reasons for the dismissal.
Liebehenschel was appointed to head the camp at Lublin-Majdanek on May 19, 1944, succeeding Martin Gottfried Weiss. The camp had been evacuated because of the Soviet advance into German-occupied Poland, but Liebehenschel’s remit was wider than just the camp itself; as commandant, he was also assigned to take charge of labor camps at Warsaw, Radom, Budzyń, and Bliżyn. Leibehenschel served there until August 1944.
In August 25, 1944, he was relocated to Trieste, Italy, to work for Odilo Globocnik as head the SS Manpower Office there. Almost all the team members in Globocnik’s command came from the Aktion Reinhard camps, and his zone of operations, created on October 1, 1943, covered the Italian provinces of Udine, Gorizia, Trieste, Pula, and the Slovene regions of Ljubljana, Susak, and Bakar.
After the war, Arthur Liebehenschel was arrested by the U.S Army and extradited to Poland on November 27, 1946. After being convicted of crimes against humanity by the Supreme National Tribunal at the Auschwitz Trial in Kraków, he was sentenced to death on December 22, 1946. He was executed by hanging on January 24, 1948. Others executed at the same time included Hans Aumeier, Maximilian Grabner, Carl Möckel, and Maria Mandl.
Kurt Werner Lischka was Gestapo chief and commandant of the security police in Paris during the German occupation of France in World War II.
Kurt Werner Lischka was born on August 16, 1909, in Breslau (Wrocław) to the family of a bank official. He passed his baccalaureate in 1927 and then studied law and political science in Berlin. After obtaining his degree, he worked in district courts and in the Provincial Court of Appeal in Breslau. He joined the SS on June 1, 1933, eventually reaching the ranks of SS-Sturmbannführer in 1938 and SS-Obersturmbannführer on April 20, 1942.
On September 1, 1935, Lischka joined the Gestapo, initially as a reference person for religious affairs. A hard worker with a reputation for zeal, self-control, and audacity, in 1938, he became a doctor of law. At 29 years old, he was promoted to head the Referat IVB office of the Gestapo in charge of religious denominations, Jews (the Jewish question), Freemasons, emigrants, and pacifists. He organized and carried out the first mass arrests of German Jews on June 16, 1938, transferring between 2,000 and 3,000 men to Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, 10 percent of whom died during the first two months. On October 28, 1938, Lischka organized the deportation of over 20,000 Jews to the Polish border, precipitating the events that would in due course lead to the November pogrom of November 9 to 10, 1938. On that night, Lischka took part in the arrest of some 30,000 German Jews in what became infamous as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass.
By the end of 1938, Lischka was appointed head of the Reich Center for Jewish Emigration in Berlin, which robbed Jews of their property before their emigration.
In January 1940, Lischka became head of the Gestapo in Cologne, and in November 1940, he was transferred to France. Here, he became deputy to Helmut Knochen, senior commander of the SiPo-SD in the Occupied Zone. His skills as an organizer were used to structure a small SiPo-SD commando that had just been set up in Paris. In January 1943, Lischka became responsible, with Theodor Dannecker, for organizing the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup of thousands of Paris Jews, who were deported, via Drancy, to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Lischka was instrumental in planning and supervising the deportation and subsequent murder of tens of thousands of French Jews, together with others the Third Reich considered to be “undesirable.”
In September 1943, Lischka, suspected of corruption, was recalled to Berlin. Criminal proceedings against him commenced, but charges were dismissed on June 27, 1944. In November 1943, he was given a key role in the central administration of the Nazi police service and assigned to the IV D1 unit of the Reich Security Main Office in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia with responsibility for reprisals. In this capacity, he was the right-hand man of Heinrich Müller, the Gestapo chief. Lischka was a member of the Special Commission of 20 July 1944, the investigative team tasked with identifying and punishing the plotters involved with the failed assassination attempt and coup against Adolf Hitler on that date.
In April 1945, Lischka was evacuated to Schleswig-Holstein, and his services ended on May 3, 1945. At the end of the war, he lived and worked under a false identity as a farmworker, but on December 10, 1945, he was arrested by British soldiers and imprisoned in British and then French internment camps.
Due to his activity in occupied Czechoslovakia, where he was implicated in the killing of Czech resistance members, Lischka was extradited to Prague in 1947 for war crimes. He was released on August 22, 1950, and he settled in Cologne, West Germany.
On September 18, 1950, Lischka was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia by a French military court for his wartime role in the Final Solution in occupied France. However, due to the 1955 closed transition agreement, Lischka, like many other war criminals, was protected against extradition, so he did not stand trial in France. For many years, French courts sought a retrial in for his activities in France, but in vain.
Lischka thus spent more than 25 years as a free man, working under his own name in the Federal Republic of Germany. One of his positions was as a judge in the Federal Republic, his life sentence in France notwithstanding.
Impatient with years of legal delays, French Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld and his German-born wife, Beate, attempted to kidnap Lischka in 1974 and take him back to France by force. Although the kidnapping attempt was foiled, it gained widespread publicity for the case against Lischka. The following year, facing heavy political pressure, Bonn finally ratified an accord with France that cleared the way for a new trial. Due in part to Klarsfeld’s success at gathering incriminating documents, the trial went unusually swiftly. In 1980, Lischka was sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, but in 1985, he was released early on health grounds. He and his wife then lived in a retirement home in Brühl, where he died on May 16, 1989.