Franz Rademacher was a German diplomat in charge of the so-called Jewish desk (Judenreferat D III) in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs between May 1940 and April 1943.
Born on February 20, 1906, in the town of Neustrelitz, Mecklenburg, he studied law in Rostock and Munich, receiving his license to practice in April 1932, prior to entering the civil service. In 1932, he joined the SA (Sturmabteilung), and in March 1933, he became a member of the Nazi Party. He joined the Foreign Office in 1937 and served several years overseas as a diplomat before being appointed head of D III in 1940. An avowed antisemite, he was recognized by those around him as a Jewish expert. Given this, he sought to elevate the role of the Foreign Office in Jewish affairs, particularly in finding a way to remove the Jews from German life.
He suggested that all Jews falling into the German sphere—which, given the conquest of Poland, had increased considerably—be expelled and deported to the French island of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa in the Indian Ocean. Throughout the spring and summer of 1940, he worked hard on developing his plan, along the way alienating himself from the Jewish expert at the SS, Adolf Eichmann, who was attempting to take control of the project himself. The question over who was ultimately to have ownership of the scheme became moot, however, when Germany failed to defeat Britain in 1940 and thereby had to abandon the plan, owing to Britain’s continued dominance of the sea lanes.
In October 1941, Rademacher became directly involved for the first time in the mass murder of Jews. At the request of the local foreign ministry representative in Belgrade who had asked for the city’s Jews to be deported, he was sent to Serbia to help occupation authorities there find a local solution to the Jewish question. Rademacher, who normally operated from Berlin, traveled to Belgrade to see firsthand whether the problem could be resolved. An agreement was reached without any further ado to shoot 1,300 Jews in situ. Upon his return to Berlin, Rademacher then filed a travel-expense claim, describing the reason for his trip as the “liquidation of Jews in Belgrade.”
From this beginning, Rademacher became involved more deeply in the developing Holocaust. He employed the Foreign Office as the vehicle for organizing the deportation of Jews from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands to the extermination camps, by demanding that governments allied to Germany surrender their Jewish citizens. In this way, Rademacher’s office was able to reduce any minimizing external complications that could otherwise have held the deportations back. Within Germany, he liaised closely with the SS to smooth the path leading to the deportations. As a leading bureaucrat in foreign affairs, Rademacher exercised great skill in carrying out the requirements of his office and brought external policy and race policy together in a relationship that was literally murderous.
In the spring of 1943, Rademacher became caught up in internal departmental politics. His immediate superior, Martin Luther, involved Rademacher in a plot to supplant Joachim von Ribbentrop as foreign minister. Luther was arrested and sent to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Rademacher was dismissed from the Foreign Office and forced to join the navy as an officer for the remainder of the war, where he served in an intelligence unit. The Foreign Office was reorganized, Rademacher’s division was closed, and all foreign matters relating to Jews were transferred to the responsibility of Eberhard von Thadden, a lawyer who was head of the office’s Inland II unit.
With the end of the war, Rademacher was arrested by British military police in November 1945. Although released, he subsequently became one of the few Nazi diplomats to be investigated. In February 1952, he was brought to trial in Germany for the murders he had overseen in Serbia and was convicted by a German state court in Nuremberg-Furth. Appealing the case in 1953, he jumped bail while proceedings were taking place and fled to Syria with the aid of Nazi sympathizers in September of that year. The court convicted him in absentia and sentenced him to three years and five months’ imprisonment.
His whereabouts were known while in the Middle East, and in 1962, he became the subject of a failed assassination attempt at the hands of Israeli spy Eli Cohen. To some degree, this was the beginning of Rademacher’s end. In 1963, he was arrested on charges of spying; released in 1965 owing to ill health, he returned voluntarily to Germany, penniless, in 1966. He was arrested at Nuremberg airport on November 30, 1966, faced a new trial, and was again convicted of war crimes. On this occasion, he was sentenced to five and a half years’ imprisonment, with the court ruling that he could be released owing to what it considered to be time served. A German high court overruled this judgment in 1971 and ordered another new trial. Rademacher appealed this action, but before proceedings could begin, he died on March 17, 1973.
Otto Rasch was a high-ranking SS officer in the German-occupied eastern territories of the Soviet Union, who commanded Einsatzgruppe C until October 1941, focusing on northern and central Ukraine.
Emil Otto Rasch was born on December 7, 1891, in Friedrichsruh, Schleswig-Holstein. During World War I, he fought as a naval lieutenant. After the war, he studied philosophy, law, and political science in Leipzig and received doctorates in law and political economy; he was known as “Dr. Dr. Rasch,” to accord with German academic tradition. In 1931, he became a lawyer, practicing in Dresden.
Rasch enrolled in the NSDAP in September 1931 and the SS in 1933. After Adolf Hitler took power in January 1933, Rasch became mayor of Radeberg, a small town just north of Dresden. This was followed by a term as mayor of Wittenberg from 1934 to 1936, where he was investigated for corruption; allegedly, he renovated his villa at the expense of his constituents, which ruined any hopes for a political future with the NSDAP.
In 1936, Rasch was employed full-time by the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), and on October 1, 1937, he assumed command of the State Police in Frankfurt am Main. After the Anschluss with Austria in March 1938, Rasch, now based in Linz, became director of security for Upper Austria. In June 1938, he joined the RSHA, and in March 1939, he was appointed chief of the Security Police (SiPo) and SD in Prague. In November 1939, as SiPo and SD inspector, Rasch was transferred to Königsberg, East Prussia.
Rasch took an active part in the Gleiwitz incident of August 31, 1939—a covert Nazi attack on a German radio station, which was used as a pretext for the invasion of Poland. With the subsequent outbreak of war in September 1939, Rasch took part in the Polish campaign.
In February 1940, with the agreement of head of the SD Reinhard Heydrich, Rasch created the Soldau transit camp, where more than 600 people were liquidated. From June to October 1941, Rasch was commandant of Einsatzgruppe C, which operated in Ukraine, following up the rear of the advancing German Army South.
In August 1941, Rasch met with his subordinates to discuss how best to implement a Hitler order dealing with the mass extermination of whole groups in the occupied eastern territories. Rasch’s view was that his commanders would have to be tougher than they had been up to now, would have to shoot more Jews, and would have to participate personally in the killings. The only exceptions that could be made related to those deemed “indispensable” as workers. All others would have to be killed.
In a report to Berlin on October 20, 1941, Rasch took credit for the massacre of nearly 50,000 people. Among these was the massacre of Babi Yar, where 33,771 Jews were massacred in two days across September 29 to 30, 1941.
Rasch was discharged from his position in October 1941, and Max Thomas, a physician, took over the leadership of Einsatzgruppe C. At the beginning of 1942, as a reward for his service, Rasch returned to Germany, where he became the director of the Continental Oil company until 1945.
At Nuremberg, Rasch was indicted with other Einsatzgruppen officials before a U.S. military court; the trial lasted from June 3, 1947, to August 10, 1948. Erwin Schulz, who had asked to be relieved of duty as commandant of Einsatzgruppe C, testified that Rasch distinguished himself by extreme ruthlessness and had ordered all Einsatzgruppen personnel, including the commanding officers, to participate personally in the mass shootings so that all members would share in their culpability.
The charges against Rasch were dropped on February 5, 1948, because he had Parkinson’s disease and associated dementia and was considered unfit to stand trial. On November 1, 1948, he died in Wehrstedt, Saxony, at the age of 56.
Walter Rauff was an SS commander who served from January 1938 as an aide of Reinhard Heydrich, first in the SS and later in the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA). Rauff was among those with responsibility for nearly 100,000 deaths during World War II, in the implementation of the Nazis’ genocide by mobile gas chamber; his victims included communists, Jews, Roma, and the disabled.
Walter Rauff was born on June 19, 1906. In 1924, at the age of 18, he joined the German navy as a cadet. After serving as a midshipman in South America and Spain, he was promoted to lieutenant in 1936 and given command of a minesweeper. In 1937, he was sanctioned for conduct unbecoming an officer (adultery) and resigned. His good friend and former fellow naval officer, Reinhard Heydrich, then deputy commander of the SS under Heinrich Himmler, gave Rauff the job of putting the SS and its security service, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), onto a war footing.
After the conquest of Norway in 1940, Rauff headed the SD there for three months. That year, he was reinstated in the navy and commanded a fleet of minesweepers in the English Channel. He was promoted to lieutenant commander in April 1941, but shortly afterward, Heydrich summoned him back to SS headquarters. When Heydrich was appointed Reichsprotektor of Bohemia and Moravia, Rauff accompanied him to Prague as his technical assistant.
In 1941 to 1942, Rauff was appointed head of the SS Technical Department, responsible for the development and use of mobile gas vans used to murder people deemed enemies of the German state. Rauff’s main rationale for using gas vans was that the shooting of noncombatant men, women, and children was a considerable burden for those doing the killing and that this burden removed by using the gas vans. Rauff delegated the task of keeping the gas vans operating in the Soviet Union and other Nazi-occupied areas to an SS chemist, August Becker, who kept Rauff fully informed on the gas-van killing operations.
Tens of thousands of people, most of them Jews, were murdered in this way. It was, however, too slow and cumbersome for the Nazis, who went on to develop fixed gas chambers using Zyklon B as the killing agent. Rauff returned to Berlin in June 1942, after Heydrich’s assassination by the Czech resistance.
A month after German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s defeat of the British at Tobruk in June 1942, the SS set up a special extermination unit to follow in the wake of Rommel’s Afrika Korps. The unit, commanded by Rauff, carried out “executive measures on the civilian population,” the Nazi euphemism for mass murder of Jews and partisans. From July 1942 to May 1943, Rauff commanded an Einsatzkommando in North Africa.
Rauff’s hope to exterminate Jews in the Middle East was brought to an abrupt halt by the British Eighth Army’s defeat of Rommel at El Alamein in October 1942. Rommel withdrew the remnants of his army to Tunisia, where it remained until May 1943, enabling Rauff’s SS to commence the persecution of local Jews. More than 2,500 Jews in Nazi-occupied Tunisia died in a network of SS slave-labor camps before the Germans withdrew. Rauff’s men also stole jewels, silver, gold, and Jewish religious artifacts. Forty-three kilograms of gold were taken from the Jewish community on the island of Djerba alone.
In July 1943, after a brief stay in Berlin, Rauff was made commander of an Einsatzkommando in Corsica, and from September 1943 until the end of the war, he was the SS commandant in Milan, where he took charge of all Gestapo and SD operations throughout northwest Italy. In both Tunisia and northern Italy, Rauff earned a reputation for utter ruthlessness, as he was responsible for the indiscriminate execution of both Jews and local partisans.
Rauff remained in Italy until the end of the war. As SS commandant, he took part in the secret negotiations that led to the surrender of the Nazis in northern Italy. Arrested by the Allies on April 30, 1945, he escaped from an American internment camp in Rimini and hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudal.
His route after leaving Italy remains controversial and unclear. Allegedly, in 1947, he was recruited for Syrian intelligence but fled to Lebanon after a coup in Syria in 1949. After Lebanon, Rauff returned to Italy and gained a transit pass for Ecuador, where he and his family settled. Before sailing for Ecuador in December 1949, Rauff allegedly worked for a while for Israeli intelligence in Egypt, although this has been denied by Rauff’s family.
Rauff settled in Quito, Ecuador. In 1953, he was reportedly in Buenos Aires, heading an anticommunist group. In 1958, he moved to Chile, obtained permanent residency status there a year later, and became a cattle and fish merchant. His son, also named Walter, joined the Chilean naval academy and was the protégé of Chief of Staff General Carlos Prats, a supporter of socialist President Salvador Allende.
From 1958 to 1963, Rauff was covertly employed by the Federal Intelligence Service of West Germany as a South American spy. His contact, Wilhelm Beissner, knew Rauff from the time when both were employed in the RSHA. In 1960, Rauff traveled to Germany in order to claim his pension for the time served in the German navy; he had no trouble with the German authorities.
When Hans Strack, the German ambassador to Chile, was ordered by Germany to request Rauff’s extradition, Strack, a supporter of exiled war criminals, delayed forwarding the application for 14 months—enough time for Chile to refuse the extradition request on the grounds that the country’s statute of limitations on murder cases had expired. In December 1962, Rauff was arrested but was freed by a Chilean Supreme Court decision five months later. Salvador Allende’s election as Chilean president in 1970 made no change to Rauff’s status. Allende argued that he could not reverse the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision.
Under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Rauff may have served as an adviser in Chilean secret police, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (National Intelligence Directorate, or DINA). Pinochet’s regime resisted all calls for Rauff’s extradition to stand trial in West Germany or Israel.
The last request to extradite Rauff to West Germany was presented by renowned Nazi hunter Beate Klarsfeld in 1983; it was rejected. The Pinochet regime alleged that Rauff had been a peaceful Chilean citizen for over 20 years and that the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision had closed the case. In January 1984, the director general of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, David Kimche, officially requested
Rauff’s outright expulsion in a meeting with Chilean foreign minister Jaime del Valle, but the request was turned down. A month later, West Germany repeated its extradition request. Chile said that the case would be reopened only if it were presented with evidence of new crimes. The court’s position was that extraditing Rauff would not serve any public interest in Chile, since he had lived in the country for many years and his behavior was always beyond reproach.
Walter Rauff died of lung cancer in May 1984.
REICHLEITNER, FRANZ (1906–1944)
Franz Reichleitner was an Austrian member in the SS who participated in Aktion Reinhard during the Holocaust.
Franz Karl Reichleitner was born on December 2, 1906, in Ried im Traunkreis, Austria-Hungary. He worked for the Criminal Police and held the rank of Kriminalsekretär. He joined the NSDAP in 1936 and the SS in 1937, rising to SS-Hauptsturmführer.
After the Anschluss in March 1938, Reichleitner worked as a member of the Gestapo in Linz, still with the rank of Kriminalsekretär. It was here that he first met Franz Stangl, who was to be the future commandant of the extermination camps at Sobibór and Treblinka.
In spring 1940, Reichleitner served with Aktion T-4 in the killing center at Hartheim Castle, near Linz. In November 1940, Franz Stangl was also transferred to Hartheim, where the two shared a room. After the appointment of Christian Wirth as inspector of all euthanasia institutions, Stangl was his successor as office manager in Hartheim, and Reichleitner became Stangl’s deputy. At Hartheim, in addition to the activities of the special registry office, the office manager was responsible for control of the death book, the processing of correspondence, and similar matters. These were also local police matters, so Stangl and Reichleitner worked closely together.
Further cementing their personal relationship, Reichleitner married a young woman from Steyr, Anna Baumgartner, who was a friend of Stangl’s wife, Theresa. On September 1, 1942, Reichleitner, then aged 36, was appointed to the position of commandant at Sobibór, replacing Stangl, who, in turn, had been transferred to Treblinka.
Reichleitner preferred to operate out of public gaze, and his command of Sobibór was recognized as stricter than that of Stangl. He relied on his subordinates, who were highly intimidated by his authority and his unpredictability, based, it was said, on the fact that he was a heavy drinker. As a result, Sobibór was highly disciplined and meticulously managed. Under Reichleitner’s command, all functions went smoothly, and transports arriving on any given day were liquidated efficiently. Reichleitner always turned himself out with great style and wore gloves, but he had no direct contact with the Jews who arrived on the transports. SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler visited Sobibór on February 12, 1943. Impressed with Reichleitner’s efficiency, he promoted the commandant to the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer.
On October 14, 1943, a major revolt took place at Sobibór. Over 300 of the 600 prisoners escaped, with some loss of life among the SS guard detachment. Reichleitner was on leave the day of the revolt, but upon his return and proceeding from Himmler’s direct order, he oversaw that those prisoners remaining in the camp were shot. Within a few days, Sobibór was ordered closed, and in succeeding weeks, there was a concerted effort to remove all traces of the camp’s existence, including what had taken place there.
Reichleitner’s future was already somewhat mapped out, however. On September 13, 1943 the overall head of Aktion Reinhard, Odilo Globocnik, had been appointed to coerce the area around Trieste and exterminate the local Jewish community. With the closure of Sobibór, Reichleitner, like so many of the other perpetrators of Aktion Reinhard, was transferred to Trieste, Italy, on antipartisan duties. While serving in this capacity, Franz Reichleitner was killed by partisans on January 3, 1944, in the Fiume district.
RIBBENTROP, JOACHIM VON (1893–1946)
Joachim von Ribbentrop was a German diplomat and politician who served as Nazi foreign minister between 1938 and 1945. A friend of Adolf Hitler, Ribbentrop was instrumental in negotiating the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact that freed Germany to invade Poland in September 1939. He managed the diplomatic moves that persuaded Germany’s Axis partners to expel their Jews for deportation to German killing centers as well as to abandon their Jewish citizens living in Germany.
Ulrich Friedrich Willy Joachim von Ribbentrop was born in Wesel, in the Rhineland, on April 30, 1893, to Richard Ulrich Joachim Ribbentrop, a career army officer, and his wife Johanne. He attended school in Germany and Switzerland and spent time in France and Britain as a child.
In 1910, he began working as clerk with a German importing firm based in London, before moving to Canada, where he worked for the Molsons Bank in Montreal. He then worked for an engineering company on the reconstruction of the Quebec Bridge and with the National Transcontinental Railway on the Canadian Pacific Railroad. He followed this with employment as a journalist in New York and Boston but returned to Germany to recover from tuberculosis. He then went back to Canada, where he set up a small business importing German wines. Shortly before the outbreak of World War I, he returned to Germany; joining the German army, he served on the Eastern Front, receiving the Iron Cross Second Class. After being seriously wounded in 1917, he was assigned to the German military mission in Turkey.
After the war, Ribbentrop worked as a wine and champagne salesman for the French firm Pommerey in the Rhineland until his marriage in 1920 to the daughter of a wealthy wine producer. This made him financially independent. Initially, his name was Joachim Ribbentrop, but in 1925, he persuaded a distant ennobled relative to adopt him so that he could inherit the noble “von,” adding this to his last name.
On May 1, 1932, Ribbentrop joined the NSDAP. He moved quickly up the party hierarchy and became one of Adolf Hitler’s closest confidants. In January 1933, he participated in the secret discussions between Franz von Papen, Hitler, and President Paul von Hindenburg in Berlin, resulting in the dismissal of Kurt von Schleicher as minister of defense and the nomination of Hitler to take up the post of chancellor on January 30, 1933. After Hitler took power, Ribbentrop became a commissioner and special envoy for the Foreign Affairs Ministry. In 1934, he became the German special commissioner for disarmament to the government of the United States. It was Ribbentrop’s responsibility to ensure that the world believed that Germany sincerely wanted an arms-limitation treaty while at the same time ensuring that no such treaty ever emerged.
In August 1934, Ribbentrop founded an agency, Ribbentrop Services (Dienstelle Ribbentrop). Funded by money from the NSDAP, it was located directly across the road from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse. The agency was staffed by journalists, diplomats, members of the NSDAP and the Hitler Youth, dissatisfied businessmen, former reporters, and ambitious Nazi Party members. Ribbentrop Services engaged in collecting information on foreign affairs, functioning as an alternative foreign ministry independent of, and often contrary to, the official Foreign Office. The Dienststelle also competed with other Nazi Party units working in the foreign policy arena, including the foreign operation section of the Nazi Party (NSDAP/AO) led by Ernst Bohle, and the Nazi Party Office of Foreign Affairs, (APA) led by Alfred Rosenberg. When Ribbentrop was appointed as minister of foreign affairs in February 1938, the Dienststelle itself lost its importance and about one-third of its staff followed Ribbentrop to the Foreign Office.
In August 1936, Ribbentrop was appointed as the German ambassador to Britain. His main task was to persuade the British government not to get involved in German territorial disputes and to work together with Germany against the communist government of the Soviet Union. Ribbentrop presented his credentials to King George VI on February 5, 1937, outraging Britain when he gave the king the Hitler salute. He also upset the British government by posting SS guards outside the German Embassy in London and by flying swastika flags on official cars. On February 4, 1938, Ribbentrop replaced Constantin von Neurath as Germany’s foreign minister.
Ribbentrop was not popular with the older members of the Nazi Party; nearly all disliked him. Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring considered him to be a snob and a social climber who married into money and bought his title. His diplomatic effort as German ambassador to Britain indicated that he was also inept. Despite efforts made by State Secretary Ernst von Weizsäcker and British prime minister Neville Chamberlain to exclude Ribbentrop from the negotiations at Munich, he participated and tried to pressure Hitler to foment a war with Czechoslovakia. The resultant diplomatic round, however, saw the Sudetenland given to Germany without violence. Even though Germany was able to annex Austria and Czechoslovakia successfully through diplomacy, Ribbentrop regarded them as his failures, because he was not able to provide Germany an opportunity to deploy its military.
As Germany’s foreign minister, Ribbentrop worked closely with Adolf Hitler in his negotiations with the British and French governments. He participated in the signing of the Pact of Steel with Benito Mussolini on May 22, 1939. On August 23, 1939, the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact (also called the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact) was signed in Moscow, defining each dictator’s future sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. The pact partitioned Poland and gave Germany the right to annex the Baltic States, buying time for the Nazis and the Soviets to consolidate their power bases. A week later, Hitler invaded Poland.
On September 27, 1940, Germany, through Ribbentrop, formed the Tripartite Pact with Japan and Italy, providing for mutual assistance against the United States. This lulled the Soviet Union into a false sense of security that it would not be attacked by the three allies.
With the outbreak of war, Ribbentrop remained foreign minister only through Hitler’s backing. Even this support faded, however, after Foreign Office personnel were implicated in the July 20, 1944, bomb plot to assassinate Hitler.
After the unconditional surrender of Germany, the pursuit of high officials serving Hitler began immediately. Ribbentrop escaped capture for a full month, but the Allies arrested him in Hamburg on June 15, 1945. He was transferred to Nuremberg, where, before the International Military Tribunal, he was accused of war crimes as one of the leading representatives of Nazi Germany. Ribbentrop and the Foreign Office were fully involved in a wide variety of breaches of the laws and usages of war, and Ribbentrop himself supported and encouraged the Nazi program against the Jews. His assent resulted in the transportation of Jews from foreign countries to concentration and death camps, even though he denied knowledge of Germany’s racial policies resulting in extermination. The tribunal found him guilty on all four counts (conspiracy, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity) and sentenced him to death. Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged on October 16, 1946.
Eduard Roschmann, subsequently known as Federico Wegener, was a member of the SS and commandant of the Riga ghetto during 1943.
He was born on November 25, 1908, in Graz, Austria, the son of a brewery manager. He studied law in Graz for six semesters but left without finishing his degree and started a business as a wine dealer, later working in his father’s brewery.
In 1927, Roschmann joined the Austrian Fatherland Front (Vaterländische Front, or VF), which was part of the paramilitary home guard (Heimatschutz) movement. In 1938, after the union of Austria with Germany, Roschmann, aged 20, was admitted to the NSDAP and the SS.
In January 1941, he began working at the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) in Berlin. As the main Nazi security agency, the RSHA was tasked with combating the enemies of the Third Reich both within and outside Germany. Roschmann served with the Gestapo and came into close contact with the commander of the SiPo and the SD in Latvia, Rudolf Lange.
After the capture of the Latvian capital Riga by the Wehrmacht on July 1, 1941, Roschmann was sent to Latvia as a member of a task force of the Security Police and the SD. On July 21, 1941, a decision was made to set up a ghetto to assist in the control and supervision of Riga’s Jews, and by October 25, 1941, all 30,000 Jews were collected there. The higher SS and police leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF) in Latvia was Hans-Adolf Prützmann. His successor in that office was Friedrich Jeckeln.
In March 1942, the German agencies in charge of the Riga ghetto and an improvised concentration camp about four kilometers away, Jungfernhof, killed 3,740 German, Austrian, and Czech Jews who had been transported to Latvia. These inmates were the elderly, the sick, and children. The victims were told that they would be moved to a better camp called Dünamünde sited outside of Riga, but there was no such camp; the Jews were transported to a forest area north of Riga and shot.
Roschmann was appointed as commandant of the Riga ghetto, a position he held from January to November 1943. In addition to local murders, Roschmann also deported thousands of Jews to their death at Auschwitz-Birkenau. While commandant, Roschmann was nicknamed the “Butcher of Riga.”
With the advance of the Red Army in October 1944, the SS fled by sea to Danzig, taking several thousands of prisoners with them. Many did not survive the trip. Roschmann then headed south toward the Austrian border and traded his SS attire for a Wehrmacht uniform. He was hidden in the homes of friends near Graz until mid-1945. Detained later as a prisoner of war and released in 1947, he visited his wife in Graz, was recognized by a former camp inmate, and was arrested by British military police, but he managed to escape during his transfer to the military prison camp at Dachau.
Roschmann then traveled to Italy via Austria, and in 1948, with the aid of Bishop Alois Hudal, he obtained a new passport in the name of Federico Wegener. He managed to flee from Genoa to Argentina, where he established a timber import-export company.
In 1955, he married his secretary, Irmtraud Schubert, even though he was still legally married, and in 1958, he moved to Germany, where he continued his business interests. An arrest warrant for bigamy was issued through the Regional Court of Graz, but Roschmann returned to Argentina before the warrant could be executed. Due to the illicit marriage with his secretary, his wife left Roschmann and married someone else in West Germany in 1958. In 1960, an international arrest warrant was issued against Roschmann for suspected war crimes. He took out an Argentinean passport in 1968.
In summer 1972, a British writer, Frederick Forsyth, sought the help of Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal in writing a story about a fugitive Nazi war criminal. Wiesenthal agreed on one condition: that the fictional criminal was Eduard Roschmann, the Butcher of Riga. Wiesenthal wanted to give Roschmann visibility and, in this way, seek his capture. Forsyth accepted and included an invented scene to make Roschmann unpopular among the Nazi fugitives. The ensuing book, The Odessa File, was a great success.
In October 1976, an extradition request was handed over by the German Embassy in Buenos Aires; it was rejected, and a further request was repeated in May 1977. On July 5, 1977, a spokesman for Argentina’s president Jorge Rafael Videla announced that the request for extradition would be considered. Roschmann left straight away for Paraguay.
On July 25, 1977, Roschmann was hospitalized for cardiovascular problems. He suffered a heart attack and died on August 10, 1977. On August 19, 1977, Interpol confirmed the identity of the Butcher of Riga, who died in a hospital in Asunción, Paraguay. Roschmann was buried in a pauper’s grave.
Alfred Rosenberg was a leading Nazi racial theorist and influential ideologue of National Socialism. He held several important state posts under the Nazis and was one of Nazism’s most significant intellectuals.
Alfred Ernst Rosenberg was born on January 12, 1893, in Reval, Russia (Tallinn, Estonia), to an Estonian mother and Baltic German father from Latvia. He studied architecture in Riga, and with the approach of German forces in World War I, he went to Moscow, where he studied engineering. In 1915, he married Hilda Leesmann, an Estonian, in Moscow, and received his doctorate in 1917. A czarist supporter during the Russian Revolution of 1917, he fled to Paris after the communist victory and followed this up by a further move to Munich in 1918. Rosenberg was an antisemite, influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s ideas on racial theory.
Rosenberg equated Jews with Bolshevism and communist revolution (“Judeo-Bolshevism”) and was heavily involved in the postwar ultranationalist scene in Munich. He joined the German Workers’ Party (the forerunner to the Nazi Party) in January 1919 and began writing for its flagship newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, becoming the paper’s senior editor in 1923. Rosenberg became a German citizen in 1920 and gradually assumed the position of chief party ideologue. His antisemitic writings spread the notorious antisemitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and he denounced the Weimar Republic as an anomaly resulting from defeat and controlled by “Jewish traitors.”
In 1923, Rosenberg divorced his first wife, Hilda. On November 9, 1923, he participated in the failed Munich Beer Hall Putsch, which resulted in Adolf Hitler’s arrest for treason. Rosenberg then became Hitler’s personal choice to serve as interim party leader while the Führer himself was in prison, a role he played until Hitler’s release.
He married his second wife, Hedwig Kramer, in 1925; the marriage lasted until his death. The couple had two children: a son, who died in infancy, and a daughter, Irene, who was born in 1930.
Upon Hitler’s release, Rosenberg returned to journalism. From 1929, Rosenberg headed the new National Socialist Society for Culture and Learning, and in 1930, he was elected to the Reichstag as a Nazi deputy from Hesse-Darmstadt. The year 1930 saw the publication of his major work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, which became the most popular party work after Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Myth was a pompous pseudoscientific study, which claimed that the Germans represented a pure Nordic race destined to rule Europe. It argued that the Aryan and Jewish “races” were in conflict, and it attacked “international Jewry,” Freemasons, Christianity, and the Jesuits, among others.
Alfred Rosenberg, nicknamed “Hitler’s Philosopher,” was considered to be the leading ideologue in Nazi Germany. His major work, The Myth of the Twentieth Century, was published in 1930, and it became the most popular party work after Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Appointed by Hitler to serve as minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Rosenberg then assumed a key role in the development of the Nazis’ “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” Tried at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg, he was sentenced to death and executed on the morning of October 16, 1946. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of William Gallagher)
After Hitler attained office in January 1933, Rosenberg headed the foreign policy office. In 1934, he was made Hitler’s deputy for supervising the spiritual and ideological training of the Nazi Party. His visit to Britain that year was intended to show that the Nazis would not be a threat, but as a propaganda trip, it was a failure. When Rosenberg laid a wreath bearing a swastika at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a British war veteran threw it into the Thames.
Rosenberg reshaped Nazi racial policy throughout the years, but it always included Aryan supremacy, extreme German nationalism, and rabid antisemitism. Rosenberg also viewed homosexuality, particularly lesbianism, as a hindrance to the expansion of the Nordic population. He argued for a new “religion of the blood” based on the supposed innate promptings of the Nordic soul to defend its noble character against racial and cultural degeneration.
In 1938, Hitler approved Rosenberg’s proposal for a new, fully Nazified university system that would provide a base for future party and state elites in racist ideology. In January 1940, Rosenberg founded the Hohe Schule (High School). Within this school was the Institute for Research into the Jewish Question, intended to legitimize Nazi antisemitic policies by proving the existence of a “Jewish conspiracy,” based on books and archives stolen from Jewish organizations at home and abroad. The libraries of the Hohe Schule were filled with looted Jewish art. Rosenberg formed a Nazi task force that looted European art treasures by the trainload, confiscating art, furniture, rugs, and even appliances from Jewish homes. Founded in October 1940, the Rosenberg Task Force (Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg, or ERR) was the most successful Nazi body involved in art plunder. By the end of war, it had shipped almost 1.5 million railcar loads of artwork and artifacts from German-controlled Europe to the Reich.
In early 1941, Rosenberg edged into Hitler’s inner circle in preparation for the German attack on the Soviet Union. His early life in Russia, together with his anti-Bolshevism, made him the Nazi authority on the Soviet Union. On July 17, 1941, following the invasion of the USSR, Hitler appointed Rosenberg as head of the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories, in charge of all Soviet lands falling to Germany stretching from the old Polish border to the Ural Mountains.
Rosenberg’s all-consuming ambition for power was undermined by his frequent fights with competitors, his ineptitude in constructing alliances, and his reputation as a poor administrator. In late 1941, as the Wehrmacht stalled before Moscow, Rosenberg’s influence lessened, but his office still comprised the Baltic States and parts of Byelorussia (Belarus) and Ukraine. In occupied regions not under military rule, Rosenberg’s ministry installed Reich commissioners together with an intricate civilian rule down to the level of rural districts.
Rosenberg received daily reports on the effect of German policies aimed at “pacifying” the local population in the occupied territories. A strong believer in Judeo-Bolshevism, Rosenberg had no difficulties in targeting members of Soviet elites and Jews for destruction. The areas under his charge were the first to see the Final Solution of the Jewish Question carried out through the systematic murder of Jewish men, women, and children. By the end of 1941, more than half a million Jews had been annihilated; Estonia, part of his ministry, was the first German-occupied region declared to be “free of Jews.” From November 1941, trains with Jews deported from the Reich arrived in the East. SS and police, together with Rosenberg’s officials, made sure that the deportees were either killed immediately on arrival or exploited in forced-labor projects that few were expected to survive.
Despite its persistent power struggles with the SS and other German agencies, Rosenberg’s Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories took a key role in the development of the Final Solution. It was the only government agency to send two representatives (Alfred Meyer and Georg Leibbrandt) to the Wannsee Conference convened by Reinhard Heydrich on January 20, 1942, in Berlin.
Disappointed by his lack of power and influence, Rosenberg wrote to Hitler in October 1944 and attempted to resign his position. Hitler ignored his letter.
Allied troops captured Rosenberg at the end of the war in the Murwick hospital. Tried at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as one of the principal Nazi leaders, he claimed to be ignorant of the Holocaust, notwithstanding that his deputy, Meyer, and his employee Leibbrandt were both present at Wannsee. Rosenberg was found guilty on all four counts of the indictment for conspiracy to commit aggressive war, crimes against peace, war crimes, and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death and executed with other condemned codefendants at Nuremberg on the morning of October 16, 1946. His body was cremated, and his ashes scattered in the Isar River.
Oswald Rothaug was a Nazi jurist. In June 1933, he was named a prosecutor at Nuremberg, and in April 1937, he became the regional court director in Schweinfurt and the director of Nuremberg’s Special Court (Sondergericht). In 1938, he became a member of the Nazi Party and worked closely with the SD (Sicherheitdienst). In 1942, he sentenced a 25-year-old Polish slave laborer to death, explaining that the inferiority of the defendant was obvious given that he was part of Polish subhumanity. Rothaug sought after and presided over the trial of Leo Katzenberger in March 1942, ordering his execution in May 1943 for so-called racial defilement. Following the trial, Rothaug was brought to Berlin as a member of the People’s Court (Volksgerichthof).
Oswald Rothaug was born on May 17, 1897, in Mittelsinn, Bavaria. The son of a primary school teacher, his education was interrupted from 1916 to 1918 while he was in the German army. He passed his final law examination in 1922 and the state examination for the higher administration of justice in 1925.
In December 1925, he began his career as a jurist, first as an assistant to an attorney in Ansbach and later as assistant judge at various courts. In 1927, he became a public prosecutor in charge of criminal cases, rising to senior public prosecutor in Nuremberg in June 1933. Between April 1937 and May 1943, he was director of the Nazi Special Courts in Nuremberg, except for a period in August and September of 1939, when he was serving in the Wehrmacht.
In 1938, Rothaug formally joined the NSDAP. The start of his membership was dated to May 1937, the date of his application, and although he alleged he was not a member, he worked close with the SD as an “honorary collaborator” on legal matters.
He was an up-and-coming judge when, in 1942, the case of 68-year-old Lehman Israel “Leo” Katzenberger came before him. Katzenberger was a shoe wholesale merchant and head of the Jewish community in Nuremberg. He was accused of the crime of “racial pollution” because of his alleged sexual intercourse with a younger Aryan woman named Irene Seiler, the daughter of a close non-Jewish friend. In fact, the investigation showed that they had a relationship, but it was one of debtor and creditor: Katzenberger had loaned Seiler some money, and she was renting an apartment and shopfront from him.
Both Katzenberger and Seiler denied the charge, and the original police report indicated that there was no evidence of a sexual relationship. In response, Rothaug had Katzenberger’s case transferred from a more traditional criminal court to a Sondergericht established by the Nazi regime to try racial and political enemies of the state. Rothaug, a proud member of the Nazi Lawyer’s League, was excited about drawing this assignment. So clear was he in his bias that he sent tickets to the Nazi hierarchy to attend the trial.
Katzenberger never had a chance. During the proceedings, Rothaug tried with all his power to encourage the witnesses to make incriminating statements against the two defendants, who were barely heard by the court, as their statements were passed over or disregarded. During the course of the trial, Rothaug took the opportunity to give the audience a National Socialist lecture on the subject of the Jewish question. The witnesses found it extremely difficult to give testimony because of the way in which the trial was conducted, since Rothaug constantly anticipated the evaluation of the facts and expressed his own views on racial matters instead.
The punishment for racial pollution was not death, but an eyewitness appeared who gave evidence that Katzenberger had been seen leaving Seiler’s house after dark. This opened the door to a different wartime law offence involving the death penalty: committing a crime during blackout hours.
In delivering his findings, Rothaug stated that Katzenberger’s visits to Seiler under the protection of the blackout served at least the purpose of keeping relations going, arguing that it did not matter whether sexual relations took place during these visits or whether the two only conversed; in his view, the very nature of the two interrelating on any level was sufficient to prove Katzenberger’s race treason. He sentenced Katzenberger to the guillotine, and the sentence was carried out on June 2, 1942. Irene Seiler, who testified that no sexual relationship existed between herself and Katzenberger, was convicted of perjury and sentenced to two years’ jail with hard labor.
From May 1943 to April 1945, Rothaug was public prosecutor at the People’s Court in Berlin. Here he handled national cases of high treason and, from January 1944, cases concerning the undermining of public morale in the Third Reich.
At the end of the war, Rothaug was arrested by the Allies and taken before the International Military Tribunal sitting at Nuremberg in the Judges Trial in 1947. In the tribunal’s view, it was not concerned with the legal incontestability under German law of cases like Katzenberger’s. The tribunal found that the evidence established beyond a reasonable doubt that Katzenberger was condemned and executed because he was a Jew and that others before Rothaug met the same fate because they were Poles. Their execution was in conformity with Nazi policies of persecution, torture, and extermination. In this context, Rothaug was a knowing and willing instrument in the Nazi program of persecution and extermination.
During their findings, the tribunal also stated that Rothaug’s manner and methods made his court an instrument of terror and won the fear and hatred of the population. The tribunal stated that, from the evidence of his closest associates as well as his victims, Oswald Rothaug represented the personification of both Nazi intrigue and cruelty. The court held that under any civilized judicial system Rothaug, a sadistic and evil man, could have been impeached and removed from office or convicted of malfeasance in office because of the scheming malevolence with which he administered injustice.
Oswald Rothaug was found guilty of crimes against humanity but was found not guilty of war crimes through the abuse of the judicial and penal process and membership in a criminal organization. On December 14, 1947, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity. His sentence was later reduced to 20 years, and he was released on parole on December 22, 1956. He died in Cologne a free man in 1967.
ROTHENBERGER, CURT (1896–1959)
Curt Rothenberger was a German jurist and leading figure in the Nazi Party. Upon the Nazi seizure of power, Rothenberger, Hans Frank, and Roland Freisler formed an unofficial group that changed the legal process by installing loyal party men into leading judicial positions.
Curt Ferdinand Rothenberger was born on June 30, 1896, in Cuxhaven, Lower Saxony; his father was a customs agent in Hamburg. From 1905, Rothenberger attended the Wilhelm-Gymnasium, a school well attended by Jewish boys. Completing his secondary schooling in August 1914, he was too young to volunteer for World War I, but in April 1915, he received his call-up papers in Kiel. He served until 1918 as a field gunner on the Western Front, rising to the rank of lieutenant.
While still a student, Rothenberger became close friends with a Jewish boy, Kurt Enoch. Serving together in the war, they remained in touch until Rothenburger’s sympathies for the Nazis rendered their connection imprudent. Enoch later emigrated from Germany.
After the war, Rothenberger returned to Hamburg and enrolled in a specially designed course for war veterans at the University of Hamburg. In 1919, he volunteered to join Freikorps Bahrenfeld. He passed his first state examination in March 1920, served a shortened legal clerkship, obtained his doctoral thesis, and passed the second state law examination. In June 1922, Rothenberger was appointed an auxiliary district court judge in Hamburg. He became an investigating judge in 1927, and in 1928, he was promoted to the Government Council in the State Justice Administration. In mid-1929, he moved into health administration, working as a senior government counsel.
At the end of 1931, Rothenberger was Hamburg candidate for a position as assistant judge in Leipzig, but he was not appointed due to his young age; at just 35 years, he was considered too young for such a senior position. His career aspirations now overcame any morals or ethics. While he had been mentored by at least two Jewish professors, he now tied his career to the Nazi Party’s success. For tactical reasons, he did not join the party but was a backroom adviser assisting the Nazis.
On March 8, 1933, Rothenberger was elected as justice senator. Once in place, he fired two Jewish prosecutors even before the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service—the Aryan Law of April 7, 1933—was passed. Rothenberger was not publicly aligned to the NSDAP, so the radical changes he made to the judiciary were not immediately evident. However, by the time he was done, he had sacked 31 Jewish judges and prosecutors. In the purge of Hamburg’s judicial system, some 30 percent of Hamburg’s lawyers lost their offices.
Rothenberger became president of the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court on April 1, 1935, and from May 16, 1935, he also served as president of the Hamburg Higher Administrative Court.
Rothenberger initiated a monitoring system in all courts. He held weekly precase discussions, in which each judge presented the most important cases coming up in the forthcoming week. Rothenberger stated how each case should proceed and at the same time criticized “unacceptable” judgments from the previous week. Over time, he decided almost every case personally. On some occasions, he intervened in the cases of other judges, directing an outcome. He always blocked any charges against men of the SA or SS.
With the onset of World War II, justice was even more controlled. After Reich Minister of Justice Franz Gürtner died in January 1941, Franz Schlegelberger was acting justice minister. Rothenberger now identified a new career for himself in Berlin. In April 1942, he wrote to Adolf Hitler with a series of reform proposals, leading to Hitler approving changes to the judicial system based on these submissions. On August 20, 1942, Hitler dismissed Schlegelberger and on the same day replaced him with Otto Georg Thierack, with Rothenberger appointed as state secretary in charge of judicial reform.
One of Rothenberger’s first acts was to make a deal with SS-Brigadeführer Bruno Streckenbach, whereby prisoners deemed as “antisocial” were to be removed from jails and given to the SS to be worked to death in concentration camps. SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler decreed that Jews and Roma would join recidivists and those with sentences of 80 years or over in this “antisocial” category.
Rothenberger soon returned to his original reform plans and sought to give the Nazi Party a closer role in the training of judges. He argued that justice at the highest level should remain with a proper, trained judiciary, an idea interpreted by the head of the Party Chancellery, Martin Bormann, as not going far enough. Others saw Rothenberger’s ideas as unwarranted attacks on the judiciary.
From December 1942, Thierack tried to get rid of his unpopular secretary of state, as his reforms were causing friction at a time when the war was beginning to turn against the Nazis and stability was necessary. Bormann eventually dismissed Rothenberger in late 1943 on the unusual charge of plagiarism. He returned, disappointed, to Hamburg. There he was appointed by Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann as Hamburg’s commissioner for total warfare. In September 1944, Rothenberger commenced practice as a public notary.
In May 1945, Rothenberger was arrested by the Allies and interned in Neumünster, near Hamburg. He became one of the defendants at the Judges’ Trial, which commenced at Nuremberg on January 4, 1947, and on December 4, 1947, he was sentenced to seven years in prison. The tribunal found that Rothenberger had furthered the program of racial persecution and contributed significantly to the degradation of the Ministry of Justice and the courts in their submission to the will of Hitler, the Nazi Party, and the police. Rothenberger was found guilty for participating in the perversion and bending of the legal system.
In August 1950, he was released early from Landsberg Prison and settled in Schleswig-Holstein, before returning to Hamburg in 1954. His request for a review of his pension was rejected by the City of Hamburg. In 1959, a report was published on Rothenberger’s activities during the Nazi era. Shamed, Rothenberger committed suicide on September 1, 1959, in Hamburg.