Ernst Kaltenbrunner

Ernst Kaltenbrunner succeeded Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in January 1943, six months after Heydrich’s assassination, and held the position until the end of the war. He commanded the Gestapo, the Sicherheitsdienst, the Kriminalpolizei and the Einsatzgruppen, and oversaw the deportations through Eichmann’s office. He was the most senior surviving SS leader at the war’s end. He was tried at Nuremberg, found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and hanged on 16 October 1946.

Austria, 1938

Kaltenbrunner had been the SS commander in Austria before the Anschluss. He coordinated the SS preparations for the German takeover of March 1938 and was rewarded with the position of Higher SS and Police Leader for Austria. From the Anschluss until his move to Berlin in January 1943 he ran the SS apparatus across Austria, including the Mauthausen concentration camp from its opening in August 1938. The Austrian SS deported the Austrian Jewish community of around 185,000 to extinction over the following five years. Kaltenbrunner was the senior SS officer responsible for that operation.

The RSHA inheritance

The RSHA was the central administrative body of the Holocaust by the time Kaltenbrunner took it over. The Operation Reinhard camps were operating at full capacity. The deportations from Western Europe, Greece, Italy and the remaining occupied territories were continuing under Eichmann’s direction. The Einsatzgruppen had completed most of their work in the occupied Soviet territories. The Auschwitz-Birkenau gassing operation was running. Kaltenbrunner inherited an apparatus already in motion. He kept it running for the remaining two and a half years of the war. The Hungarian deportations of summer 1944, in which around 437,000 Hungarian Jews were deported to Auschwitz, were conducted under his command, with Eichmann reporting to him directly throughout.

The visits

Kaltenbrunner visited Auschwitz, Mauthausen and other camps repeatedly during his time as RSHA chief. He met with the camp commandants. He toured the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau in autumn 1943. The most-cited visit was to Mauthausen in spring 1945, where prisoner witnesses testified at his Nuremberg trial that he had observed killings in the gas chamber and a separate set of killings by gunshot on the same day, all under conditions where the prisoners about to be killed could see him watching. The witnesses included Karl Strauss, a Mauthausen prisoner who survived. Mauthausen, the camp Kaltenbrunner had personally overseen since 1938, killed around 90,000 of the 190,000 prisoners who passed through it.

The orders

Kaltenbrunner signed the operational orders for the deportation of Hungarian Jewish children who had been spared at Horthy’s personal request after the July 1944 halt to the main deportations. He authorised the killing of British and American POWs in his custody in 1944 in violation of the Geneva Convention. He ordered the killing of prominent prisoners, including the Resistance leaders held in the special bunker at Mauthausen, in the closing weeks of the war when the regime was collapsing. He authorised the executions of around 200 Jewish forced labourers held at Mauthausen on 28 April 1945, six days before the camp was liberated. The orders were signed in his name and survived in captured RSHA files.

The denials at Nuremberg

Kaltenbrunner mounted, at his Nuremberg trial, a defence based on systematic denial. He denied that he had known about the killing programme. He denied that he had authorised any specific operation. He denied that he had visited the camps. He denied that the documents in front of him bore his signature. He claimed the documents were forgeries or had been signed by his deputies without his knowledge. The prosecution’s evidence, including the recovered RSHA files, the testimony of Eichmann’s subordinates, the survivor witnesses from Mauthausen, and the documentary chain of operational orders that bore his name, made the denials untenable. The American prosecutor John Harlan Amen cross-examined him for several days. The transcript records Kaltenbrunner becoming visibly less coherent as the documents mounted up.

He was found guilty on the war crimes and crimes against humanity counts on 1 October 1946. The judges acquitted him on the conspiracy and crimes against peace counts on the technicality that he had only joined the senior leadership in 1943. He was sentenced to death and hanged on 16 October 1946 at Nuremberg. He was 43.

What he was

Kaltenbrunner is the case of the senior SS officer who took over an established killing apparatus and ran it. He had not designed the operation; Heydrich had. He had not initiated the policy; Hitler and Himmler had. He had no particular ideological enthusiasm beyond the standard SS commitments. What he did was keep the apparatus functioning at full capacity through the most lethal phase of the killing, including the Hungarian deportations, the death marches, and the closing-phase killings of remaining prisoners. The Holocaust was, by the time he inherited it, an industrial operation that ran on its own momentum. His contribution was that he did not slow it down. He had nineteen months in command and the apparatus killed more people in those months than in any equivalent period before.

See also

Sources

  • Peter Black, Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich, Princeton University Press, 1984
  • Nuremberg trial transcripts, the Kaltenbrunner cross-examination by John Harlan Amen, April 1946
  • Mauthausen survivor testimony, 1945-1946
  • USHMM: Ernst Kaltenbrunner