Final Solution

Simon Wiesenthal

I was just reorganizing my desk and found some photographs almost twenty years old. One was a picture from July 2002 when I was fortunate enough to meet Mr. Simon Wiesenthal in his office in Vienna.

Simon Wiesenthal (above in his later years) was born on December 31, 1908, in Buchach, in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father was a wholesaler, who had left Russia in 1905 to escape the anti-Jewish pogroms. The elder Wiesenthal was called to active duty in 1914 in the Austro-Hungarian Army at the start of World War I; he was killed in action on the Eastern Front in 1915. Simon, his younger brother and his mother fled to Vienna, when the Russian Army overran Galicia. In the ebb and flow of war, the family returned to Buchach in 1917, after the Russians retreated. Simon attended the Czech Technical University in Prague, where he studied from 1928 until 1932. After graduating, he became a building engineer, working mostly in Odessa in 1934 and 1935. The next six years are unclear, concerning Wiesenthal’s life; he married in 1936, when he returned to Galicia.

After the Nazi invasion of Russia in 1941, Wiesenthal’s mother came to live with him and his wife in Lvov. Wiesenthal, a Jew, was detained by German authorities on July 6, 1941, but was saved from an Einsatzgruppe firing squad by a Ukrainian man, for whom he had previously worked. German police deported Wiesenthal and his wife in late 1941 to the Janowska labor and transit camp and forced to work at the Eastern Railway Repair Works. Every few weeks the Nazis would conduct a selection of Lvov Jewish Ghetto inhabitants unable to work. In one such deportation, Wiesenthal’s mother was transported by freight train to the Belzec extermination camp and killed in August 1942. On April 20, 1943, Wiesenthal avoided execution at a sand pit by firing squad, when at the last moment a German construction engineer intervened, stating that Wiesenthal was too skilled to be killed.

On October 2, 1943, the same German warned Wiesenthal that Janowska and its prisoners were about to be liquidated. Wiesenthal was able to sneak out of camp and remained free until June 13, 1944, when Polish detectives arrested him in Lvov. With Russian troops advancing, the SS moved Wiesenthal and other Jews by train to Przemyśl, 135 miles west of Lvov, where they built fortifications for the Germans. In September 1944, the SS transferred the surviving Jews to the Płaszów concentration camp in Krakow. One month later, Wiesenthal was transferred to the Gross-Rosen concentration camp. While working at a rock quarry there, Wiesenthal was struck on the foot by a large rock, which resulted in the amputation of the large toe on his right foot. The advancing Russian Army forced the evacuation of Gross-Rosen; Wiesenthal and other inmates marched by foot to Chemnitz. From Chemnitz, the prisoners were taken in open freight cars to Buchenwald. A few days later, trucks took the prisoners to the Mauthausen concentration camp, arriving in mid-February 1945. When the camp was liberated by American forces in May 1945, Wiesenthal weighed 90 pounds.

Wiesenthal dedicated most of his life to tracking down and gathering information on fugitive Nazis. His goal was to bring as many conspirators to the “Final Solution” as possible to justice for war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 1947, Simon Wiesenthal co-founded the Jewish Historical Documentation Center in Linz, Austria, in order to gather information for future war crime trials. He later opened the Jewish Documentation Center in Vienna. Wiesenthal was instrumental in the capture and conviction of Adolf Eichmann.

Visiting Mr. Wiesenthal in Vienna, 2002

The author interviewed Simon Wiesenthal at his small office in the Jewish Documentation Center in central Vienna in July 2002. During the visit, Mr. Wiesenthal said that there was one thing wrong with his book, The Camp Men. Dismayed, French waited for the explanation. “You were born 50 years too late. You found how to look through their officer files to prove they had been in the camps, while I had to rely on eye-witnesses. If you had been there to help me back then, I would have found more. But you weren’t born yet!”

Wiesenthal wrote The Sunflower, which describes a life-changing event he experienced when he was in the camp. He died in Vienna on September 20, 2005; his remains are buried at Herzliya, Israel.

Simon WiesenthalThe Fifth Field2021-12-24T11:02:23-06:00

Chełmno/Kulmhof

Chełmno was a hybrid extermination camp whose mechanism for death was a special commando, Sonderkommando Lange, of mobile toxic gas vans in which the victims were killed. These vans then dumped the bodies in mass graves in a nearby forest, the Rzuchów Forest. The location, referred to by the Germans as the Vernichtungslager Kulmhof, was thirty-one miles north of the metropolitan city of Łódź, in which a large Jewish ghetto had been established by the Nazis after their invasion of Poland in 1939. Chełmno is actually a shortened named for the Polish village of Chełmno nad Nerem, named Kulmhof an der Nehr in German. It was centrally located in the German district of the Warthegau, which top-ranking Nazis wished to make “Jew-Free”, Judenrein.

Four estimates have been made over the years as to the number of victims (mainly Jews and gypsies, but also some non-Jewish Poles and even some Czechs from Lidice) who perished in the operation of the facility: 152,000; 180,000; 340,000; and 200,000. Just as the location was a combination of stationary and mobile elements for killing, so the Nazi staffing of Chełmno was a joint SS and German police; Order Police (Ordnungspolizei) and Protective Police (Schutzpolizei) operation. One man, who escaped, later wrote that Chełmno was a “human slaughterhouse.”

The stationary portion of the operation centered about the grounds of a nearby mansion – the Nazis there known as the Hauskommando; victims were brought to the village by trains and trucks. After unloading, the Jews surrendered their possessions, remaining in the mansion several hours to no more than one day before they were forced into the special gas vans and killed. During the second period of operation, after the mansion had been destroyed, a church was used to hold the victims before their deaths. The Germans at the forest piece of the operation were known as the Waldkommando.

Chełmno remains one of the lesser-known and more-mysterious extermination efforts connected with the Final Solution (also known as the Final Solution of the Jewish Question (Endlösung, die Endlösung der Judenfrage), recent research – such as Chełmno and the Holocaust: The History of Hitler’s First Death Camp, by Patrick Montague has provided insights into many aspects of this terrible facility. The following individuals are believed to have been perpetrators at Chełmno during its two periods of operation:

(November 1941-April 11, 1943)

SS-Oberscharführer Basler, gas van driver

SS-Hauptscharführer Alfred Behm, transport commander; captured by the Soviets in 1945; fate unknown

(Police) Walter Bock, guard; born June 16, 1912; acquitted at trial in 1963

Polizeihauptwachtmeister Otto Böge, sergeant of the guard

Hans Bothmann

SS-Hauptsturmführer & Kriminalkommissar Hans Bothmann, commandant; born November 11, 1911 in Dithmarschen, Germany; arrested by the British on April 4, 1946; hanged himself the same day

Erwin Bürstinger

SS-Hauptscharführer Erwin Bürstinger, motor pool; born February 16, 1908 in Wels, Austria; fate unknown

Walter Burmeister

SS-Rottenführer Walter Burmeister, commandant’s driver; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 13 years in prison

Polizeihauptwachtmeister Gustav Fiedler, sergeant of the guard, operated bone-crusher in forest; born October 23, 1910; tried in Germany in 1965 and received sentence of 13 months in prison

SS-Hauptscharführer Karl Goede, victim valuables

Wilhelm Görlich

SS-Hauptscharführer Wilhelm Görlich, administration; taken prisoner by the Soviets in February 1945; sentenced to 25 years in prison; released in 1949

Alois Häfele

Polizeimeister/Revierleutnant Alois Häfele, supervisor of Jewish labor at the mansion; born July 5, 1893 in Württemberg; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 15 years in prison; sentence reduced to 13 years on appeal

Polizeiwachtmeister Simon Haider, forest guard commander; died November 4, 1958

Polizeioberwachtmeister Karl Heinl, mansion guard commander; born April 11, 1912; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 7 years in prison

Polizeiwachtmeister Friedrich Hensen; born November 29, 1920

SS-Oberscharführer Oskar Hering, gas van driver; killed in action with the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen” at Vratanica, Serbia on October 4, 1944

(Police) Wilhelm Heukelbach, guard; born February 28, 1911; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 13 months in prison; sentence dropped on appeal

Herbert Hiecke-Richter

SS-Oberscharführer Herbert Hiecke-Richter, transport commander; fate unknown

Revieroberwachtmeister Kurt Hoffmann, operated bone-crusher in forest

Polizeioberleutnant Gustav Hüfing, supervisor police guard; born in Wesel; died July 24, 1958

Fritz Ismer

SS-Hauptscharführer Fritz Ismer, victim valuables; served in the 10^th SS Panzer Division “Frundsberg”; no charges were ever brought against him

Erich Kretschmer

SS-Unterscharführer & Polizei-Oberwachtmeister Erich Kretschmer, transport guard commander; fate unknown

Gustav Laabs

SS-Hauptscharführer Gustav Laabs, gas van driver; born December 20, 1902; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 15 years in prison; sentence reduced to 13 years on appeal

Polizeioberleutnant Harold (Harry) Lang, supervisor police guard, fate unknown

Herbert Lange

SS-Hauptsturmführer Herbert Lange, commandant; born September 29, 1909 in Menzlin, Pomerania; killed in action on April 20, 1945 at Niederbarim near Berlin

Polizeimeister Willi Lenz, supervisor forest camp; born in Silesia; ambushed and hanged by last surviving group of Jews on January 18, 1945 at the granary as the Nazis evacuated Chełmno

Polizeioberleutnant Harri Maas, supervisor police guard

(Police) Friedrich Maderholz, guard; born November 7, 1919; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 13 months in prison; sentence dropped on appeal

Polizeiwachtmeister Theodore Malzmüller, guard; served with the 7th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen”; provided testimony at post-war trial in Germany

(Police) Mehring, guard; born March 25, 1920; acquitted at trial in 1963

Polizeimeister Kurt Möbius, transportation at the mansion facility; born May 3, 1895; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 8 years in prison

SS-Hauptscharführer Friedrich Neumann, administration

Herbert Otto

SS-Obersturmführer Herbert Otto, deputy commandant; born October 9, 1901 in Dresden; killed in Prague, Czechoslovakia on May 6, 1945

SS-Scharführer Rudolf Otto, guard

Albert Plate

SS-Sturmscharführer Albert Plate, deputy commandant; killed in action on October 4, 1944 with the 7^th SS Volunteer Mountain Division “Prinz Eugen”

Johannes Runge

SS-Hauptscharführer Johannes Runge, forest camp, built crematoria ovens; believed to have died of his wounds after being captured by the Soviets in February 1945 at Poznań, Poland

SS-Hauptscharführer Erwin (Erich) Schmidt, canteen & provisions; believed killed in action in February 1945 at Poznań, Poland

(Police) Wilhelm Schulte, guard; born June 23, 1912; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 13 months in prison; sentence dropped on appeal

SS-Unterscharführer Max Sommer, victim valuables; died in Bonn prior to trial

(Police) Alexander Steinke, guard; acquitted at trial in 1963

Franz Walter, gas van driver

Toni Wornshofer, truck driver

(March 19, 1944-January 18, 1945)

SS-Hauptsturmführer & Kriminalkommissar Hans Bothmann, commandant; born November 11, 1911 in Dithmarschen, Germany; arrested by the British on April 4, 1946; hanged himself the same day

SS-Hauptscharführer Erwin Bürstinger, motor pool; born February 16, 1908 in Wels, Austria; fate unknown

Ernst Burmeister

Polizeileutnant Ernst “Max” Burmeister, commanded police detachment; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 3 ½ years in prison

SS-Unterscharführer Walter Burmeister, commandant’s driver; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 13 years in prison

SS-Hauptscharführer Hermann Gielow, gas van driver; born October 9, 1892 in Berlin; tried in Poland; received death sentence; executed at Poznań, Poland on June 6, 1951

SS-Hauptscharführer Wilhelm Görlich, administration; taken prisoner by the Soviets in February 1945; sentenced to 25 years in prison; released in 1949

Revierleutnant Alois Häfele, supervisor of Jewish labor; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 15 years in prison; sentence reduced to 13 years on appeal

SS-Hauptscharführer Herbert Hiecke-Richter, victim valuables; fate unknown

Polizeioberwachtmeister Bruno Israel, guard; born August 19, 1906 in Łódź; tried in Poland; received death sentence; commuted to life in prison; released from prison December 12, 1958; died in Mindelheim, West Germany on April 17, 1968

SS-Unterscharführer & Polizei-Oberwachtmeister Erich Kretschmer, supervisor crematoria ovens; fate unknown

SS-Hauptscharführer Gustav Laabs, gas van driver; born December 20, 1902; sentenced at trial in 1963 to 15 years in prison; sentence reduced to 13 years on appeal

Polizeimeister Willi Lenz, supervisor forest camp; born in Silesia; ambushed and hanged by last surviving group of Jews on January 18, 1945 at the granary as the Nazis evacuated Chełmno

Walter Piller

SS-Oberscharführer Walter Piller, deputy commandant, drove gas van; born December 14, 1902 in Berlin; tried in Poland; received death sentence; executed on January 19, 1949 in Łódź

Polizeiwachtmeister Rufenach, guard

SS-Hauptscharführer Johannes Runge, forest camp, supervisor crematoria ovens; believed to have died of his wounds after being captured by the Soviets in February 1945 at Poznań, Poland

SS-Sturmscharführer Wilhelm Schmerse, deputy commandant

SS-Hauptscharführer Erwin (Erich) Schmidt, canteen & provisions; believed killed in action in February 1945 at Poznań, Poland

SS-Scharführer Stefan Seidenglanz, driver; fate unknown

Polizeiwachtmeister Arthur Sliwke, guard

SS-Unterscharführer Max Sommer, administration; died in Bonn prior to trial

SS-Hauptscharführer Ernst Thiele, driver; fate unknown

The following individuals are reported to have been at Chełmno, but it is not clear when they served there or what position they held:

Polizeiwachtmeister Bartel

Polizeiwachtmeister Blench

Polizeiunterwachtmeister Bollmann

Polizeioberwachtmeister Daniel

SS-Unterscharführer Walter Filer

Polizeiwachtmeister Moyz Kerzer

Polizeioberwachtmeister Oskar Kraus

Polizeiwachtmeister Friedrich Loscheck

Polizeiwachtmeister Sepp Reissner

Polizeiwachtmeister Anton Reiblinger

SS-Sturmscharführer Albert Richter

Polizeiwachtmeister Erich Rombach

SS-Scharführer Franz Schalling

SS-Rottenführer Wilhelm Sefler

Chełmno/KulmhofFrench MacLean2016-03-06T10:31:09-06:00

Adolf Eichmann

Adolf Eichmann

SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann was born in Solingen, Germany on March 19, 1906. His mother died when he was eight and the family moved to Linz, Austria. His father fought in World War I in the Austro-Hungarian Army and survived to start a mining company in that Austrian city. Adolf attended high school but dropped out to become a mechanic, later finding that he was unsuitable at this occupation. He worked for his father and then two other clerical jobs, before returning to Germany in 1933. Prior to departing Linz, he joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS. Once in German, he was assigned in the SS to the administrative staff at the Dachau concentration camp for a year. He then transferred to the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service) and assigned to the “Freemasons’ Desk” to keep track on German members of that organization.

In 1938, Adolf Eichmann traveled to the British Mandate of Palestine to conduct an assessment of potential massive German deportations of Jews to Palestine. After the German unification with Austria in 1938, Eichmann transferred to Austria to assist SS forces organize in Vienna.

In November 1934, Adolf Eichmann transferred to the Jewish Section at the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin. He was promoted to SS-Hauptscharführer and later to SS-Untersturmführer, a commissioned rank. Eichmann married in 1938; he would father three sons with his wife and a fourth with a woman in Argentina, later in life. The same year he was selected to form the Central Office of Jewish Emigration in Vienna, Austria. In December 1939, he moved to the Reich Main Security Office to become the head of Office IV B4, Jewish Affairs. After submitting a report in 1940 on the potential to ship Germany’s Jews to the island of Madagascar, he became the transportation administer of the “Final Solution,” coordinating the transportation of Europe’s Jews to eastern ghettos and extermination camps, playing a key role at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942. Eichmann, nicknamed “The Bloodhound,” hit his zenith of evil in 1944, when he went to Hungary and organized the transportation of that country’s 430,000 Jews to Auschwitz and their deaths. In 1944, he remarked, “A hundred dead people are a catastrophe. Six million dead is a statistic.” He received the War Service Cross 1st Class for his efforts. In 1945, Eichmann said, “I will leap laughing to my grave, because the feeling that I have five million people on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction!”

After the war, Eichmann was briefly detained by American forces, but escaped. In 1950, he left Germany for Italy and subsequently fled to Argentina, where he remained in hiding for several years. Living under the alias, Ricardo Klement, he was captured by Israeli security agents in Buenos Aires on May 11, 1960. He said at the time, “But I had nothing to do with killing the Jews. I never killed a Jew, but I never killed a non-Jew either – I’ve never killed anybody.” He returned to Israel, where he was put on trial, where he was found guilty and sentenced to death. During that proceeding, Eichmann stated, “If they had told me that my own father was a traitor and I had to kill him, I’d have done it. At that time I obeyed my orders without thinking, I just did as I was told.” Israeli hangman Shalom Nagar hanged Adolf Eichmann shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962 at a prison in Ramla, Israel. The Israelis cremated his remains and scattered the ashes in the Mediterranean.

Adolf EichmannFrench MacLean2016-03-04T20:30:31-06:00

Albert Widmann

Dr. Albert Widmann on trial after the war

SS-Sturmbannführer Dr. Albert Widmann, the son of a railroad engineer, was born in Stuttgart, Germany on June 8, 1912. Studying at the Stuttgart Technical Institute, he received his doctorate in chemical engineering in 1938. The year before he graduated, Widmann joined the Nazi Party. After his schooling, Albert Widmann found himself employed with the Technical Institute for the Detection of Crime, a forensic laboratory. By 1940, he had risen to be the institute’s chief of the section for chemical analysis. By that time, Widmann was also a member of the SS, holding the rank of SS-Untersturmführer.

Widmann’s section provided technical advice to the Nazi T4 Euthanasia Program. He took part in the early discussions about killing methods, participated in the first carbon monoxide gassing experiment at the Brandenburg State Hospital and Nursing Home, and through the institute, obtained the necessary carbon monoxide gas and poisons for T4. He also obtained and provided the lethal chemicals used in fatal injections in the children’s euthanasia program, sharing shared his technological knowledge with others in the T4 program that were in charge of supervising and administrating the program. Widmann visited other T4 centers, when solutions to technical problems needed to be tested, such as, when the crematorium in Sonnenstein Euthanasia Center malfunctioned.

In Russia, Dr. Widmann and Arthur Nebe conducted an experiment using explosives as the killing agent. They locked 25 mentally ill patients in two bunkers in a forest outside of Minsk. The first explosion did not kill every victim and it took so much time preparing the second explosive charge that the results were deemed unsatisfactory. Several days later, they conducted an experiment with poison gas in Mogilev. SS personnel hermetically sealed a room with twenty to thirty of the insane patients in the local lunatic asylum. Two pipes were then driven into the wall and attached by Dr. Widmann to the exhaust pipe of a car parked outside. A driver turned the car engine on and Widmann ensured that the exhaust began seeping into the room. However, after eight minutes, the people in the room were still alive. A second car was connected to the second pipe and through simultaneous operation, and a few minutes later, all those in the room were dead.

Widmann reportedly conducted other experiments back in Germany at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, along with Dr. Joachim Mrugowsky, concerning testing poisoned ammunition on prisoners – most of the tests ended in death.

After the war, Dr. Albert Widmann fled Berlin to Austria and finally returned to Stuttgart. He took a job with a paint company and ended up as the chief chemist. Widmann avoided prosecution until 1959. He served only six years and six months in jail for his crimes. Dr. Albert Widmann died in Stammheim on December 24, 1986.

Albert WidmannFrench MacLean2016-03-04T20:37:56-06:00

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Himmler

Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was born in München on October 7, 1900 in a Roman Catholic middle-class family. His father, Gebhard Himmler, was a teacher; his mother was Anna Maria Heyder. He had one older brother Gebhard Ludwig and one younger, Ernst. Heinrich was named after his godfather, Prince Heinrich of Bavaria of the royal family of Bavaria, who had been tutored by Gebhard Himmler. Heinrich attended grammar school in Landshut, where Gebhard served as deputy principal. He did well in his schoolwork, although he struggled in athletics.

Young Heinrich’s health was poor; he would have lifelong stomach complaints and other ailments. To remedy this, he trained daily with weights as a youth and exercised to become stronger. Fellow students recalled him as studious but awkward in social situations. In 1915, Himmler began training with the Landshut Cadet Corps. His father used his connections with the royal family to get Heinrich accepted as an officer candidate, and Himmler enlisted with the reserve battalion of the 11th Bavarian Regiment in December 1917.

After the war, Himmler completed grammar school. Following an apprenticeship on a farm and a subsequent illness, he studied agronomy at the Technische Hochschule in München. In his second year, he joined an Anti-Semitic nationalist group, the Reichskriegflagge.

Himmler joined the Nazi Party in August 1923, with a Nazi Party number of 14,303. He was involved in the Beer Hall Putsch on November 9, 1923. From mid-1924, Himmler worked under Gregor Strasser, a leading party leader, as a party secretary and propaganda assistant. Travelling across Bavaria agitating for the party, he gave speeches and distributed literature; within months, he became the head of the party office in Lower Bavaria and was responsible for integrating the areas membership with the ‘Nazi Party, under Hitler, when the party was re-founded in February 1925.

That same year, Himmler joined the SS (SS #168), initially holding a position of SS-Gauführer for Lower Bavaria. He soon became the deputy propaganda chief for the party as well. In September 1927, Himmler briefed Adolf Hitler on his vision to transform the SS into a loyal, powerful, racially pure elite unit. Hitler’s response was to appoint Himmler as the Deputy Reichsführer-SS, with the rank of SS-Oberführer, under Erhard Heiden. Heiden fell into disgrace, after allegations surfaced that parts of his uniform were customized by a Jewish tailor, and on January 5, 1929, he was dismissed by Adolf Hitler and succeeded by Heinrich Himmler as Reichsführer-SS. Never one to underestimate a potential rival, in April 1933, Himmler ordered Erhard Heiden arrested members of the Sicherheitsdienst. Heiden was killed shortly after, presumably at SD headquarters in München, but his corpse was only found in September 1933; he was buried on September 15, 1933.

During the 1930s, Himmler set up an SS empire in Germany, to include the concentration camp system in March 1933. He led the purge of the SA, Sturmabteilung Brownshirts on June 30, 1934 (known as “The Night of the Long Knives.”) In addition to assuming control of the police, Himmler established an SS military branch that later became known as the Waffen-SS. Growing the Waffen-SS became a Himmler priority, as did establishing the Einsatzgruppe beginning in 1939 with the invasion of Poland. During the war, he was a major architect of the “Final Solution.”

The Waffen-SS grew in scope to several dozen divisions and 800,000 troops. Hitler relied on these forces even more after the failed July 20 Bomb Plot against his life. Hitler appointed Himmler the commander of Army Group Vistula on the Eastern Front in January 1945, but replaced him on March 20, 1945, when Himmler’s military incompetence proved too great. That spring, Himmler attempted to negotiate an independent peace settlement through the Swedish Red Cross, using Jewish prisoners as bargaining assets. The Allies refused. Himmler and Hitler met for the last time on April 20, 1945, on Hitler’s birthday, at the Führer bunker, where Himmler swore total loyalty to Hitler. At a military briefing later that day, Hitler stated that he would not be leaving Berlin, in spite of Soviet advances. Along with Hermann Göring, the head of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe) Himmler quickly left the city immediately after the briefing. Himmler made his way to Flensburg in northern Germany, where he reported to Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, who had been named by Hitler as his successor. Dönitz, knowing that Himmler was of no value at this point, dismissed Himmler from all his positions.

At the end of World War II in early May 1945, Heinrich Himmler attempted to go into hiding. Although he had not made extensive preparations for this, as other high-ranking Nazis had, he had equipped himself with a forged paybook under the name of Sergeant Heinrich Hitzinger. With a few companions, he headed south on May 11, 1945 to Friedrichskoog, without a final destination in mind. The group continued to Neuhaus, before splitting up; Himmler and two aides were stopped at a British checkpoint on May 21, 1945 and detained. Over the following two days, Himmler – still in disguise – was moved around to several camps, before arriving at the British 31st Civilian Interrogation Camp near Lüneburg on May 23, 1945. During a routine interrogation, Himmler admitted who he was and was immediately searched. After finding nothing, military police took him to the headquarters of the Second British Army in Lüneburg, where a physician conducted a medical exam. When the doctor attempted to examine the inside of Himmler’s mouth, Himmler jerked his head away, bit into a hidden cyanide pill and collapsed onto the floor. He was dead within fifteen minutes. Shortly afterward, the British buried Himmler’s body in an unmarked grave near Lüneburg. The precise location of the grave remains unknown. Since the war, pictures of the deceased Himmler appear to show that his nose had been broken, and rumors still persist that a British physician gave him an injection of some unknown substance just before he died.

Heinrich HimmlerFrench MacLean2016-03-04T20:45:26-06:00

Reinhard Heydrich

Reinhard Heydrich

SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich served as the chief of the Reich Main Security Office, Deputy Reich-Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, and one of the main architects of the Holocaust. Historians regard him as the darkest figure within the Nazi elite. Even Adolf Hitler called him “the man with the iron heart.” Heydrich was born on March 7, 1904 in Halle an der Saale to composer and opera singer Richard Bruno Heydrich and his wife Elisabeth Anna Maria Amalia Krantz. Young Reinhard was very intelligent and excelled in his schoolwork at the Reformgymnasium; he was a talented athlete and became an expert swimmer and fencer. However, Reinhard was shy and insecure; he was frequently bullied for his high-pitched voice and rumored Jewish ancestry, which earned him the nickname “Moses Handel.”

After World War I, Heydrich joined a Freikorps, a paramilitary unit that fought Communists near his hometown. In 1922, he joined the German Navy and became a naval cadet at Kiel. On April 1, 1924, he was promoted to senior midshipman and sent to officer training at the Mürwik Naval College. Two years later, he advanced to the rank of ensign and was assigned as a signals officer on the battleship Schleswig-Holstein, the flagship of Germany’s North Sea Fleet. Admiral Erich Raeder dismissed Heydrich from the Navy in April 1931, after a charge of “conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman,” for breaking an engagement promise to a woman he had known. Heydrich was devastated by the dismissal and the absence of prospects for a career. Six months later, he married Lina von Osten, a Nazi Party follower.

The same year, Heydrich joined the SS and began establishing a counterintelligence division. Heinrich Himmler interviewed him and was so impressed that he appointed Heydrich to a position as chief of the new “Ic Service” (intelligence service). Heydrich set up office at the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich and created a network of spies and informers for intelligence-gathering purposes and to obtain information to be used as blackmail. [29] Information on thousands of people was recorded on index cards and stored at the Brown House. In the summer of 1932, Himmler appointed Heydrich chief of the renamed security service – the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). Himmler named Heydrich to head the Gestapo on April 22, 1934. Two months later, the SD was declared the official Nazi intelligence service. In 1934, Heydrich assisted Himmler and Hitler in crushing the SA in the “Night of the Long Knives.” He helped organize Kristallnacht, a series of coordinated attacks against Jews throughout Nazi Germany and parts of Austria on November 9–10, 1938. On September 27, 1939, the SD and the Security Police (made up of the Gestapo and the Kripo) were subordinated into the new Reich Main Security Office or SS-Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA), which was placed under Heydrich’s control.

By late 1940, the Wehrmacht had swept through most of Western Europe, to include France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway. The following year, Heydrich’s SD was given responsibility for carrying out the Nacht und Nebel (Night-and-Fog) decree. According to the decree, “persons endangering German security” were to be arrested in a completely discreet way: “under the cover of night and fog.” Thousands of people disappeared without a trace and no one was told of their whereabouts or their fate. Prior to the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, Heydrich established four Einsatzgruppe, each with several Einsatzkommando, whose mission was to kill undesirable elements and potential partisans in Russia immediately after the German Army conquered the area.

On September 27, 1941, Hitler appointed Heydrich as Deputy Reich Protector of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (the part of Czechoslovakia incorporated into the Reich in 1939), sending the actual Reich Protector, Konstantin von Neurath, on permanent leave, based on his soft approach to the Czechs. Upon his appointment, Heydrich told his aides that he would “Germanize the Czech vermin.” Heydrich, from his headquarters in Prague, enforced German policy, fought resistance to the Nazi regime and maintained production quotas of Czech military equipment and weapons, vital to the German war effort.

Heydrich chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, which laid out plans for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question, comprising the deportation and extermination of all Jews in German-occupied territory in Europe.

A British-trained team of Czech and Slovak agents attacked Heydrich was in Prague on May 27, May 1942. The group had been sent by the Czechoslovak government-in-exile to kill him in an operation code named “Operation Anthropoid.” Himmler sent Dr. Karl Gebhardt to Prague to assist. Gebhardt disdained the use of sulfonamide, expecting Heydrich to make a full recovery without antibiotic use (which Gebhardt thought worthless). Heydrich died of sepsis a week later. When hearing of Heydrich’s death, SS-Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich proclaimed, “Thank God that sow’s gone to the butcher.” The Nazis retaliated for Heydrich’s death by linking the assassins to the village of Lidice, razing Lidice to the ground, executing all adult males and sending most of the women and children to concentration camps.

Heydrich was buried in Berlin in an elaborate Nazi State funeral at the Invalidenfriedhof. Heydrich’s grave and remains were ransacked and destroyed after the war.

Reinhard HeydrichFrench MacLean2016-03-28T19:24:12-05:00

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler, the Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the Nazi Party, hailed from Ranshofen, a small village in the municipality of Braunau am Inn, Austria. He was born on April 20, 1889, the fourth of six children of a minor customs official, Alois Hitler – and Klara Pölzl. At age three, Adolf moved with the family to Passau, Germany, but remained there only two years before locating in Leonding, near Linz, Austria. This early traveling between the two countries helped Adolf later adopt the feeling that he was more German than Austrian.

Hitler’s father, Alois Hitler, was the illegitimate child of Maria Anna Schicklgruber. The baptismal register did not show the name of Alois’ father, so Alois received his mother’s surname. In 1842, a Johann Georg Hiedler married Maria Anna. After she died in 1847 and he in 1856, Alois was brought up in the family of Hiedler’s brother, Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. In 1876, Alois was legitimated and the baptismal register changed by a priest before three witnesses. However, many in the family – and others as well, although they kept quiet – were convinced that Maria Anna, Alois’ mother, was employed as a housekeeper for a Jewish family in Graz, Austria and that this family’s 19-year-old son, Leopold Frankenberger, had actually fathered Alois. If true (and many prominent historians disbelieve this assertion) that would make Hitler – who hated all Jews and wanted to exterminate them – a quarter Jewish himself in the Nazi way of determining race.

In June 1895, the Hitler family moved to a small landholding at the village of Hafeld near Lambach, Austria, when Alois retired from customs and tried his hand at farming and beekeeping. Young Adolf attended school at the village of Fischlham. However, he rebelled against the school discipline, as well as that of his father, and began to emotionally separate from members of the family. With the farming attempt in shambles, Alois moved the family back to Lambach and a year later to Leonding. In February 1900, Edmund, Adolf’s younger brother, died from measles, which further pushed Adolf to being a sullen and detached boy, constantly bickering with his father and schoolteachers. That September, Alois sent Adolf to the Realschule in Linz, Austria, hoping the son would become a customs bureau employee. This event soured Adolf further, as he had wished to become an artist and attend a classical high school. His schooling declined, when on January 3, 1903, Alois suddenly died. Adolf transferred to the Realschule at Steyr, Austria for a year, before leaving school completely.

From 1905 to 1913, Adolf lived in Wien, Austria. Following a bohemian lifestyle, he was financed by orphan’s benefits; his mother also supported him. During this time, Hitler worked as a part-time laborer and eventually as a painter of watercolors. The Academy of Fine Arts, Wien, rejected Hitler for admittance in 1907 and 1908, because of his inaptitude for painting, and the academy’s director suggested that Hitler study architecture. Klara Hitler died on December 21, 1907, an event that crushed Hitler’s spirit. Running out of money, he lived in a homeless shelter in 1909 and by 1910, he had settled into a house for poor working men. He probably began his virulent Anti-Semitism at this time. Hitler left Austria in February 1914 and moved to München.

At the outbreak of World War I, Hitler volunteered to serve in the Bavarian Army as an Austrian citizen. He was assigned to the 1st Company of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment “List Regiment” and served as a dispatch runner on the Western Front in France and Belgium. He was in combat at the First Battle of Ypres, the Battle of the Somme, the Battle of Arras and the Battle of Passchendaele (Third Battle of Ypres.) He was soon decorated for bravery, receiving the Iron Cross 2nd Class in 1914. During the Battle of the Somme in October 1916, he was wounded in the groin area and left thigh by shrapnel from an artillery shell that exploded in the dispatch runners’ dugout. He subsequently spent almost two months in the Red Cross hospital at Beelitz, not returning to his regiment until March 5, 1917. Hitler received the Iron Cross 1st Class on August 4, 1918, having previously received the Black Wound Badge on May 18, 1918. On October 15, 1918, Hitler was temporarily blinded in a mustard gas attack and was hospitalized in Pasewalk. At this hospital, he received word of Germany’s defeat, and suffered a second bout of blindness.

Now a decorated veteran of World War I, Hitler joined the German Workers’ Party (a precursor of the Nazi Party [NSDAP]) in 1919, and became the leader of the NSDAP in 1921. On November 9, 1923, Hitler and his followers attempted a coup d’état, known as the Beer Hall Putsch, in downtown München. The failed coup resulted in a conviction for treason and imprisonment at Landsberg Prison, during which time he wrote his memoir, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). After Hitler’s release from prison in 1924, Hitler gained popular support by attacking the Treaty of Versailles and promoting Pan-Germanism, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Communism through the use of charismatic oratory, superb organizational skills and Nazi propaganda.

Slowly, but surely, the Nazi Party gained traction. After his appointment as Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Hitler transformed the Weimar Republic into the Third Reich, a single-party dictatorship based on the totalitarian and autocratic ideology of Nazism. Now as Führer and Reichskanzler, his public aim was to establish a New Order of absolute Nazi German hegemony in continental Europe. His private discussions revealed Hitler’s foreign and domestic policies that had the goal of seizing “living space” (Lebensraum) for the Germanic people in Eastern Europe and Russia. Hitler directed the rearmament of Germany, the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia and the invasion of Poland by the Wehrmacht in September 1939. These actions led to the outbreak of World War II in Europe. Under Hitler’s rule, in 1941 German forces and their European allies occupied most of Europe and North Africa and invaded Russia. The Nazis “Final Solution,” the destruction of the European Jews, accelerated at this point. By 1943, Hitler’s military decisions led to escalating German defeats. In 1944, the Western Allies invaded France and the Soviet Union reached Poland in the east. In 1945, the Allied armies successfully invaded Germany.

In the final days of the war, during the Battle of Berlin in 1945, Hitler married his long-time mistress, Eva Braun. On April 30, 1945, Hitler finished dictating his final testament and the pair committed suicide, Hitler by biting down on a cyanide capsule, while simultaneously shooting himself in the head with a pistol, to avoid capture by the Red Army. SS troops doused the corpses with gasoline in the garden of the Reichs’ Chancellery and burned the corpses. Rumors persisted for three decades that Hitler had fooled his enemies and had fled to South America, but all the stories proved false.

Hitler said numerous outrageous things during his career. Here are a few perverse statements he made about women:

“A highly intelligent man should have a primitive and stupid woman.”

“These women are so oddly primitive. A hairdresser, clothes, dancing, theaters can distract them from any serious activity.

“The only things they’re willing to read are magazines and novels.”

“With all due respect for older ladies, I would prefer having younger ones nearby.”

“I detest women who dabble in politics. And if their dabbling extends to military matters, it becomes utterly unendurable.”

“Other women are extremely careful of their appearance, but not beyond the moment when they’ve found a husband. They’re obsessed by their outlines, they weigh themselves on exact scales – the least gram counts! Then you marry them, and they put on weight by the kilo!”

“Intelligence, in a woman, is not an essential thing.”

“Spanish women, even though they speak several languages, are outstandingly stupid.”

Adolf HitlerFrench MacLean2016-03-28T21:03:53-05:00

Visit the Hidden Side of History with French L. MacLean