FIFTH FIELD - Key Persons
Günther Lütjens was born on May 25, 1889 in Wiesbaden. He served as Commander of Torpedo Boats, Commander of Reconnaissance Forces and finally Chief of the Fleet. A winner of the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross, he was killed in action in the North Atlantic aboard the battleship Bismarck on May 27, 1941 in combat with the British Home Fleet.
Before the final action, he made the following announcement to the crew:
"Seamen of the battleship Bismarck! You have covered yourselves with glory! The sinking of the battlecruiser Hood has not only military, but also psychological value, for she was the pride of England…The German people are with you, and we will fight until our gun barrels glow red-hot and the last shell has left the barrels. For us seamen, the question now is victory or death!"
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.
Alois Brunner, born 8 April 1912 in Nádkút, Vas, Austria-Hungary, SS-Hauptsturmführer in the Gestapo, commander of the Drancy internment camp, oversaw deportations of tens of thousands of Jews from France, Austria, Salonika and Slovakia to extermination camps, assistant to Adolf Eichmann, fled to Syria after the war to avoid prosecution, known in Syria as Dr. Georg Fischer, condemned to death in abstentia in France in 1954, object of many manhunts and investigations over the years by different groups, serious injured several times by Israeli Mossad letter bombs, interviewed by Bunte magazine in 1985, lived in an apartment building on 7 Rue Haddad in Damascus, probably died in Syria in 2010 and buried somewhere in Damascus, said in an interview in 1987:
SS-Obersturmbannführer Christian Wirth was born on November 24, 1885 in Oberbalzheim, in the Launberg district of Württemberg. He attended the Volkschule in Oberbalzheim for eight years and then trained as a carpenter before being employed by the Buhler Brothers Timber Works.
Wirth suffered from asthma his entire life, but managed to join the 123rd Grenadier Regiment "König Karl" in 1905. He served with the unit for five years, before joining the Schutzpolizei in 1910. For the next fpur years, Wirth progressed through the ranks, elevating to the Kriminalpolizei. In 1914, Wirth became a corporal in the 246th Reserve Infantry Regiment. Fighting on the Western Front in Flanders, the Somme and Aisne-Champagne, Wirth won the Iron Cross 2nd and 1st Classes. He was wounded in the right arm and received the Wound Badge in Black; during the conflict, he rose to become a sergeant and finally an acting officer.
He subsequently became a police officer in Stuttgart, joining the Nazi Party on January 1, 1931 (He reportedly may have been in the Nazi Party in the early 1920s), the SA in 1933 (where he was a Sturmführer in SA-Sturm 119) and the SS in 1939. By that time, he was the Head of Kommissariat 5. Wirth subsequently served in a Gestapo position in Vienna and the Security Police in Prague.
Christian Wirth played a significant role in the Nazi T4 euthanasia program in the late 1930s, personally participating in the first gassing experiments at Brandenburg, Grafeneck Castle and Hartheim Castle. Wirth then passed the examination at the leadership school of the Security Police and was promoted to Kriminalkommissar. He was reported to have been in Lublin and Chelmno in the fall of 1941, possibly involved in killing operations.
In late 1941, SS-Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik encountered difficulties in executing Operation Reinhard and brought Wirth to Lublin to supervise the three major extermination camps - Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka. Nicknamed "The savage Christian," "Christian the Terrible" and "Stuka," he recruited T4 staff from Germany, conducted efficiency experiments with Zyklon B and carbon monoxide, and in general proved so successful that he received the War Service Cross 2nd and 1st Classes.
As Operation Reinhard drew to a close, Wirth played an instrumental role in Aktion Erntefest - the massacre of remaining Jews workers in the Lublin area work camps. Wirth then transferred to San Sabba Trieste to work for his old boss Odilo Globocnik, forming and heading Einsatz R, an SS and Police Sonderkommando.
Christian Wirth was killed in action near Kozina, Istria by partisans on May 26, 1944. British historian Michael Tregenza supposedly located a diary of a Slovenian partisan, who organized the ambush that killed Wirth; other sources are unsure of who actually killed him. Wirth was initially buried with full military honors at the German Military Cemetery in Opcina (near Trieste.) Christian Wirth was exhumed in 1959 and is currently buried at the German Military Cemetery at Costermano, Italy.
Job Titles:
- Director of the Central Intelligence Agency
David Howell "Dave" Petraeus, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and former Commander, Central Command (CENTCOM), was born at Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York on November 7, 1952. He graduated from the United States Military Academy (ranking 39 of 833) with a Bachelor of Science degree and a commission as an Infantry officer, on June 5, 1974.
In his early career, Petraeus served in the 509th Airborne Battalion Combat Team at Vicenza, Italy and the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia. After serving as the aide-de-camp to Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono, Lieutenant Colonel Petraeus commanded the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment in the 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault.) He almost died in 1991, when he was struck in the chest by an errant M-16 rifle bullet on a training exercise. He later commanded the 1st Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division. Petraeus subsequently broke his pelvis, during a hard landing on a parachute jump, but again recovered and commanded the 101st in Iraq. In July 2004, he was promoted to lieutenant general and selected to command the Multi-National Security Transition Command - Iraq.
Dave Petraeus was the General George C. Marshall Award winner as the top graduate of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in 1983. He later received a Ph.D. degree in International Relations in 1987 from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, which led to an assignment as Assistant Professor of International Relations at the United States Military Academy.
After several years in Iraq, General Petraeus concluded that a risky "Surge Strategy" was perhaps the only way to bring Iraq out of its semi-civil war status. In January 2007, he was selected to command the Multi-National Force - Iraq. On October 31, 2008, David Petraeus assumed command of the U.S. Central Command. This assignment was interrupted in June 2010, when he was selected by the President to become the Commander, U.S. Forces in Afghanistan.
General David Petraeus retired from the Army on August 31, 2011. In his remarks at David Petraeus' Army retirement, Admiral Michael Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, compared Petraeus to Ulysses S. Grant, John J. Pershing, George Marshall and Dwight D. Eisenhower as one of the great battle captains of American history.
David Petraeus was sworn in as the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency on September 6, 2011. However, on November 7, 2012, just weeks after the coordinated attack against two United States government facilities in Benghazi, Libya, by members of the Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia, CIA Director Petraeus submitted his resignation. The following day, the President accepted it.
A later investigation found General Petraeus had improperly stored classified information and had not fully cooperated with investigators into this matter. He pled guilty to several misdemeanors and received probation, with a $100,000 fine. During the following years, he held several prestigious academic posts and served as a high-level consultant to government officials and private businesses.
To this day, the details of David Petraeus' resignation remain somewhat hazy and unclear. Was the incident truly an ill-advised relationship between the General and his biographer, which then led to violations concerning the storage of classified information? Was it "taking one for the team" over the failure at Benghazi? Or was it that the intelligence community, aided by an element of the FBI, disliked the former Army general, who had no true experience in national level intelligence matters, and then perhaps illegally tapping his phones and email - an example of the swamp devouring its own?
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.
Dr. August Hirt, SS-Sturmbannführer, born 29 April 1898 in Mannheim, Nazi anthropologist and surgeon, collector of pathological specimens of inmates at Natzweiler concentration camp as well as performing experiments with mustard gas on inmates, winner of Iron Cross 2 nd Class and wounded in the upper jaw by a bullet in World War I, studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, committed suicide 2 June 1945 at Schluchsee, Baden-Württemberg, said the following on collecting specimens for study:
Possibly a childhood friend of SS chief Heinrich Himmler, SS-Gruppenführer Dr. Karl Franz Gebhardt was born in Haag/Upper Bavaria on November 23, 1897. He was wounded in action and the winner of the Iron Cross 1st Class, while assigned to the 4th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, in World War I; he was also a British prisoner of war for a short time.
He later graduated the University of Munich as a physician. In 1923, he was a member of the Freikorps/Bund Oberland and participated in the Beer Hall Putsch. He joined the Nazi Party and SS in 1933. In 1937, he became chair holder for orthopedic surgery at the University of Berlin. Gebhardt subsequently a personal physician to Heinrich Himmler. His other titles included Chief Surgeon to the Reich Physician to the SS and Police, President of the German Red Cross.
In 1940, Dr. Gebhardt served a tour of duty in the 2nd SS Division Das Reich. On May 27, 1942, Himmler sent Dr. Gebhardt to Prague to assist Reinhard Heydrich, who had been gravely wounded in an assassination attempt. Gebhardt disdained the use of sulfonamide, expecting Heydrich to make a full recovery without antibiotic use (which Gebhardt thought worthless). Heydrich died of sepsis.
During the war, Dr. Gebhardt conducted horrific medical experiments on several dozen female inmates at the women's concentration camp of Ravensbrück. For his achievements, Gebhardt received the Knights Cross of the War Service Cross; he also received the German Cross in Silver. The "Doctors' Trial" convicted him of crimes against humanity and issued a death sentence on August 20, 1947. Karl Gebhardt was executed by hanging on Wednesday, June 2, 1948 at the Landsberg Prison. His remains were transferred to Munich, where he is buried in the Ostfriedhof (Plot 8, Row 5, Grave 1/2)
Ernst Lerch, SS-Sturmbannführer, born 19 November 1914 in Klagenfurt, Austria, employed in his father's Café Lerch in his home town in the 1930s, adjutant to SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik in Lublin, Poland, participant in Operation Reinhard (Aktion Reinhard)- the operation to kill the Jews of Poland, winner of the Iron Cross 1 st Class, served as chief of Globocnik's personal staff in the OZAK (Operationszone Adriatisches Küstenland), tried in Austria in 1972 but trial adjourned without verdict, died in 1997, said of SS-Obergruppenführer Odilo Globocnik, the chief of Operation Reinhard:
"Globocnik has two souls: one sincere and pleasing one; he really was sociable and fun loving, even witty, and then there was another, completely reversed aspect - the harshness and unbending behavior in his work. The orders, which came from above, were executed in each particular case; an order could not be discussed. He had the extraordinary ability, sometimes like that of a priest, to obey these orders."
SS-Hauptsturmführer Franz Novak was born on January 10, 1913 in Wolfsberg in the Carinthia district of Austria. The son of a locomotive driver, he joined the Hitler Youth and subsequently the Nazi Party. Following the assassination of Engelbert Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor who had banned the Nazi Party, Novak fled to Germany. The crime occurred on July 25, 1934, when ten Austrian Nazis entered the Chancellery building and shot Dollfuss to death; Novak was involved in the plot. In 1938, he joined the SS and Security Service. Following the Anschluss, Novak returned to Austria, working in the Central Office for Jewish Emigration, first in Vienna, then Berlin, and finally in Prague. Novak was SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann's railroad and transportation timetable expert and thus occupied a liaison role with the Ministry of Transport.
Friedrich Paulus, Army Field Marshal, was born on September 23, 1890 in Breitenau, Hesse, the son of a school teacher. His first assignment was with the 111th Infantry Regiment; he fought in France, Macedonia and Serbia from 1914-1918. After World War I, Paulus was assigned to the 13th Infantry Regiment in Stuttgart, before serving in several General Staff positions in the XVI Corps, the Tenth Army and the Deputy Chief of the German General Staff.
In January 1942, Paulus assumed command of the German Sixth Army and led this formation through the Stalingrad Campaign until 1943, when he and the Sixth Army surrendered. The winner of the Knight's Cross with Oak Leaves, Paulus was captured by the Soviets, remained a prisoner, until released from prison in 1953 and allowed to settle in East Germany. He died on February 1, 1957 in Dresden. Friedrich Paulus' remains were later transferred to Baden-Baden, where he was buried with his wife, whom he last saw in 1942.
Iconic photo of Paulus at surrender of Sixth Army. He is to the right; in the center is the Sixth Army Chief of Staff Arthur Schmidt; to the left is Wilhelm Adam, the Sixth Army Adjutant
Paulus was maligned after the war for his conduct of the Stalingrad fight, especially after Soviet forces had surrounded the Sixth Army in November 1942. But he was in an untenable position. The following are some quotations of Friedrich Paulus about Stalingrad that show his emotions during the campaign.
George Armstrong Custer, Civil War hero and Indian War immortal, was born in New Rumley, Ohio on December 5, 1839. "Autie" was admitted to the United States Military Academy (West Point) in 1858. He would graduate last in his class in 1861, after which he went directly into the Civil War. Showing numerous examples of courage under fire, Custer was promoted to brevet Brigadier General in 1863 and given command of a cavalry brigade. On July 3, 1863, Custer led his unit in an attack against Confederate cavalry, causing the enemy to withdraw. A year later, George Custer married Elizabeth Clift Bacon.
After the Civil War, the U. S. Army dramatically shrank in size and Custer found himself a lieutenant colonel and commander of the newly formed 7th Cavalry Regiment. He led this unit against the Southern Plains warriors at the Battle of the Washita River in November 1868. In 1873, Custer led an expedition of the cavalry to protect a railroad survey party. The following year, Custer led an expedition into the Black Hills - sacred territory to the Lakota tribe - and discovered gold.
Custer gained permanent fame (or infamy) on June 25, 1876, when he led the 7th Cavalry Regiment against a huge Lakota and Northern Cheyenne village along the Little Bighorn River. Dangerously splitting his command, Custer led five of the twelve cavalry companies around the east flank of the village. Two hours later, his entire command lay dead. The remnants of the regiment withdrew to what would later be called "Reno Hill." Putting up a stiff resistance for two days, most of these troopers survived the battle, unlike their regimental commander.
George Custer's mutilated body was initially buried on the battlefield. The Army later removed his remains and transferred them to the military cemetery at West Point. His widow, "Libbie," continued to defend the honor and capabilities of her deceased husband, until she died in New York City on April 4, 1933.
Heinrich Müller was born in Munich, Bavaria, 28 April 1900, the son of working-class Catholic parents. In the final year of World War I, he served as a pilot for an artillery spotting unit, during which he was decorated several times for bravery, to include the Iron Cross 2nd Class, the Iron Cross 1st Class, the Bavarian Military Merit Cross 2nd Class with Swords and the Bavarian Pilots Badge.
Müller joined the Bavarian Police in 1919. During the immediate post-war years, Müller was involved in the suppression of attempted Communist risings in Bavaria (He became a lifelong enemy of Communism after witnessing the shooting of hostages by the revolutionary "Red Army" in München, during the Bavarian Soviet Republic.) During the Weimar Republic, Müller served as the head of the München Police Department, where he acquainted with many members of the Nazi Party including Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich.
After the 1933 Nazis rise to power, Heydrich - as head of the Security Service - recruited Müller to the SS. In 1936, as head of the Gestapo, Heydrich named Müller that organization's Operation's Chief. Heinrich Müller quickly rose to the ranks, achieving the grade of SS-Gruppenführer in 1939. With the consolidation of law enforcement agencies under Heydrich in the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), Müller became the chief of the RSHA "Amt IV" (Office #4 or Deptartment #4.) At about the same time, he acquired the nickname "Gestapo Müller" to distinguish him from another SS general of the same name. The nickname would soon bring an aura of dread associated with Müller for many. He was also called "Bloody Müller."
As the Gestapo chief, Heinrich Müller played a leading role in the detection and suppression of all forms of resistance to the Nazi regime, succeeding in infiltrating and destroying many underground networks of the Communist Party and the Social Democratic Party. Müller was also active in resolving the Jewish question; Adolf Eichmann headed the Gestapo‘s Office of Resettlement and then it's Office of Jewish Affairs (the Amt IV section called Referat IV B4), as Müller's subordinate. Müller attended the Wannsee Conference in Berlin in January 1942 that formalized responsibilities for the destruction of Europe's Jews.
Heinz-Georg Lemm was a prisoner of American forces for ten months, until 1946. He was then transferred to Soviet control and confined to a Soviet prisoner of war camp until 1950, when he returned to Germany. In 1957, Heinz-Georg Lemm joined the post-war German Bundeswehr (Post-WWII German Army) and progressed to the rank of lieutenant general. He commanded the 5th Panzer Division and the Troop Office of the Bundeswehr before retiring on September 30, 1979. He then led the Association for Knight's Cross Recipients. General Lemm retired to the small village of Ruppichteroth, northeast of Bonn, to be closer to his old Army friend and fellow Knight's Cross winner, Martin Steglich. Heinz-Georg Lemm died on November 17, 1994.
Klaus Barbie, SS-Hauptsturmführer, born 25 October 1913 in Bad Godesberg, Gestapo officer, brutal interrogator of resistance fighters, sentenced to death in absentia in 1952 and 1954, known as the "Butcher of Lyon," joined the SS in 1935, captured in Bolivia in 1982, convicted in Lyon, France of murder, sentenced to life imprisonment, died in prison of cancer 25 September 1991 (He was quickly cremated and his ashes secretly scattered,) said of the quality of personnel in the SS:
Sometimes you get the opportunity to work with a real American hero. If you get really lucky, you serve again with that person a second time. Such was the case with Lieutenant Colonel Montgomery Meigs, then a Cavalry Squadron Commander, and I was the C Troop commander in his unit. Later, he rose to become the Commander of US Army Europe as a 4-star general, saw my name as coming up for reassignment, and asked me to be the Inspector General for the US Army Europe. When I arrived in Heidelberg and reported in to his office, I asked him for his "Commander's Intent" for guiding the tens of thousands of Army troops in Germany and other countries, and he replied: "We're going to do that just like back in the Squadron."
Montgomery Cunningham "Monty" Meigs, former Commander, U. S. Army Europe (USAREUR,) was born in Annapolis, Maryland on January 11, 1945. His father, a lieutenant colonel and tank battalion commander, had been killed in action in France exactly one month before his son was born. The great-great-great grandnephew of Montgomery C. Meigs of Civil War fame, the younger Meigs graduated from West Point in 1967. He served as a cavalry troop commander and a squadron operations officer in Vietnam. After receiving a Ph.D. in history at the University of Wisconsin - Madison and attending the Army's Command and General Staff College, he taught in the History Department at West Point, spending one academic year at Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Lieutenant Colonel Meigs assumed command of the 1st Squadron, 1st Armored Cavalry Regiment of the 1st Armored Division in June 1984. Two years later, he attended the National War College as an Army Fellow and then served as a strategic planner on the Joint Staff for three years. Colonel Meigs then returned to USAREUR and assumed command of the 2nd Brigade, 1st Armored Division on September 26, 1990, later fighting in "Operation Desert Storm." Promoted to brigadier general, Montgomery Meigs commanded the Seventh Army Training Command in Grafenwöhr, Germany, as well as serving as Chief of Staff of V Corps and Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations of the U.S. Army, Europe, and Seventh Army. He later commanded the 1st Infantry Division in Bosnia, and after receiving a fourth star, became the commander of the U. S. Army in Europe.
After his retirement in 2002, Montgomery Meigs served as a professor at the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, director of the U.S. Department of Defense's Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO) and as Visiting Professor of Strategy and Military Operations at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He is also the President and CEO of Business Executives for National Security (BENS), a national security public interest group. He resided in Austin, Texas, until he died on July 6, 2021, after a long illness.
SS-Standartenführer Dr. Rudolf Lange was a key figure in the Einsatzkommando and the Wannsee Conference. The son of a railway construction supervisor, Rudolf was born on November 18, 1910 in Weisswasser, in eastern Saxony. Lange received a doctorate in law in 1933 at the University of Jena and soon joined the Gestapo. He served in the Gestapo office in Berlin in 1936, transferring to Vienna, Austria in 1938 to coordinate the annexation of the Austrian police system with the Reich. In 1939, Lange transferred to Stuttgart. He ran the Gestapo offices in Erfurt and Weimar in 1939, before returning to Berlin.
On June 5, 1941, Dr. Lange reported to Pretzsch, in the Wittenberg district in Saxony-Anhalt, and the staff of Einsatzgruppe A. Lange rose to command Einsatzkommando 2 on December 3, 1941; he also held the position of commander of the Security Service in Latvia. He planned and executed the murder of 24,000 Latvian Jews at the Rumbula Forest near Riga from November 30 to December 8, 1941.
Lange was then invited to attend the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, to help discuss the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question." It was held in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee, along Lake Wannsee on January 20, 1942. The three-story villa, in which the meeting was held, was built as a villa residence for factory owner Ernst Marlier, a manufacturer of pharmaceutical preparations, in 1915. Marlier purchased two plots of land on Grosse Seestrasse (later renamed Am Grossen Wannsee) from the Head Forestry Office in Potsdam and the Royal Prussian Waterway Engineering Authority. Marlier sold the property in 1921 to the North German Real Estate Company in Berlin for 2,300,000 Reichsmarks. Friedrich Minoux, a member of the board of this company, obtained the property in 1937. He was arrested in 1940 for helping to embezzle 8,800,000 Reichsmarks. While in prison, he sold the property for 1,950,000 Reichsmarks to the Nordhav Foundation, an organization that had been established in 1939 by Reinhard Heydrich to create and maintain holiday homes for members of the SS security services and their relatives. It was rumored that Heydrich planned to ultimately keep the property for his own home.
Although Lange was the lowest ranking of the present SS officers, Reinhard Heydrich viewed Lange's direct experience in conducting the mass murder of deported Jews as valuable for the conference. Afterward, Lange returned to Riga, where he remained until 1945, when he assumed command of the Security Service and Security Police for the Reichsgau Wartheland, at Posen, Poland. He was promoted to SS-Standartenführer, but soon after, the Red Army surrounded Posen (now Poznań.) During the siege, Lange was wounded organizing the security police defenses in the city. He committed suicide at the Kernwerk core fortress in Posen on February 16, 1945, hours before Soviet troops overran these final defenses. He was posthumously awarded the German Cross in Gold.
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.
SS-Gruppenführer Arthur Nebe served as the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe B in Russia, although that was not his most-important function in the Third Reich.
Born in Berlin on November 13, 1894 to an elementary school teacher, he graduated from the Leibniz-Gymnasium in Berlin (high school) and served in the 17th Pioneer Battalion, a combat engineer organization in World War I. At the front, he was wounded twice by poison gas and was awarded the Iron Cross 1st Class.
After the war, in 1920, Nebe joined Berlin's detective force, the Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police), called Kripo for short. By 1924, he had advanced to the rank of Police Commissioner; that year he married Elise Schaeffer - the couple had one daughter two years later. In 1928, he assumed responsibility for the Kripo offices in Potsdam and Frankfurt an der Oder, where he investigated numerous narcotics and murder cases. Nebe joined the Nazi Party on July 1, 1931.
In 1932, Nebe helped form the National Socialist Civil Service Society of the Berlin Police and became friends with Kurt Daluege, a police official and prominent Nazi. Daluege recommended that Nebe be appointed the Chief Executive of the State Police. In July 1936, the Kripo became the criminal police department for the entire Third Reich. It was merged, along with the Gestapo into the Security Police under Reinhard Heydrich.
Arthur Nebe, who formally entered the SS on December 2, 1936, was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and appointed head of the entire Kripo, making him a direct subordinate of Heydrich. Evidence shows that about this time, Nebe began to dislike the methods of Himmler and Heydrich, although he continued to have lunch with them frequently.
By 1938, Nebe's dislike turned to hostility and he joined anti-Nazi conspirators Dr. Karl Sack and Hans Oster. Nebe provided information on SS forces to the conspirators involved in the September 1938 coup attempt, a plan to overthrow Hitler if Germany went to war with Czechoslovakia. However, Britain and France caved in to Hitler's demands and there was no war over Czechoslovakia.
In 1941, perhaps sensing some reluctance on the part of his subordinate to get his hands dirty, Reinhard Heydrich selected Nebe to command Einsatzgruppe B, which would follow the Wehrmacht's Army Group Center in the invasion of the Soviet Union. Nebe asked for a transfer to the International Police Commission to avoid this duty, but Heydrich insisted; anti-Nazis Ludwig Beck and Hans Oster urged Nebe to accept, so they would have direct evidence of SS crimes and organization. During Nebe's tenure in the east, Einsatzgruppe B murdered about 46,000 victims. With the technical assistance of Dr. Albert Widmann, Nebe experimented with the use of explosives and carbon monoxide gas vans (used to suffocate victims) to kill the mentally defective in lunatic asylums in Minsk and Mogilev, to spare his men the anxiety of shooting them.
Nebe served in Russia from June to November 1941, returning to Berlin to command the Kripo once again. In March 1944, after the mass escape of Allied prisoners of war from Stalag Luft III, Nebe helped select fifty re-captured prisoners for execution. He also reportedly suggested in June 1944 to SS physician Dr. Ernst Grawitz that the Gypsies held at Auschwitz would be good patients for medical experiments at Dachau.
Arthur Nebe appears to have been on the fringe of the July 20, 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler at Rastenburg. Supposedly, his mission in the plot was to lead a team of twelve police officers to assassinate Heinrich Himmler, but his whereabouts on the day remain in question (He may have been in Berlin with conspirator General Paul von Hase) as does the method by which he was to have received the signal to act.
In any case, Nebe - using various disguises after a warrant was issued for his arrest on July 24 - fled into hiding. There are many versions of what happened next; one of the most logical is that Nebe contacted a female acquaintance in the police, one Adelheid Gobbin at the end of July, requesting help. She took him to her apartment and then arranged a hiding place with the Walter Frick family at Motzen on Lake Motzen, twenty miles south of Berlin. Gestapo investigator Willy Litzenberg appears to have tracked Gobbin down in January 1945 and in a later interrogation, she revealed Nebe's hiding place. Nebe, who according to one source attempted to fake his own suicide in January, was arrested in February 1945 and sentenced to death by the People's Court.
On March 21, 1945, executioners at Plötzensee Prison in Berlin hanged Arthur Nebe (and Walter Frick.) After the war, there were reports that he had been sighted in Turin, Italy and Ireland, but nothing has ever confirmed that he survived the war.
Theodor Dannecker, SS-Hauptsturmführer, born 27 March 1913 in Tübingen, Baden-Württemberg, assigned to Office IV B 4 (Jewish Affairs) of the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) under Adolf Eichmann, leader of the Judenreferat at the Sicherheitsdienst post in Paris that oversaw the deportation of 13,000 Jews to Auschwitz, in charge of deporting all Jews from Bulgaria to extermination camps, assisted in the deportation of more than a half a million Hungarian Jews between early 1944 and summer of the same year to Auschwitz and other death factories, committed suicide after being taken prisoner by the U.S. Army on 10 December 1945 in Bad Tölz, Bavaria.