The man known to history as Ernst Kaltenbrunner
was born on the 4th of October 1903 in the town of Ried im Innkries in Upper Austria,
not far from the city of Salzburg near the German border. His father was Hugo Kaltenbrunner, a lawyer
in Ried im Innkreis and his mother was Therese Udwardy. Together she and Hugo had several more sons,
Friedrich, who was born almost exactly two years before Ernst, and then Werner and Roland,
born in 1905 and 1910 respectively. Ernst’s childhood and teenage years were
relatively unremarkable. He was sent to the nearby town of Raab in
Upper Austria for his primary schooling, but thereafter was dispatched to Linz, one of
the biggest cities in Austria to attend the Realgymnasium. This school had been established under the
auspices of the Austrian imperial government back in 1851. Several years before Kaltenbrunner arrived
at the school a child called Adolf Hitler had been a student there. He and Kaltenbrunner’s paths would cross
again. Another child who also attended the Realgymnasium
in Linz but at the same time as Ernst was Adolf Eichmann. The two became firm friends and their associations
with each other would continue throughout their lifetimes. Kaltenbrunner’s childhood was otherwise
non-descript, though it is notable that his family home was a nationalist one, firmly
believing in the mission of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to rule over a wide range of disparate
people across the southern stretches of Central Europe and south-east into the Balkans where
the Austrians had replaced the Ottoman Turks as the major power during the course of the
nineteenth century. Kaltenbrunner came of age in a period of conflict. Long before he was born, the continent’s
politics had been destabilised by the union of the thirty or so smaller German states
into a German Empire in 1871. Germany’s emergence upset the balance of
power in Europe, where it now became the foremost power on the continent itself and a challenge
to the British Empire, the global superpower of the late nineteenth century. By the time of Kaltenbrunner’s birth the
major powers were dividing into two armed alliances, one centred on Germany and the
Austro-Hungarian Empire of which the Kaltenbrunners were subjects, and the other eventually comprising
Britain, France and Russia. In the summer of 1914, when Ernst was just
ten years old, war arrived when a regional conflict involving the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and Serbia in the Balkans ballooned into a continent-wide war. It soon expanded into the First World War
as other nations such as Japan became involved and then the United States in 1917. The entry of the latter power on the side
of Britain and France tipped the conflict in their favour and in November 1918 the war
ended in the total defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany. Though he was just barely a teenager when
the guns fell silent, Kaltenbrunner’s life would be shaped by the fallout from this first
global conflict. The political landscape of Austria shifted
dramatically in the months following the end of the First World War. For over 600 years the country had been ruled
by the House of Habsburg, a noble line which had created an enormous empire in Central
Europe and the Balkans covering modern-day Hungary, Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, Bosnia
and Herzegovina and parts of Serbia. Defeat in the war brought the House of Habsburg
to an end and saw the empire disintegrate as new nations such as Hungary and Czechoslovakia
declared their independence. In response to this situation a new Republic
of German-Austria was established in late October 1918, shortly before the war ended. The new government which was formed in Vienna
quickly determined that Austria might best be served in this rapidly changing world by
uniting with Germany into a Greater Germany. They subsequently initiated talks with the
new republican government in Germany even as the end of the war unleashed political,
social and economic chaos across both countries. These talks continued into the spring and
summer of 1919, but by then Britain and France had become implacably opposed to Austria and
Germany uniting. Thus, when the Treaty of Saint Germain, the
peace agreement between the victorious powers and Austria, was signed in September 1919
it included a clause which forbade Austria from uniting with Germany. Nevertheless, this was not the end of the
matter and the issue of German-Austrian unification would be resurrected again in the 1930s with
serious consequences. Kaltenbrunner was too young to have fought
even in the latter stages of the First World War, though he would have been politically
cognisant enough to be aware of what was occurring around him in a destabilised Austria in the
late 1910s. Shortly afterwards he headed for the city
of Graz himself where he first began studying chemistry, but in 1923 decided to follow in
his father’s footsteps and switched to studying law. Eventually he earned his PhD from the university
there, before heading back to Upper Austria to work in the courts in Salzburg in 1926. He remained there for nearly two years before
establishing his own legal practice in Linz in 1928. As we will see, he became politically active
in Austrian nationalism both during his student days in Graz and when he returned to Upper
Austria in the mid-1920s. Another notable feature of these years is
the toll they took on Kaltenbrunner’s physical appearance. He was a keen amateur fencer when studying
at Graz and it is widely believed that it was this hobby which resulted in several large
scars to his face. However, the details of how he obtained these
injuries are not certain and others claimed he was involved in a serious car accident
in his younger years. Regardless of how they were obtained the result
was that Kaltenbrunner, who was well over six foot tall, was left with a striking, almost
sinister look. Many people would report feeling intimidated
by his presence in future years. While Kaltenbrunner was earning his law degree
the political situation across the border in Germany was one of chaos. Following the end of the First World War the
country had been gripped by a series of bloody revolutions as Communist groups and others
tried to seize power in cities like Berlin and Munich in late 1918 and into 1919. These had all failed eventually, but this
political environment had allowed for the emergence of right-wing reactionary paramilitary
organisations and political groups. One such group, founded in Bavaria in 1920,
was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party or Nazi Party, a group who wished to
reverse the terms of the Treaty of Versailles which had imposed harsh peace terms on Germany
at the end of the war. The party was led by an Austrian, one who
was rabidly Anti-Semitic and eventually led the Nazis in the direction of believing that
a massive Jewish and Communist plot was attempting to destroy Germany. They attempted a coup in Munich in November
1923, one which was suppressed in just over a day and after which many members fled over
the border to Austria where branches of the party had also been established in 1920. Despite a crackdown back in Germany following
the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 and Hitler’s brief imprisonment in its aftermath, the Nazis
would continue to be a malignant force in German politics into the second half of the
1920s. As noted, Kaltenbrunner had been raised in
a family which favoured nationalist politics and he himself had become involved with several
nationalist political parties in Austria in the early 1920s while studying at the University
of Graz. These included the Independent Movement for
a Free Austria, a far right political group. In 1929 he revealed his political sympathies
for Nazism when he agreed to represent the Austrian branch of the party in several legal
issues it was dealing with. It was unsurprising, then, that he decided
to join the Nazis himself in October 1930. This was at a time when the wider Nazi Party
in Germany and its southern neighbour was beginning to gain increasing amounts of support
after years in the political wilderness. Both countries had been badly impacted by
the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed it. As jobs were lost and life savings were wiped
out by hyperinflation many individuals in both countries began turning to extremist
political parties such as the Nazis as a way of expressing their resentments. Kaltenbrunner rose quickly within the Austria
branch of the party and by 1931 was a major district official in his native Upper Austria. Later that year, on the 31st of August, he
also joined the SS, a paramilitary wing of the Nazis headed by Heinrich Himmler, one
of Hitler’s closest associates. Kaltenbrunner was beginning his ascent within
the Nazi Party as the wider organisation was gaining massive amounts of support in Germany. For instance, in the Reichstag elections of
September 1930 it increased its vote share to 18% and became the second largest party
in Germany. Less than two years later it increased this
to 37% in fresh elections and became the largest political party in the parliament by some
margin. As a result in January 1933 Hitler was able
to pressure the centrist and centre-right political establishment to make him Chancellor
of Germany. Within months the Nazis succeeded in completely
undermining the democratic process in Germany and turning the country into a one-party dictatorship. The situation was different in Austria. In legislative elections held there in November
1930 the Nazis only acquired 3% of the vote, which translated into zero seats in parliament. Nevertheless, in the months that followed
the party began to gain favour amongst more and more Austrians, particularly so from May
1931 onwards when Credit-Anstalt, one of Austria’s largest banks declared bankruptcy, rocking
the financial system of the Americas and Europe even further and creating enormous economic
difficulties in Austria itself. No further parliamentary elections were held
in Austria during the early 1930s and so it is difficult to assess exactly how extensive
the Nazi Party’s support had become there by the time Hitler became Chancellor of Germany
in January 1933. Yet it was certainly quite sizeable and had
gained much from the collapse of Credit-Anhalt, a bank which was founded in the mid-nineteenth
century by the Rothschilds, a banking family of Austrian Jews. This was exploited by the Austrian Nazi Party
to stoke Anti-Semitic sentiment in the country and garner greater support from 1931 onwards. Ultimately, though, the growth of Nazism in
Austria was curbed in the spring of 1933 just as Hitler and his accomplices were passing
an Enabling Law in Germany to allow them to rule by decree there. In part inspired by the example of Germany
and partly out of concern about Hitler’s calls for German unification with Austria,
the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss effectively suspended parliamentary democracy
in Austria in March 1933 and initiated the country’s own type of fascism by declaring
a new party, the Fatherland Front, to be the only legally recognised political party in
Austria from May 1933 onwards. This was influenced by Benito Mussolini’s
brand of fascism in Italy. Its remit, Dollfuss envisaged, was to bring
political and economic stability to Austria and to prevent the Nazis from taking over
the country. By this time Kaltenbrunner was one of the
most senior figures within the Austrian Nazi movement and he along with other prominent
members of the Austrian SS such as Arthur Seyss-Inquart were in regular contact with
Himmler about how to undermine the Austrian political system from within. Owing to his subversive activity he was arrested
by the Austrian government just days after marrying Elisabeth Eder, a fellow member of
the Austrian Nazi Party, on the 14th of January 1934. He was detained at a detention centre which
was newly erected at Kaisersteinbruch on the grounds of conspiring against the state and
for membership of the Nazi party, which had been prohibited by Dollfuss’s government
in the summer of 1933. Kaltenbrunner was just one of approximately
50,000 Austrians who were arrested in the second half of 1933 and the first six months
of 1934 for their associations with the Nazis. Over the next months he led a hunger strike
here and there was major unrest in February as riots broke out. This caused severe disquiet in the town of
Kaisersteinbruch itself and the detention centre was abandoned in May 1934, at which
time Kaltenbrunner was released. Therefore he was a free man again by the time
Dollfuss was assassinated by Nazi agents in Vienna on the 25th of July 1934. Whether Kaltenbrunner knew of the plan to
kill the Austrian Chancellor is unclear. Dollfuss was succeeded as Chancellor of Austria
by Kurt Schuschnigg, an Austro-fascist of a slightly milder disposition than his predecessor. Schuschnigg faced the same problem as Dollfuss
of trying to suppress Austrian Nazism as its proponents built up their strength over the
border in Bavaria in southern Germany. Throughout the mid-1930s Austrian Nazis operated
from here, slipping over the border to undertake sabotage missions and attack Fatherland Front
officials. Kaltenbrunner was often amongst them, travelling
to Passau in Bavaria by train on several occasions to bring in money and resources to Austria
to aid the Nazi effort to undermine the state there. At the same time he had risen to become one
of the leading figures within the Austrian SS and some of his trips to southern Germany
were to pass on intelligence to Himmler and his new protégé as head of the Nazis’
security services and intelligence networks, Reinhard Heydrich. As a result of all of this activity Kaltenbrunner
was arrested on several occasions in the mid-1930s on suspicion of treason and other offences,
though he was never successfully prosecuted. He did lose his licence to practice law though. Meanwhile the insurgency by the Nazis into
Austria from Bavaria continued. It resulted in hundreds of deaths and attacks
on thousands more during the mid-1930s. Despite his best efforts to prevent the growth
in support for the Nazis within Austria, by late 1937 Schuschnigg’s government was in
a difficult position. Under Hitler’s rule Germany had begun aggressively
rearming in 1935 in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. By late 1937 this had reached a point where
a military intervention in Austria by Germany would see the country easily conquered. Simultaneously Hitler’s rhetoric about Germany
and Austria uniting, a move increasingly referred to as the Anschluss, meaning ‘connection’
or ‘political union’, was becoming more and more inflammatory. As Nazi terror tactics in Vienna escalated
and Berlin’s demands increased in the first weeks of 1938 Schuschnigg decided to call
a referendum in Austria to decide on the issue of uniting with Germany. His goal was to win this and settle the issue,
going so far as to promise his other political opponents in Austria that fresh elections
would be held if their supporters rallied against the Nazis. However, before Schuschnigg’s gambit had
a chance to pay off Hitler ordered German troops over the border into Austria on the
12th of March 1938. The ground had been well prepared in advance
by leading figures of the Austrian Nazi movement such as Seyss-Inquart and Kaltenbrunner and
the takeover was bloodless. Four weeks later the Anschluss was ratified
by a plebiscite which passed by 99% and in which political enemies of the Nazis, such
as the Austrian Jews and those of Romani descent, were prohibited from voting. Kaltenbrunner and many other Austrian Nazis
who had risked much during the mid-1930s to further the Nazi cause in Austria were commensurately
rewarded for their commitment following the union of Germany and Austria. The country was officially designated as the
province of Ostmark of which Arthur Seyss-Inquart became the first governor. Kaltenbrunner was appointed as the Minister
of Public Security within Austria and was promoted to the rank of Brigadefuhrer within
the SS. Although the German Reichstag had largely
become a ceremonial body by 1938, the acquisition of a seat was a sign of an individual being
held in favour by the Nazi senior leadership and so Kaltenbrunner’s ascent as a member
of the parliament in April 1938 when Austrian members were added was a further sign of his
growing power within Nazi Austria. Finally, he was also made an SS and Police
Leader for the Donau administrative region, a posting which effectively made him the most
senior police figure in all of Austria. In this role he was involved from the summer
of 1938 onwards in efforts to begin persecuting Austria’s Jewish communities and also to
establish a branch of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, in Vienna. Kaltenbrunner was also heavily involved in
the months following the Anschluss in the establishment of Mauthausen concentration
camp. This was established outside the town of Mauthausen
approximately twenty kilometres from Linz in early August 1938. Concentration camps such as this, which were
effectively prisons which could be built quickly and cheaply to house political prisoners and
the ideological enemies of Nazism, had been built throughout Germany since the rise to
power of the Nazis there in 1933. Mauthausen was the first concentration camp
established in Austria. Here socialists, Jews, Romani, homosexuals
and anyone else considered an enemy of the state in the new reality Austria found itself
in, were detained in cramped conditions. Most were given extremely limited rations
and effectively starved to death while they were made to work as slave labourers mining
and building munitions and aircraft for the impending Nazi war effort. Eventually several satellite camps were established
near the village of Gusen so that the entire camp complex could house 85,000 prisoners
at maximum capacity. All told by 1945 some 190,000 prisoners would
pass through Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp of which it is estimated that nearly
half died owing to the severity of the conditions of the camp which Kaltenbrunner had a major
hand in first establishing in 1938. While Kaltenbrunner was involving himself
in the development of the concentration camp at Mauthausen-Gusen Hitler was bringing Europe
ever closer to the precipice of war. The union of Germany and Austria had been
prohibited under the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, but there was no appetite for
war in Britain and France over the issue, particularly so when public sentiment in Austria
had been so broadly in favour of the Anschluss. However, no sooner had swastika flags begun
flying over government buildings in Vienna than Hitler and his associates in Berlin began
pressing German claims to the Sudetenland in western Czechoslovakia. This was a region with a predominantly ethnically
German and German-speaking population which the Nazis claimed was also rightfully part
of the Greater Germany they were trying to create. On this occasion the British, French and even
Benito Mussolini’s fascist government in Italy objected to German claims. However, at a summit of European leaders convened
in Munich in September 1938 Hitler managed to convince the British Prime Minister Neville
Chamberlain that if Germany was granted the Sudetenland it would be the last territory
he would seek. Chamberlain acquiesced, but he maintained
to Hitler that any further aggression would result in war. Chamberlain’s actions at Munich have typically
been seen as a wholly misguided strategy of appeasement, but this unfairly ignores the
fact that the agreement bought Britain and France time to begin rearming should Hitler
break his promise. They did not have long to wait to see if he
would or not. In March 1939, just six months after the agreement
at Munich, the Nazis effectively dismembered the rest of Czechoslovakia, annexing parts
of it and created occupied protectorates out of the rest. The city of Memel in the Baltic Sea region
was seized from Lithuania at the same time. Still Britain and France did not react, but
when Hitler began pressing claims to Poland within a short period of time the situation
changed. London and Paris now once again claimed that
if the independence of another sovereign nation were threatened they would have to act. The Germans initiated a false flag operation
in an effort to make Poland look like the aggressor in late August 1939, but no one
was fooled. Thus, when German tanks and infantry divisions
rolled over the border into Poland on the 1st of September Britain and France responded
by declaring war on Germany. The Second World War had commenced. In the course of it Kaltenbrunner would move
from being a middling Nazi official in Austria to one of the most senior figures of the entire
Nazi hierarchy. Kaltenbrunner’s further ascent within Austria
reached a new height in the early summer of 1940 when he was promoted to the position
of Police President of Vienna. At the same time he was made an Untersturmfuhrer
or ‘Junior storm leader’ within the SS, one of the senior officer grades of the paramilitary
organisation. Kaltenbrunner was now the most senior police
figure within Austria. Over the next year he made considerable strides
in expanding the Nazi intelligence services throughout the country in a bid to identify
and root out any opposition movement which might emerge there during the war. Pre-emptive steps had been taken to prevent
this in 1938 and 1939, arresting approximately 100,000 individuals who were deemed to be
opponents of the Nazis out of Austria’s population of nearly seven million people. But new resistance movements sprang up during
the war, particularly around the Roman Catholic priest, Heinrich Maier, whose followers were
able to obtain schematics of German warplanes and pass them to the Allies. Kaltenbrunner’s secret police had limited
success in breaking up Maier’s organisation, but considerably more in dismantling resistance
groups such as the Austrian Freedom Movement, whose most prominent members were eventually
identified, tried and sent to concentration camps. While Kaltenbrunner was expanding his intelligence
network and overseeing the policing of wartime Vienna, the wider European conflict was going
very well for Germany. The initial campaign into Poland had foreshadowed
events elsewhere as the country was effectively overrun in four weeks. By early October Warsaw was in German hands
and the Poles were effectively defeated. A lull in hostilities occurred that winter,
so much so that people in Britain and France began to talk about a phoney war. But this was the quiet before the storm. In the spring of 1940 German tanks rolled
over the northern border into Denmark and paratroopers landed into Norway’s main cities
and ports, as both countries were brought under Nazi occupation in a matter of days. Then in May the long expected invasion of
France was initiated. In a blistering military campaign the Nazis
crushed the resistance in north-eastern France and Belgium and then trapped the British Expeditionary
Force, consisting of more than 300,000 men, in the port of Dunkirk. Only a daring rescue operation in late May
and early June stopped these men from being captured or massacred. Nevertheless, by mid-summer Paris had been
captured and France was defeated. The Nazis were triumphant throughout Western
and Central Europe. Only Britain stood against them. The first years of the war changed the Nazi
state’s situation in many ways. One of the most substantial changes was in
terms of the number of Jewish people that were now living within the borders of the
Reich or the territory that it occupied. Ever since their rise to power in Germany
in 1933 the Nazis had implemented increasingly oppressive laws which effectively disenfranchised
Germany’s half a million Jewish people and made them second class citizens. The goal here was to coerce Germany’s Jews
into leaving the country and moving abroad. On the 9th of November 1938 this Anti-Semitism
took on an even more sinister edge when thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues
were attacked across Germany in government-orchestrated pogroms. Hundreds of Jewish people were killed and
thousands more interred in concentration camps from which the majority never returned. Some of the worst of these attacks on what
became known as ‘The Night of the Broken Glass’ or Kristallnacht occurred in Vienna,
which had one of the largest concentrations of Jewish people anywhere in the Third Reich
at that time. Kaltenbrunner was central to overseeing the
attacks in Vienna during Kristallnacht, an operation which was unofficially led by the
SS. The war changed the situation again. There were approximately three and a half
million Jewish people living in Poland when it was conquered in the autumn of 1939. Thus, the policy of coercing Jews to leave
Nazi-held territory was much less practical here. Dystopian plans were developed to resolve
the so-called ‘Jewish Question’ in the course of 1940 by Kaltenbrunner’s old school
friend, Adolf Eichmann, who was now working within the newly established Reich Security
Main Office, which was overseen by Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler’s second in command of
the SS. Eichmann’s scheme involved the mass detention
of Europe’s Jews and their forcible deportation to the East African island of Madagascar. It was, though, eventually concluded that
this scheme was impractical, particularly so from early 1941 when Hitler had fully determined
that Germany would invade the Soviet Union that coming summer. When the invasion was initiated in June 1941
and much of Ukraine, eastern Poland and western Russia were quickly overrun, this brought
over two million more Jews under Nazi rule. With all of Europe seemingly having fallen
before them in the summer and autumn of 1941 a new approach to the Jewish Question was
decided upon by Hitler, Himmler and other senior Nazis such as Heydrich. They called it the ‘Final Solution’. The ‘Final Solution’ was effectively a
plan for the mass murder of all of Europe’s Jews. Elements of this were already being rolled
out as the German army advanced eastwards into the Soviet Union in the late summer and
autumn of 1941. Brigades of SS death squads known as the Einsatzgruppen
followed in the rear of the German army and massacred entire communities of Jewish people
throughout Ukraine and other regions. Elsewhere it would involve the systematic
identification and arrest of Europe’s Jews. They would then be sent to a number of concentration
camps primarily located in Poland where the vast majority would be gassed to death within
hours of their arrival. This genocidal operation would be overseen
by the SS of which Kaltenbrunner was a member. The logistics of identifying all of Europe’s
Jews would be overseen by Heydrich’s Reich Security Main Office where officials like
Eichmann were in charge of making sure the trains to the death camps ran efficiently. Figures like Kaltenbrunner were to oversee
the regional aspects of this by using the police services under their control to identify
any Jews attempting to hide in cities like Vienna. In the end an estimated 65,000 Austrian Jews,
constituting the majority of those who had not fled Austria prior to the outbreak of
the war in September 1939, were identified and killed as part of the Final Solution. Kaltenbrunner was central to these events
in Austria. In the early summer of 1942 events unfolded
in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the administrative zone which had been formed
out of much of Czechoslovakia in 1939, which would have a bearing on the rest of Kaltenbrunner’s
life. The previous autumn Reinhard Heydrich, the
head of the Reich Security Main Office, an umbrella organisation which oversaw all of
the policing and intelligence services across Nazi Europe, was appointed as the stand-in
governor of Bohemia and Moravia. The Czech Resistance had been growing stronger
in 1941 and Hitler had determined that Heydrich, who he once referred to as ‘the man with
the iron heart’, was the best person to crush the unrest there. Heydrich certainly made inroads quickly, executing
hundreds of people within weeks of taking up his position in Prague and arresting thousands. But his actions also aroused widespread animosity
and plans were quickly underway to assassinate Heydrich. It would take months for a plan to be put
into action, but on the 27th of May 1942 Heydrich was badly wounded in an assassination attempt
outside Prague. He died a week later in hospital, leaving
the most senior office in Europe’s intelligence and policing services empty. Himmler temporarily stepped into the role
as head of the SS, but with his responsibilities in other areas stretching him thin a successor
to Heydrich would eventually be needed. Kaltenbrunner was appointed as the head of
the Reich Security Main Office in succession to Heydrich on the 30th of January 1943 after
much prevarication on Himmler’s part. His appointment was a major surprise to many
who did not consider him to be a candidate for a position which effectively made Kaltenbrunner
the most senior figure within the SS other than Himmler himself. Many had expected that Heinrich Muller, the
head of the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, would be given the post. At the same time Kaltenbrunner also succeeded
Heydrich as President of the International Criminal Police Commission or ICPC, the forerunner
of Interpol. As head of the Reich Security Main Office
Kaltenbrunner was now in charge of an umbrella organisation which oversaw seven different
departments, each handling various elements of the intelligence and policing services. For instance, the Gestapo was subsumed within
Department 4, which also contained the offices run by Kaltenbrunner’s childhood friend,
Adolf Eichmann. Department 6 oversaw intelligence gathering
abroad, while other departments handled administration and matters such as standard policing in the
Reich and occupied territories. As head of the Reich Security Main Office
Kaltenbrunner became a pivotal figure in the Holocaust of Europe’s Jews and other groups
such as the Romani, which Heydrich had played an absolutely critical role in initiating
during 1941 and early 1942. Several years later Kaltenbrunner would claim
that he was barely involved in the Holocaust and other crimes committed by the regime,
that effectively he stepped into Heydrich’s shoes when the gears of the genocidal programme
were already in operation and that he did not contribute to what was happening in any
tangible fashion. This is not true. For instance, it was long after Heydrich’s
assassination and following Kaltenbrunner’s appointment as his successor that the Reich
Security Main Office established the policy of Schutzhaft or ‘protective custody’. This directed that anyone who was designated
as being in ‘protective custody’ in Central and Eastern Europe would be quickly transferred
to the concentration camp system. Its purpose was to speed up the processing
and thus murder of Europe’s Jews, Romani and other groups. Moreover, directives to the commandants of
the main death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor, Chelmno, Majdanek and
Belzec to continue the mass executions using Zyklon-B and carbon monoxide were received
directly from the Reich Security Main Office throughout 1943 and 1944. The end result of all of this was that Kaltenbrunner
was the head of the Reich Security Main Office during the most intense period of the Holocaust
and other genocidal policies. While the Final Solution had been agreed upon
by the hierarchy in 1941 and experiments using Zyklon-B had been carried out at Auschwitz
that autumn, it was not until January 1942 that Heydrich had passed on details of what
was to occur to senior Nazi bureaucrats at a conference outside Berlin. Steps were taken to begin initiating it in
the months that followed and from the summer of 1942 it intensified until the Nazi genocide
operation was at its most extreme in 1943 and 1944. For instance, it was in the spring of 1943
after Kaltenbrunner succeeded Heydrich that most of the 60,000 Jews in occupied Greece
were deported to Auschwitz and killed there. It was in the summer that the Jewish ghettos
across the Baltic States and Belorussia were liquidated and all of their inhabitants transferred
to the concentration camps and near certain death. Similarly, it was only after Germany effectively
took over northern and central Italy in the autumn of 1943, months after Kaltenbrunner
became head of the RSHA, that the identification, arrest and deportation of Italy’s Jews to
the death camps commenced. Kaltenbrunner, whose pronouncements at various
points in the 1930s and 1940s indicate his own personal extreme Anti-Semitism, described
the, quote, “eradication of the Jews in Italy” as a matter of “special interest”
to him. There is no doubting the centrality of Kaltenbrunner
to the Holocuast and the genocide of other groups by the Nazis. In accepting the position as the head of the
Reich Security Main Office, in succession to Heydrich, Kaltenbrunner was placing himself
in an exposed position, for the war was turning dramatically against the Nazis by the time
he was promoted in January 1943. The invasion of Russia had stalled in the
winter of 1941 outside Moscow and Leningrad. As it did the war became a conflict of attrition
on the Eastern Front, with the Russians mounting a much stouter defence in 1942. Their sheer numbers made it clear by that
summer that Hitler needed a major victory if he was to stave off defeat, but a massive
campaign in the autumn of 1942 to try to take the southern Russian city of Stalingrad and
with it access to the strategically vital oil fields of the Caucasus did not go as planned. By the early winter the German Sixth Army
had been surrounded by the Russians and was slowly being starved into submission. Just weeks after Kaltenbrunner took over the
RSHA they surrendered at Stalingrad in the first massive defeat of German arms during
the war. Thereafter the Russians began inexorably pushing
the Germans back westwards, while after defeating the Italians and Germans in North Africa the
Western Allies opened a Southern Front in Italy in the summer of 1943. It was now a matter of when, not if, Germany
would be defeated, and as the defeat of the Nazis became inevitable people like Kaltenbrunner
must have surely known they would have to answer for their crimes in years to come. In his first year in charge of the Reich Security
Main Office Kaltenbrunner became a major patron and advocate for a man who would develop a
fearsome reputation amongst the Allies by the end of the war. This was Otto Skorzeny, an Austrian-born member
of the SS. Kaltenbrunner recommended Skorzeny for several
missions in 1943 and as head of the RSHA he may have been pivotal in the selection of
Skorzeny to lead a special operations mission in Italy to rescue Benito Mussolini from his
Italian captors after the fascist government in Rome had overthrown him and offered to
surrender unconditionally to the Western Allies. Skorzeny led the infamous Gran Sasso Raid
in which Mussolini was rescued by German special operatives led by Skorzeny from a mountaintop
hotel where he was being held captive in central Italy. With the Italian leader rescued Skorzeny and
his men extracted him back to northern Italy and he was installed as the puppet ruler of
the Italian Social Republic which continued the war against the Allies from northern Italy
for the remainder of the war. Kaltenbrunner’s faith in Skorzeny had been
rewarded and he became the go-to German special operatives commander for the remainder of
the war. In the late autumn of 1943 Kaltenbrunner and
Skorzeny became central to a highly secretive initiative. This was codenamed Operation Long Jump and
resulted from the Germans acquiring intelligence that the three main leaders of the Allied
war effort, the Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, the President of the United
States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the dictator of the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin,
were due to meet in a major Allied conference in the city of Tehran in Iran in late November
1943. Kaltenbrunner was placed in charge of a top
secret plan to assassinate the three leaders. He quickly chose Skorzeny as the man to oversee
the actual carrying out of the operation. In the weeks that followed a special training
school was established in Copenhagen and there were plans afoot to send several units to
Tehran when the conference started. The details remain shadowy to this day, but
Kaltenbrunner and Skorzeny seemed to have also planned on trying to take Roosevelt alive
in order to bring him back to Germany as a bargaining tool in negotiating peace terms
with the United States. The entire plan, though, was fatally undermined
when an undercover Soviet secret agent, Nikolai Kuznetsov, obtained details of it from an
SS officer, Ulrich von Ortel, in Ukraine weeks before the conference was due to start. Thus, Kaltenbrunner’s efforts came to nothing
and the operation was abandoned. It was also during his time at the head of
the RSHA that Kaltenbrunner became notorious for his stance towards homosexuality. Homosexuality had been illegal in Germany
prior to the Nazis claiming power in 1933, however the laws had only been loosely applied
and few individuals were prosecuted. That all changed from the mid-1930s onwards
as the Nazis made it a priority to persecute homosexuals. Eventually between 1933 and 1945 over 100,000
people were arrested on charges of homosexuality, of which roughly half were convicted. Many were sentenced to years in prison. As head of the Reich policing services from
January 1943 Kaltenbrunner attempted to develop even more extreme policies, petitioning the
Reich Ministry in the summer of 1943 to have a compulsory sentence of castration imposed
on any males found guilty of homosexuality. In the end he withdrew this proposal, not
because he had changed his mind, but because it seemed more plausible that the Gestapo
could implement this independent of the courts. Additionally, many of those who were so convicted
in the months that followed were often coerced into volunteering for chemical castration
by telling them that it was a choice between this fate or being sent to the concentration
camps. It is estimated that upwards of 800 men who
were convicted of homosexual acts were castrated before the war ended. Kaltenbrunner was also one of the central
figures in one of the most brutal episodes of the entire Holocaust. This occurred between the spring and late
summer of 1944. Early that year Hitler had decided to take
a more interventionist line in Hungary, a country which had been allied with Nazi Germany
throughout the war, but one which had played a largely passive role in the Final Solution
and other genocidal policies. There were three-quarters of a million Jewish
people in Hungary, so when Germany effectively took greater control of the country in the
spring of 1944 a massive campaign to extend the Holocaust into the region was initiated. Kaltenbrunner and his old friend Eichmann
were the two pivotal figures in what followed. Indeed when the Hungarian regent, Miklos Horthy,
was informed at a meeting with Hitler in Austria early in 1944 that Germany was taking greater
control over Hungarian affairs, Kaltenbrunner and Eichmann travelled with Horthy back to
Hungary on his train. Between March and July 1944 upwards of 400,000
of Hungary’s Jews were arrested and sent to the death camps. The vast majority ended up at Auschwitz where
over 2,000 Hungarian Jews were being killed every day in May and June 1944. More would have been killed here at this time
if the crematorium had the facility to burn more bodies. Kaltenbrunner was one of the central architects
of this industrial scale slaughter of Hungary’s Jews. By the time the worst of the arrests and deportations
were coming to an end in Hungary Kaltenbrunner was called to Berlin. On the 20th of July 1944 there had been an
attempt to kill Hitler at his military headquarters in western Poland that was very nearly successful. This had been led by the military commander,
Claus von Stauffenberg, and involved a network of fairly senior and middling military officers. Their plans to launch a coup in the aftermath
of the assassination failed as a bomb which had been intended to kill Hitler and several
other leading members of the regime only wounded the Fuhrer. The revolt was suppressed in the hours that
followed. As chief of the security forces Kaltenbrunner
was called to Berlin to lead the investigations into how deep the plot ran. Weeks of investigations led to the arrest
and conviction of thousands of individuals, many of them simply for knowing somebody who
was implicated in the conspiracy. Eventually approximately 5,000 people were
executed in reprisals and thousands more were sent into the concentration camp system. For his role in this Kaltenbrunner was awarded
the Knights Cross to the War Merit Cross with Swords, the Blood Order, which was usually
only awarded to those who had participated in the Beer Hall Putsch all the way back in
1923, and the Golden Party Badge, an award given to the oldest and most trusted members
of the Nazi Party. By now Kaltenbrunner was at the height of
his power within the regime, as his personal standing with Hitler had soared. Thus, in December 1944 Himmler determined
to promote him to the rank of General of the Waffen-SS. There were additional reasons for doing so
which were tied to the general course of the war. In the summer of 1944 the Western Allies had
opened the long awaited Western Front in France with the D-Day landings in Normandy. By mid-autumn Paris and Antwerp had been liberated
and the Allies began building up their forces in the east of France for a drive into Germany
that winter. In the east the situation was even worse. The Russians had pushed the Germans back into
Poland by the autumn of 1944 and despite efforts to hold the line both there and in western
Ukraine, by the end of the year they too were massing their armies in western Poland, for
a late winter offensive into eastern Germany. It was at this juncture that Himmler began
awarding SS officers such as Kaltenbrunner the title of general, the hope being that
once the war was over they would be considered military officers rather than police officials
and would consequently be subject to international laws regarding the treatment of military prisoners. Kaltenbrunner was also one of many senior
Nazis who as the war effort became utterly doomed for Germany tried to establish channels
to determine what exact terms German surrender to the Western Allies, rather than the Soviet
Union, could be negotiated on. The belief by this time was that the Western
Allies would treat Germany far more leniently than would the Soviet Union, a nation which
had been left devastated by the German invasion and where approximately 27 million people
lost their lives during the war. To that end late in 1944 he established contacts
with the International Red Cross based out of neutral Switzerland. In mid-March 1945 he met with the president
of the organisation, Carl Jacob Burckhardt, at Vorarlberg in western Austria. These negotiations, however, ultimately led
nowhere, though Kaltenbrunner was not implicated for any treasonous behaviour in attempting
these negotiations and many senior Nazis had also been seeking to establish what the parameters
of surrender might be through various diplomatic lines in late 1944 and early 1945. There was one last desperate act for Kaltenbrunner
during the war. On the 18th of April, even as the Allies were
spreading out all around Germany, Himmler appointed Kaltenbrunner as commander of the
southern armies. By this stage this involved some disparate
forces which were still holding much of Austria and parts of Hungary, Croatia and adjoining
territory, not because the forces here were holding out against Allied attacks, but simply
because they faced little hostile action, the Allies seeing little strategic benefit
in securing these countries when the real target was Germany and Berlin. Thus, rather than overseeing a major military
campaign here Kaltenbrunner spent the last weeks of April and early May making some provisions
for the remaining Nazi soldiers and SS members under his command to begin a guerrilla campaign
against the Allies once the area was occupied. He also became involved in a peculiar dispute
with the Nazi governor of Upper Austria, August Eigruber, over the fate of a huge cache of
6,500 art works which had been assembled over the years in the region for the purposes of
erecting a museum to Hitler near his home town of Braunau am Inn. Eigruber wished to destroy the entire collection,
which included works by Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo, Jan Van Eyck and Jan
Vermeer and which had been looted from across occupied Europe. Kaltenbrunner prevented him from doing so
in a peculiar conclusion to the war in Upper Austria. Kaltenbrunner was not alone in his efforts
to negotiate the terms of a German surrender in late 1944 and early 1945 and others such
as Himmler and Hermann Goering were involved in similar efforts. None of these were successful, however, in
large part because Hitler was determined to fight on until the end. This was despite the inevitability of defeat
by early 1945. The Soviets had crossed into eastern Germany
by this time and were advancing on Berlin, while the Western Allies had begun occupying
the Rhineland in western Germany at the same time. Both sides were anxious to be the one to capture
the German capital, but it was the Russians who had the geographical advantage. Thus, while the Americans, Canadians, British,
French and others were spreading out to take Bavaria and other regions in the spring of
1945, the Russians surrounded Berlin. The battle for the city began in mid-April,
with the Nazis arming old men and teenagers to defend the city. It did not last long and on the 30th of April,
with Russian gunfire and tanks nearing the city centre Hitler killed himself in the Reich
chancellery bunker. His nominated successor, Joseph Goebbels did
likewise the following day, leaving the negotiation of a formal surrender to the Allies to be
worked out by the new President of Germany, Admiral Karl Donitz. A formal announcement of the end of the war
in Europe was made on the 8th of May 1945. By the time the surrender was formalised on
the 8th of May Kaltenbrunner was on the run. He had briefly flown to Berlin in mid-April
for a meeting with Hitler to have his post as commander of the German armies in Southern
Europe confirmed and to discuss his strategy for proceeding in the coming weeks, after
which he returned to Austria. He was there when news of Hitler’s suicide
and then the end of the war reached him. As it was clear that high-ranking Nazi officials
and senior members of the SS would be arrested by the Allies Kaltenbrunner eloped with his
deputy commander in Austria, Arthur Scheidler, and several other SS members into the Austrian
Alps where they hoped to avoid detection, hiding in a mountain cabin with false identity
papers. On the way Kaltenbrunner threw his official
seal as head of the RSHA into an Alpine lake from which it was recovered by a tourist in
2001. The small party of SS soldiers did not operate
under the radar for very long. On the 12th of May 1945 they were apprehended
and arrested by members of the US 80th Infantry Division after reports had circulated in the
nearby town of Altaussee that some men were hiding in the cabin on the mountainside. When they were apprehended their false identities
were soon unravelled, but Kaltenbrunner would not have avoided positive identification for
very long anyway. His profile as head of the Reich Security
Main Office was too high and his facial scars too identifiable for him to have avoided arrest. Kaltenbrunner and those he was arrested with
would soon face trial. In the closing months of the war the Allies
had keenly debated exactly how they should proceed in terms of dealing with Germany and
its people once the war concluded. Sober heads prevailed, ones which argued that
to impose blanket penalties and punishments on the German population, such as had been
done in the form of indemnities after the First World War, would possibly create new
resentments in Germany and would also be fundamentally unjust. Many Germans had nothing to do with the crimes
of the Nazis, a political party which had only ever received just over 35% of the vote
in any national election in Germany. Moreover, ordinary Germans could hardly be
held responsible for the atrocities which had been committed at concentration camps
which were clandestinely established in occupied Poland. As such the Allies came to the conclusion
that they would only seek to prosecute the leaders of the Nazi Party, other officials
and Germans who had actively facilitated them in fomenting the war and committing widespread
crimes against humanity, and the entirety of the SS, the organisation that had run the
concentration camps and been responsible for an appalling litany of crimes across Central
and Eastern Europe between 1939 and 1945. Kaltenbrunner fell into two different categories
of those who were to be prosecuted. He was a high ranking member of the Nazi Party,
particularly in Austria where he had aided in the establishment of the concentration
camp system and served as Police Chief of Vienna and latterly as a senior military commander. Additionally, he was a member of the SS and
had actually risen to become its second most senior figure, junior only to Heinrich Himmler. Furthermore, events that occurred in the weeks
following Kaltenbrunner’s arrest made him an even more significant figure when it came
to the prosecution of German war criminals. On the 21st of May 1945 Himmler was arrested
in northern Germany near the Danish border, where many Nazi leaders had fled as Berlin
was being captured by the Russians. He was quickly identified and interrogated. But just two days later, on the 23rd of May,
he committed suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule at a detention centre near Luneburg. Thus, suddenly Kaltenbrunner became the most
senior surviving member of the SS. With both Himmler and Heydrich dead he was
the figure who would be included as the main SS defendant in the trial of the leading members
of the Nazi regime which was to be held before an International Military Tribunal at the
city of Nuremburg in southern Germany. The Nuremburg trial commenced in mid-November
1945. It lasted through to the early autumn of 1946. The length of the trial is explained by the
fact that the prosecution wanted to make clear to the whole world the extent of the Nazis’
crimes, while there were also two dozen defendants involved, though several were missing individuals
who were to be tried in absentia. Of them Hermann Goering was the most senior,
while others included the Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop; the former Deputy
Leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess; and the Armaments Minister and Hitler’s architect,
Albert Speer. Kaltenbrunner was initially absent from the
trial as he received treatment for a brain haemorrhage. When he was able to attend in person he claimed
his signature had been falsified on documents which implicated him in the committing of
war crimes and that his position as head of the RSHA was symbolic. Unsurprisingly the court did not believe him
and he was found guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. He was brought for execution with the eight
others who had been sentenced to death in the trial on the 16th of October 1946 and
Kaltenbrunner’s last words before he was hanged were used to yet again further the
claim, that he had no knowledge of the crimes committed by the regime. Afterwards, the bodies of those who were executed
were cremated and scattered in the River Isar near the Austrian border. Ernst Kaltenbrunner is something of an enigmatic
character. Unlike many of the others whom he stood trial
with at Nuremburg in 1945 and 1946 he was a somewhat peripheral figure within the Nazi
regime at the outbreak of the Second World War. By way of contrast, Hermann Goering was one
of the most senior figures in the Nazi Party and Hitler’s declared successor for much
of the war, Wilhelm Keitel was the overall commander of the German armed forces and Joachim
von Ribbentrop was the German foreign minister who orchestrated the infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop
Agreement with the Soviet Union. Kaltenbrunner was a regional SS police officer
in Austria in the autumn of 1939, a relatively senior one within the Vienna hierarchy, but
not someone who would have been expected to ascend to a major position in the years that
followed. His promotion as head of the Reich Security
Main Office was owing to a peculiar set of circumstances. Firstly, Reinhard Heydrich, the occupant of
the position, was assassinated, the only senior Nazi official to be successfully killed during
the war, and then Heinrich Himmler made a peculiar decision to appoint Kaltenbrunner
as his successor, despite the availability of some other more likely candidates such
as the head of the Gestapo, Heinrich Muller. Many were surprised that Kaltenbrunner was
appointed to the post. Perhaps owing to his rather strange rise from
obscurity to become the second most senior official within the SS, Kaltenbrunner has
remained one of the most shadowy and little discussed characters within the Nazi regime. But there is no doubting his ideological fanaticism. He was a zealous follower of Hitler and he
proved as ruthless a head of the Reich Security Main Office as Heydrich had been. As a result the Final Solution which Heydrich
had overseen the initiation of across the SS-run concentration camps shortly before
his death, was energetically overseen by Kaltenbrunner and individuals whom he managed through the
RSHA such as his childhood friend, Adolf Eichmann. His Anti-Semitism and ideological adherence
to Nazism was considerable and it was under Kaltenbrunner’s oversight, with Eichmann’s
aid, that the mass-murder of over half of Hungary’s 750,000 Jews was orchestrated
in the space of just six months in 1944. Moreover, Kaltenbrunner’s outlook in other
areas was barbaric, notably his desire to have an official policy of castration implemented
across the Reich for those found guilty of homosexuality. Once the war ended Kaltenbrunner yet again
found himself seemingly promoted to a position few would have expected. This was as a defendant at the headline trial
before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremburg from the autumn of 1945 to the
autumn of 1946. With both Himmler and Heydrich dead, Kaltenbrunner
was the most senior member of the SS left alive to stand trial. Given his record as head of the Reich Security
Main Office since 1943 he was certainly an adequate replacement to be sentenced to death
in 1946. What do you think of Ernst Kaltenbrunner? Was he every bit as brutal a head of the Reich
Security Main Office as Heydrich or was he simply a functionary who continued the processes
which had been put in place by his predecessor? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
