Otto von Wächter was an Austrian lawyer, a Nazi politician, and a high-ranking member of the SS.
Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter was born on July 8, 1901, in northern Bohemia, the only son of General Josef von Wächter, a former Austrian army minister, and his wife Martha. His father served in the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I and received an award that gave him the title Freiherr (baron).
Between 1908 and 1913, Wächter lived in Trieste, Italy, where he attended primary school. During World War I, the family lived in Budějovice (Budweis), southern Bohemia, then a German-speaking district. Wächter graduated high school in 1919.
Skilled in swimming, climbing, and skiing, Wächter twice won Austrian rowing championships between 1919 and 1922. He completed his legal studies at the University of Vienna and received his doctorate in law in 1924.
From 1919 to 1922, Wächter was a member of an Austrian Freikorps. On April 1, 1923, aged 21, he took out membership in the then-banned Austrian Nazi Party. In October 1923, he also joined the German Nazi Party, but by 1925, he had dropped out due to internal party conflicts; he rejoined in October 1930. From 1931, Wächter served as a district office leader (Gauamtsleiter) in Vienna and chief trainer of the party in Austria. He enrolled in the SS on January 1, 1932.
Wächter was a leader of the failed Austrian putsch of July 25, 1934, which led to the murder of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. He then fled to Germany, which cost him his Austrian citizenship in 1935, but he obtained German citizenship soon after. In 1937, Wächter started working in the relief organization of exiled Austrian Nazis in Berlin.
Following the Anschluss of March 1938, Wächter served under the Nazi governor of Austria, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, from May 24, 1938, to April 30, 1939. He headed the Wächter Commission, which was responsible for the dismissal and/or compulsory retirement of all Austrian officials who did not conform with the Nazi regime, as well as all Jewish officials in Austria.
Following the conquest of Poland in September 1939, the Nazis established the General Government in the central region of the country, which was administered by Hans Frank. Shortly after, Adolf Hitler appointed Wächter as governor of Kraków. On November 6, 1939, the local Gestapo chief, SS-Obersturmbannführer Bruno Müller, called a meeting of all staff and faculty of the Jagiellonian University to lecture them about German plans for Polish education. The entire faculty attended, and all were subsequently deported to Sachsenhausen concentration camp in what was called the Sonderaktion Krakau (Special Action Kraków). This was part of the Nazi plan to eliminate the Polish intellectual elite in the centers that were to become culturally German.
Wächter was also head of the Commission for Refugee Issues in Kraków. In this role, he ordered that by December 1, 1939, all Jews over 12 years old in the district of Kraków must put a distinguishing mark on their homes or would suffer severe punishment if they failed to do so. Further, also in December, he prohibited Jewish children from attending school in all public, private, and “Jewish schools.” At the same time, he discussed with Hans Frank and Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger what measures could be taken to compel Poles to do forced labor.
In December 1940, a decree for the expulsion of the city’s 68,000 Jews appeared under Wächter’s signature, as did a further decree issued on March 3, 1941, ordering the remaining 15,000 Jews to move into the newly created Kraków ghetto. At a government meeting on October 20, 1941, Wächter would say that a “radical solution to the Jewish issue is inevitable.”
As governor of Kraków, Wächter was under the direct supervision of Hans Frank. Frustrated with the limitations of his role, Wächter was about to resign when he received a new posting in Galicia. The post of governor of Kraków was taken over by Richard Wendler, brother-in-law of SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler.
After Operation Barbarossa on June 22, 1941, the eastern part of the former Austrian province of Galicia was attached to the General Government as the District of Galicia. On January 21, 1942, Wächter was appointed by Hitler as governor, based in the city of Lvov (Lviv).
Wächter showed himself to be an advocate of Frank’s harsh attitude toward the Final Solution of the Jewish Question. In August 15, 1942, he obeyed an order to liquidate the ghetto and personally oversaw the transportation of 4,000 Jews to extermination camps.
In late 1942, Wächter visited the operational area known as Reichskommissariat Ukraine. There, he drew the conclusion that the best way to effectuate the Final Solution was through gassing.
While governor of Galicia, Wächter established a new Waffen-SS division under German supervision of people recruited from the local Ukrainian population. Its task was to fight against Soviet communists (which, by definition, included Jews as carriers of “Judeo-Bolshevik” ideas). After the disastrous German defeat at Stalingrad at the start of 1943, Wächter submitted the proposal to Himmler on March 1, 1943; by April 28, 1943, the SS Division Galicia was commissioned.
The loss of Galicia on July 26, 1944, to the advancing Red Army saw Wächter petition Himmler for transfer to the Waffen-SS. Himmler gave Wächter a new commission as head of “the Military Administration to the Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in Italy,” headed by SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff. Wächter relocated to Gardone on the Lake Garda. In August 1944, Himmler gave Wächter the added responsibility of lieutenant general of the police. In the final stages of the war, he still headed the Eastern Affairs unit in the Reich Security Main Office.
Wächter remained with the First Division of the Ukrainian National Army until May 10, 1945, when he left to avoid being captured by the Soviets. He then successfully faked his death in Rome by drowning. He adopted a false identity as Alfredo Reinhardt and fled to Rome, where he hid for four years under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudal. In the spring of 1949, he crossed into South Tyrol in Italy, and in June, he began looking at options for moving to Brazil. On July 3, 1949, however, he contracted severe jaundice and died on July 14, 1949.
The dual German administration in the General Government meant that Wächter’s role in Kraków was possibly not as extensive as that of others in occupied Poland. Moreover, notwithstanding his key role, little documentation exists about him in the Austrian State Archives or in Berlin Document Center. Famed Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who tried to hunt down Wächter after the war, considered him “the most hated among all Nazi fugitives,” even though he managed to compile only a single folder on Wächter from his own exhaustive research. That folder is today part of the Simon Wiesenthal Archive, in Vienna.
Gustav Wagner, an Austrian staff sergeant in the SS and a deputy commander of the Sobibór extermination camp in German-occupied Poland, was known as the “Beast” and the “Wolf,” because of his brutality to camp prisoners.
Born on July 18, 1911, in Vienna, Gustav Franz Wagner joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1931. In 1934, he was arrested for painting swastikas and putting up Nazi posters, which was prohibited. To help him escape further arrest, the Nazi Party smuggled him over the border into Germany, where he worked with a local SA detachment, returning after the Anschluss with Austria in 1938.
From May 1940, he served in the Aktion T-4 institution of Schloss Hartheim near Linz under the command of Franz Stangl, implementing the Nazi program of killing or sterilizing people with physical and mental disabilities. Because of Wagner’s experiences at Hartheim, in March 1942, he was transferred to Sobibór in Poland, where he again worked with Stangl. After the camp was completed, Wagner was appointed deputy commandant and was responsible for the selection of prisoners.
Sobibór was a murder complex, where over a period of 15 months, 250,000 men, women, and children stepped off the train in the morning and were gassed by lunchtime. Their corpses were burned before dawn the next day. By then, their luggage had been sorted and packed for shipment to Germany. The victims were gassed by carbon monoxide.
Wagner’s role was crucial. His initial job was to construct the factory—to build the structures and the wire fences (which were later electrified), make the antiescape trenches, place the minefields, build the gas chambers, and manage laying a small rail siding so that the trains could pull off the main line and discharge their cargoes.
He had responsibility for the daily interactions with prisoners and supervision of Sobibór’s daily routine. During his visit to Sobibór on February 12, 1943, Heinrich Himmler promoted him to SS-Oberscharführer.
Wagner was remembered as one of the most brutal SS officers at the camp. Survivors have described him as a cold-blooded sadist. He regularly thrashed camp inmates and killed Jews at whim without restraint. He rarely shot his victims but tortured them, using an ax, shovel, whip, or even his bare hands. He did not require any reason for doing so. Even other German SS guards in the camp were afraid of him.
Gustav Wagner was the deputy commander of the Sobibór extermination camp. He was remembered by prisoners as one of the most brutal of SS officers, with his violence earning him the nicknames “The Beast” and “The Wolf.” He also spent time at the death camp of Treblinka, having learned much of his trade as a guard under the tutelage of Franz Stangl. Austrian Roman Catholic bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathizer at the Vatican, helped Wagner and Stangl escape Europe at the end of the war through a “ratline” and reach Syria using a Red Cross passport. Wagner was found dead with a knife in his chest on October 3, 1980, in São Paulo, Brazil. (Keystone Pictures USA/ZUMAPRESS.com)
In the spring of 1943, after two Jews escaped from Sobibór, Wagner took charge of securing the camp, and with a squad of Wehrmacht soldiers, he laid minefields around the perimeter to deter further escapes. This was ineffective. When a fully fledged revolt took place at Sobibór on October 14, 1943, Wagner was in Lublin, and the prisoners believed that his absence would improve their chances of success. After this, Wagner was ordered to assist in closing the camp. He was transferred to Treblinka and eventually to northern Italy, to the concentration camp of San Sabba. He then also fought in Yugoslavia against the partisans.
In 1945, after this last assignment, Wagner escaped the Allied advance. He was sentenced to death in absentia at Nuremberg. In late 1947, Wagner and Stangl were both held by the Austrians in connection with their involvement in the Aktion T-4 program at Hartheim, but on May 30, 1948, they both escaped and disappeared. With the help of former colleagues, they crossed the border to South Tyrol and asked the Catholic agencies there to contact Rome.
Austrian Roman Catholic Bishop Alois Hudal, a Nazi sympathizer in the Vatican, helped Wagner and Stangl both escape through a ratline and to reach Syria using a Red Cross passport. On August 25, 1948, Wagner and Stangl both applied for a Red Cross travel document to migrate to Argentina, filling in the forms truthfully and using their real names. They gave their nationality as Austrian, saying that they had lost their nationality for political reasons, which made them stateless and entitled to assistance.
After three years in Syria, they both fled to Brazil, again with Bishop Hudal’s help. Wagner was admitted as a permanent resident in 1950 and assumed the name of Günther Mendel.
After the Sobibór trial in West Germany in 1966, the West German searchers knew that Wagner was staying near his former boss, Stangl. It took until February 28, 1967, before Stangl was tracked down by Nazi hunter Simon Weisenthal, arrested, and extradited to West Germany. Weisenthal learned from evidence in Stangl’s trial in Düsseldorf that Wagner had been hiding in Brazil since 1950 and asked the Brazilian police to locate Wagner, but they failed to do so.
Wiesenthal, together with a Brazilian journalist, eventually tracked down Wagner by posting in the paper a photograph of Germans in Brazil celebrating Hitler’s 90th birthday and identifying one of the persons as Gustav Franz Wagner. It was not Wagner; but Wagner turned himself in to the Brazilian police because he feared that he would, like Adolf Eichmann, be kidnapped by the Mossad and sentenced to death in Israel or even be killed immediately by Israeli agents. He sought to hide his role in the death camps, but on May 31, 1978, when a Sobibór ex-prisoner, Stanislaw Szmajzner, saw the story on television about Wagner’s arrest, he traveled to São Paulo and identified Wagner. There was now no doubt about Wagner’s identity, and the Brazilian Ministry of Justice took him into custody.
On July 5, 1978, the Brazilian Supreme Court received the official request from West Germany for Wagner’s extradition. After a series of court hearings involving the West German and Brazilian governments—and requests filed from Austria, Israel, and Poland that Wagner be extradited—the Brazilian attorney general rejected all attempts to bring Wagner to justice in Europe. As a result, he was never brought to trial, ostensibly due to the way the countries requested his extradition. The Brazilian Supreme Court’s strict interpretation of the law also played a role.
Wagner died on October 3, 1980, aged 69, after he was found with a knife in his chest in São Paulo. His attorney stated that Wagner had committed suicide.
Christian Wirth, a German SS and police officer, was a perpetrator of the Aktion T-4 program and a leading architect of Aktion Reinhard, the Nazi campaign to annihilate the Jews of Poland. Notorious for his sadism and brutality both to Jewish victims and his own SS staff at Nazi extermination camps, Wirth, nicknamed “Christian the Cruel” and “Wild Christian,” implemented mass killings of Jews in three of the six Nazi death camps situated in Poland.
Born on November 24, 1885, in Oberbalzheim in Baden-Württemberg, Wirth was the son of a master cooper. After attending elementary and advanced training school, he became a carpenter. From 1905 to 1910, he was a member of the Württemberg Grenadier Regiment 123. He served as a policeman in Heilbronn in 1910, but he soon moved to Stuttgart, where he became a detective. During World War I, he volunteered to serve as a noncommissioned officer on the Western Front, where he was wounded. After the war, in June 1919, he returned to Stuttgart and was promoted quickly to police detective sergeant in charge of other detectives investigating homicides. His reputation for brutality was already well known, and his success rate for getting confessions from suspects was impressive.
Across 1922 to 1923 and then again from January 1, 1931, Wirth was a member of the NSDAP. In 1932, he was promoted to the position of criminal police inspector, taking a political role in the national police officers’ association at Württemberg. In June 1933, he joined the SA, and on December 7, 1937, he became a member of the SD. In April 1939, he transferred to the SS. By the time war broke out in September 1939, Wirth had reached the rank of Kriminalkommissar in the Stuttgart Criminal Police (Kripo), a department of the Gestapo under Arthur Nebe.
Along with several other police officers, Wirth participated in the Aktion T-4 euthanasia program, carried out and supervised by the Reich Chancellery and targeting Germans with mental and physical disabilities. Initially, the victims were killed by lethal injections, but later, gas vans and gas chambers were used.
In October 1939, Wirth was sent as administrator to a euthanasia unit in Brandenburg. He personally led the first gassing experiments there using carbon monoxide in a confined space. The experiment was attended by Philipp Bouhler and Viktor Brack of the Reich Chancellery. Bouhler introduced the idea to disguise future gas chambers as shower rooms so that victims would not become suspicious before the gassing started. Eventually, all gas chambers in the extermination camps would be camouflaged in this way.
Wirth was promoted to SS-Obersturmfűhrer, and from February 1940 until May 1940, he was stationed at the Grafeneck psychiatric killing center. Here he met SS-Obersturmführer Josef “Sepp” Kaspar Oberhauser, who later became his adjutant at Bełżec death camp. At Grafeneck was also situated SS-Untersturmführer Kurt Franz, named as commander of the camp at Sobibór in April 1942 and who was later himself transferred to take charge at Treblinka.
Wirth then worked briefly in the euthanasia facilities at Hadamar and Hartheim Castle. Franz Stangl, a future commandant at both Sobibór and Treblinka, met Wirth at Hartheim. In mid-1940, Wirth was appointed as head of the euthanasia program and inspector of all euthanasia centers in Germany and Austria. The euthanasia program was officially discontinued on August 24, 1941, as it gradually met with increasing opposition from the Catholic Church and relatives of the victims.
Many of those carrying out Aktion T-4, including Wirth, were able to put their experience gained with the gassings in the euthanasia facilities to perfect use in Aktion Reinhard. Three Aktion Reinhard death camps—Bełżec, Sobibór, and Treblinka—were built in German-occupied Poland, with the aim of gassing all Jews from the area known as the General Government.
By mid-March 1942, with Wirth as its first commandant and staffed by men he had met during Aktion T-4, Bełżec’s killing capacity was operational. Bełzec was the first extermination camp where fixed gas chambers used carbon monoxide to kill the victims.
At Bełżec, Wirth earned a reputation for brutal efficiency and complete dedication to duty. He could also be hard on the German SS guards. He believed that they were lazy and ordered them to undertake route marches around the camp, which he personally led. Even the guards were taken aback by his brutality.
Wirth decided that the Jewish prisoners themselves were to do as much of the work as possible in the extermination process. He personally selected Sonderkommando workers from the first few trains that arrived at the camp and introduced a hierarchy into the Sonderkommando, appointing oberkapos and kapos—Jews who had the authority to supervise other Jews.
As Bełżec’s commandant, Wirth sought to find the best ways to make the killing center run as efficiently as possible, seeking to ascertain the best ways to kill and dispose of the bodies of as many Jews as quickly as possible. Drawing on his Aktion T-4 experience, he recognized the importance of deceiving the victims about the real purpose of the camp. He often made a welcoming speech to new arrivals, assuring them that they had come to a transit camp and that they had nothing to fear. He also recognized the importance of speed in this operation, moving the victims quickly from arrival to execution. He ordered that they be forced to run from one place to the next, always being beaten or whipped if they did not do so fast enough, so that they were terrified and disoriented.
Wirth’s approach to the extermination process at Bełżec served as a model for the extermination camps Sobibór and Treblinka. In June 1942, Wirth moved from Bełżec and went to Berlin. Gottlieb Hering, whom Wirth had known for 20 years, took over at Bełżec in August 1942, as the second (and last) commandant. On August 1, 1942, Wirth reappeared, appointed as inspector of all three Aktion Reinhard camps. In this role, he directed all three commandants and was directly subordinate to Odilo Globocnik.
Wirth’s first task was to reorganize Treblinka, which had become somewhat disordered over time. He took on the task with enthusiasm, ensuring that the gas chambers were enlarged and capable of dealing with more substantial numbers expected to arrive. Once he had finished at Treblinka, he moved on to Sobibór and did the same there. In December 1942, Wirth was given charge of the slave labor camps in the Lublin area.
In the summer of 1943, Wirth was promoted to SS-Sturmbannfűhrer. After Aktion Reinhard was discontinued in the fall of 1943, Wirth and other officers were transferred to the region around Trieste in northern Italy. In addition to fighting partisans, Wirth’s role was now to establish a death camp in San Sabba, which included a small gas chamber, to kill the Jews of Trieste. Globocnik was appointed local higher SS and police leader, and Globocnik, Wirth, and their colleagues were responsible for hunting down and arresting partisans and Jews.
In November 1943, Wirth temporarily returned to the Lublin district to take charge of Aktion Erntefest (Harvest Festival). As the Aktion Reinhard camps began to be closed, Wirth ensured that the Jewish laborers in Nazi camps, including Trawniki and Madjanek, were killed; some 42,000 Jews were murdered as a result.
Wirth lost his own life on May 26, 1944, aged 58, when he was killed by Yugoslav partisans in a street fight while traveling in an open-topped car on an official trip to Fiume. He was buried with full military honors.
Eduard Wirths was the chief SS doctor at Auschwitz from September 1942 to January 1945. He was significantly immersed in Nazi ideology in three crucial spheres: the claim of revitalizing the German race and Volk, the biomedical path to that revitalization through purification of genes and race, and the focus on Jews as a threat to this renewal and to the immediate and long-term health of the Germanic race. He was responsible for medical experimentation carried out at Auschwitz, including that by Josef Mengele.
Wirths was born at Geroldshausen, near Würzburg, on September 4, 1909, into a liberal Catholic family. His father served as a medical orderly in World War I. Eduard and his younger brother Helmut both became doctors. As a child, Eduard was meticulous, obedient, conscientious, and reliable; these traits continued into his adult life. The Wirths family was not known to be antisemitic or to be politically radical.
Wirths became a zealous Nazi while studying medicine at Würzburg University between 1930 and 1935. He joined the Nazi Party and the SA in 1933, applied to join the SS in 1934, and joined the Waffen-SS in 1939. With the onset of war, Wirths saw service in Norway and on the Eastern Front but was ruled medically unfit for combat in the spring of 1942 after he had a heart attack. He undertook special training for department leaders at Dachau concentration camp and served as chief SS psychiatrist at Neuengamme concentration camp during July 1942. In September 1942, now promoted to SS-Hauptsturmführer, he was appointed chief camp physician at Auschwitz, tasked with stopping the typhus epidemics that had afflicted SS personnel at the site.
Wirths improved conditions on the medical blocks, and he was well regarded by most prison doctors and inmates with whom he had contact. He was protective of prisoner doctors and other prisoners doing medical work. In August 1944, Wirth recommended Dr. Josef Mengele for promotion, referring to Mengele’s “open, honest, . . . [and] absolutely dependable” character and “magnificent” intellectual and physical talents. Referring to Mengele’s scientific experiments on prisoners, he also wrote of his “valuable contribution to anthropological science by making use of the scientific materials available to him.”
Wirths was involved in ordering medical experimentation, particularly in gynecological and typhus-related tests, while his own primary research concerned precancerous growths of the cervix. He also had an interest in the sterilization of women through the removal of their ovaries by surgery or radiation. It is generally acknowledged that he never directly participated in such experiments himself; instead, he delegated them to subordinates. The victims of these experiments were Jewish women who had been imprisoned in Block 10 of the main camp in Auschwitz.
Wirths entrusted the responsibility for performing colposcopy procedures in Auschwitz to an inmate doctor, a German Jewish gynecologist named Maximillian Samuels, who was an expert in detecting precancerous growths in the cervix. Samuels was ordered to perform colposcopies on the female inmates in Block 10, remove parts of their cervix, study precancerous conditions of the cervix, and summarize his findings. In the fall of 1943, Samuels completed his research and submitted to Wirths his report, “Carcinoma: The Female Scourge of This World Is Curable.” As soon as Samuels’s task was finished, he was shot. Wirths sent the photographs and specimens for study to Dr. Hans Hinselmann, the physician who reportedly invented colposcopy, in Berlin. A colposcopy is today considered the gold standard for detecting cervical cancer in women with abnormal Pap smears, and the procedure has saved an untold number of women’s lives.
While Wirths was busy in Auschwitz, his younger brother, Helmut Wirths, worked with Hinselmann at the Frauenklinik Altona (“Women’s Clinic” in the northern city of Altona).
Like Hinselmann, Wirths’s research focused on colposcopic examinations, and Wirths was trained in the procedure by Hinselmann.
Prior to the spring of 1943, selections of prisoners for gassing or work had been conducted by the camp commander and his subordinates. Wirths assumed medical control of prisoner selections at Auschwitz-Birkenau and insisted upon taking his own personal turn in performing selections.
Wirths was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer in September 1944. Following the evacuation of Auschwitz in January 1945, he was transferred, along with many other former Auschwitz personnel, to the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in Thuringia. He held the position of chief camp physician until the camp’s evacuation in April 1945.
Wirths was captured by the Allies at the end of the war and held in custody by British forces. He attempted suicide by hanging after a British officer made him recognize his responsibility in the death of some 4 million people. Eduard Wirths died on September 20, 1945, from injuries sustained during his suicide attempt.
Dieter Wisliceny was an SS officer who was a key enforcer in the final phase of the Holocaust, rounding up Jews into ghettos and sending them to extermination camps. He served in Greece, Hungary, and Slovakia; introduced the yellow star, which distinguished Jews from non-Jews in occupied countries; and was involved in the deportation of Slovakian Jews in 1942, the Greek Jews from Salonika in 1943 to 1944, and the Hungarian Jews in 1944. Wisliceny’s evidence at the Nuremberg trials was later important in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel.
He was born on January 13, 1911, in Regulowken (now Możdżany), East Prussia, the son of a landowner. Wisliceny began studying theology before working briefly as a clerk in a construction firm. He was unemployed when he became a member of the NSDAP in 1931, and in 1934, he connected with both the SS and the SD. On joining the SD in July 1934, he befriended Adolf Eichmann, who had also just joined. At one stage, Wisliceny was Eichmann’s superior in the SS. Both men served together from 1934 to 1937 in Berlin, maintaining friendly relations from 1937 until 1940, when Eichmann was sent to Vienna and Wisliceny was assigned to Danzig.
In 1940, Eichmann requested that Wisliceny work for him at the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt, or RSHA) in Bratislava as an adviser on the Jewish question in Slovakia, but his role also covered Jews in Hungary and Greece. Wisliceny worked with Eichmann until September 1944.
Wisliceny acquired a reputation in Slovakia for accepting bribes. During the summer of 1942, he was bribed by the Bratislava-based Jewish Relief Committee to delay the deportation of Slovakian Jews. He also negotiated the ill-fated Europa Plan, initiated by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, to save the remnants of European Jewry for some $2 to $3 million, to be paid for by Jewish organizations abroad. Wisliceny accepted an initial bribe of $50,000 but did not halt the deportations.
As a specialist on “Jewish matters,” Wisliceny met with Eichmann and other regional specialists at least annually, usually in November. While each representative reported on conditions in his territory, the number of persons affected by evacuation and extermination activities was kept secret. Those attending learned, however, the outcome of the Final Solution from the specialists reporting on each country.
From early 1943 to 1944, Wisliceny was assigned to Salonika, where, together with Alois Brunner, he introduced the definition of a Jew in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws. He ordered Jews to wear a yellow Star of David, required Jewish doctors and lawyers to affix such stars in their offices, and made Jewish tenants put stars on their apartment doors. Three ghettos were established, one of which, the Baron Hirsch quarter, was enclosed. These directives enabled the efficient roundup and deportation of Greece’s Jews to Auschwitz. Wisliceny’s mission to Salonika resulted in the ultimate destruction of Greek Jewry.
Wisliceny and his associates established themselves in villas formerly owned by Jews in the Hodos Velissariou district, and on March 15, 1943, 40 train cars carrying Jews left for Auschwitz. The next transport to leave went to Treblinka, arriving there on March 26, 1943. Between March 15 and August 11, 1943, more than 45,000 Jews from Salonika and other places in the German Occupation Zone of Greece were deported to Auschwitz.
Wisliceny’s last assignment, in March 1944, saw him join Eichmann’s Special Operations unit in Budapest, to arrange the deportation of Hungary’s Jewish population to Auschwitz. The Hungarian and German governments had agreed that the German army would not enter Budapest. No mention was made of the Security Police, and a unit called Special Action Commando Eichmann (Einsatzkommando Eichmann), numbering about 800 members, was secretly organized from the Security Police and Waffen-SS. This began the extermination of the Hungarian Jews. Eichmann’s men moved into Hungary on March 19, 1944, with all operations directed by Eichmann personally. Between April and October 1944, over 400,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz.
Wisliceny also served as liaison in the failed Blood for Goods negotiations, in which Eichmann offered to save the lives of 1 million Jews in exchange for goods supplied by the Allies, including 10,000 trucks. While detailed preparations were made for the deportation of all Hungarian Jews, a Hungarian Jewish emissary, Dr. Rudolf Kasztner, gave Wisliceny a large bribe to arrange a meeting with Eichmann to discuss the Jewish situation. Around April 8 or 10, 1944, a meeting was held in Eichmann’s office between Kasztner, Joel Brand (another Jewish representative), and Eichmann. The negotiations failed, and the planned deportations continued. At this time, Budapest remained outside the scope of the deportations.
Recognizing that an agreement could eventually be achieved, Eichmann decided to send some 9,000 Hungarian Jews to Vienna. In August 1944, a further 3,000 were sent to Bergen-Belsen, from where, in December 1944, they were sent to Switzerland.
In November and December 1944, about 30,000 Jews were evacuated from Budapest to Austria under terrible conditions. The group was forced to walk about 180 kilometers to the Austrian border in rain and snow and without food. Many died. This was reported by the Hungarians to Eichmann, and Eichmann ended Wisliceny’s participation in the Hungarian actions.
Wisliceny was arrested on May 12, 1945, near Altaussee, Austria. At Nuremberg, he was a witness for the prosecution and provided vivid details about the implementation of the Final Solution. In his evidence, Wisliceny claimed that in late April or early May 1942, Eichmann had shown him a secret order dated April 1942 signed by Heinrich Himmler that, on Adolf Hitler’s specific authority, designated Heydrich to immediately begin the “final disposition of the Jewish question.” The order stated that the führer was to be kept informed as to the execution of this order. Wisliceny also said that at his last meeting with Eichmann in February 1945, at which time they were discussing their fates upon losing the war, Eichmann had told him, “I laugh when I jump into the grave because of the feeling that I have killed 5,000,000 Jews. That gives me great satisfaction and gratification.” Wisliceny’s evidence was produced in the 1961 Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem, Israel.
After the trial at Nuremberg concluded, Wisliceny was extradited to Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, where he was charged with complicity in mass murder. Convicted on February 27, 1948, he was sentenced to death by hanging. He escaped from prison on March 3, 1948, but was denounced by an innkeeper about 20 kilometers away. On May 4, 1948, he was hanged in Bratislava.
Karl Wolff held the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer in the Waffen-SS. He became chief of staff to Heinrich Himmler and SS liaison officer to Adolf Hitler until 1943. He was the supreme head of the German police forces in Italy in 1945.
Karl Friedrich Otto Wolff was born on May 13, 1900, in Darmstadt, Hesse, the son of a wealthy district court judge. Completing his education at the Catholic school in Darmstadt in 1917, Wolff joined the German army, undertook four months’ training, and volunteered on September 5, 1917, to serve with the Hessian Infantry Regiment on the Western Front. Wolff chose the army as his career, and as a lieutenant, he was one of the youngest officers ever appointed, having obtained his rank in 1918 at the age of 17. He was awarded the Iron Cross First and Second Class. After the war, Wolff was forced to leave the army due to the terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles, and in December 1918, he joined a Hessian Freikorps, where he stayed until May 1920.
Wolff then started a two-year apprenticeship at the Bethmann bank in Frankfurt. In July 1922, he became engaged to Frieda von Röhmheld, whom he married in 1923. The couple moved to Munich, where Wolff worked for Deutsche Bank until hyperinflation led to his being laid off in June 1924. He then joined a public relations firm, and on July 1, 1925, he started his own public relations company in Munich, which he ran until 1933.
The appeal of a more powerful Germany drew Wolff to join the SS in July 1931 and the NSDAP in October the same year. Wolff rose through SS ranks, becoming an SS-Sturmführer in February 1932. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he served briefly as an SS military liaison officer to the German army, and on June 15, 1933, he was selected by SS-Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler as his adjutant. In 1936, Wolff became Himmler’s chief of staff. By early 1937, SS-Gruppenführer Wolff was the third in command of the entire SS.
As chief of staff, Wolff controlled access to Himmler, became head of the SS Chancellery, and supervised various SS organizations. His trajectory was rapid; by 1939, he was the liaison between Himmler and Hitler’s general staff, as well as Himmler’s “eyes and ears” at Hitler’s headquarters. Around this time, he befriended Odilo Globocnik.
On September 8, 1939, Wolff ordered the Gestapo office in Frankfurt (Oder) to immediately arrest all male Jews of Polish nationality and their family members and to confiscate their wealth. As the war developed, he took part in meetings regarding the elimination of the Jews. He was aware of Generalplan Ost and the gas chambers. In August 1941, at Arthur Nebe’s invitation as commander of Einsatzgruppe B, Himmler and Wolff attended the shooting of Jews at Minsk. Repelled by the incident, Himmler resolved to implement alternate methods of killing, and by the spring of 1942, on his orders, Auschwitz had been greatly expanded to include new gas chambers where victims were killed by the pesticide Zyklon B.
Wolff’s involvement in planning the transport and murder of the Jews of Warsaw in July and August 1942 was evidenced in the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, which verified that up to 300,000 Jews were deported to die in the gas chambers of Treblinka. Wolff could not refute that he personally ordered several trains to start the deportations. He dealt constantly with Reich Railway Director Albert Ganzenmüller, and in a letter of August 13, 1942, referring to transports of Jews to Treblinka, Wolff thanked Ganzenmüller for his assistance and noted with pleasure that a train with 5,000 members “of the chosen people” had been running daily for 14 days. Under these conditions, the deportations could continue at an accelerated pace.
Wolff lost authority and power as differences arose between him and Himmler, especially after Reinhard Heydrich was assassinated in the summer of 1942. His influence was now threatened by other SS leaders, particularly Heydrich’s successor at the RHSA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, and Walter Schellenberg of the foreign intelligence service. In April 1943, Himmler sacked him as chief of staff and announced that he would personally take over Wolff’s duties as liaison officer to Hitler.
Later in 1943, Wolff made something of a comeback when Hitler personally granted him a general’s rank in the Waffen-SS. In September 1943, Wolff was transferred to Italy as higher SS and police leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, or HSSPF), and the German military governor of northern Italy. In that position, Wolff split duties with the head of the SD there, Wilhelm Harster, for security, prisons, and the supervision of concentration and forced-labor camps, as well as the deportation of forced laborers and the war against the partisans.
The Nazis entered Rome on September 10, 1943, and obtained registration lists of its Jewish community. On September 26, 1943, the community was ordered to hand over 50 kilograms of gold as a ransom and given 36 hours to do so or face the immediate deportation of 200 of their members. The gold payment merely postponed their fate. On October 16, 1943, the Germans entered the ancient ghetto to round up Jews for deportation. Most had gone into hiding. About 4,000 found sanctuary in various Roman Catholic institutions, including the Vatican. On October 18, 1943, however, 1,035 Jews were deported from Rome, and eventually a total of 2,091 Roman Jews were deported, approximately half of them to Auschwitz. By the end of World War II, only 102 of the deportees were still alive.
On December 9, 1944, Wolff was awarded the German Cross in Gold for using Italian units, with German troops in support, to destroy partisans and for the “maintenance of war production in the Italian territory.”
By 1945, Wolff was acting military commander of Italy, and in March 1945, he used intermediaries to contact the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in Switzerland, under Allen W. Dulles, and negotiate the surrender of all German forces in Italy. In exchange, in a secret agreement, Wolff was promised that the Allies would not prosecute him for actions during his command in Italy.
Taken into American custody, Wolff escaped trial as an SS general and leading Nazi by providing evidence against his fellow Nazis at Nuremberg in 1946. In 1947, he retired to private life.
In 1949, the West German government arrested Wolff for war crimes. He was tried in Munich for the Minsk shootings, his part in the deportation and murder of at least 300,000 Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka and Sobibór, and the death of about 100 partisans and Jews on the Russian front. He was sentenced to four years in prison.
On June 9, 1958, Otto Bradfisch, the head of Einsatzkommando 8, was questioned by the Munich state prosecutor about the shooting of Jews and communists in Minsk in mid-August 1941. In his defense, Bradfisch claimed that the executions were legal, as proven by the presence of Himmler and Wolff at the shootings.
In 1961, evidence presented at the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel revealed that Wolff had organized the deportation of Italian Jews to the death camps in 1944, and Wolff was again arrested in 1964. Wolff stood trial in Munich. Charged as an accessory to the murder of more than 300,000 Jews while he was adjutant to Himmler between 1942 and 1943, Wolff was tried as a Schreibtischtäter, literally a “desk perpetrator,” someone not physically present at the crime but culpable for reasons of administrative responsibility. The court concluded that Wolff served as Himmler’s “eyes and ears” in deportations and was thus guilty of complicity in the killings. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison but only served half of this term. He was released in 1970 on medical grounds.
Karl Wolff died aged 84 on July 17, 1984, in a hospital in Rosenheim.