Letters from Vienna #156
Letter to Horst von Wächter III
The Campaign of Defamation Against Your Father
Dear Horst,
Many thanks for your prompt reply to my missives. I perfectly understand why you find Gonzalo Lira’s “demeanour presumptuous, it has nothing to do with that reserve, that modesty, which is so important to us.” Gonzalo Lira is opinionated, loud and brash, which is due to his semi-American upbringing (many indeed mistake him for an American) but I still think he deserves credit for speaking out when he did (above all: under those particular circumstances) and I don’t think he deserves eight years in a Ukrainian jail for simply speaking the truth. I view him, for all his faults, as a man of honesty, integrity and courage, and remain convinced that he deserves our support.
The Campaign of Defamation Against Your Father:
Of the documents you gave me I think the Krüger letter the most important and as such it deserves to be quoted in full:
The Higher SS and Police Leader East, Kraków 24.II:1942
To the
Governor of the District of Galicia
SS Brigade leader Dr.Wächter
Lemberg
Mr. Governor!
I received the letter of 20.2.1942, the content of which I found extremely disconcerting...
For me, as a senior SS and police leader, there was no need to express myself immediately after your introductory words, since only those who had to report on the ins and outs of the matter had to speak. I also gave expression to this sentiment. If I took the floor at the request of the State Secretary, I only did so in response to your words, since I had to establish from the outset that the reasoning you gave had a bias. I immediately wrote down your words that “a German colonization of the eastern region during the war would bring about the collapse of production”. In doing so, you clearly laid down your fundamental position in front of this body, without there being any need to do so or without this point even being raised. It was a matter of course for me, as the representative of the Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of German Nationality, that I would strongly oppose your attitude. ...
The Reichsführer SS (Himmler) placed me as a higher and police leader here in this area as his representative. I carry out all my actions and measures as a member of the SS. You are here in the Government General as a high-ranking official and high official of the party and carry out your duties as a politician. Although you wear the uniform of an SS Brigadeführer, you have never allowed yourself to be guided by the fact that you are a member of the SS when carrying out the tasks assigned to you as a politician...
KRÜGER e.h.
SS Obergruppenführer and General of the Police
It is important to note that the rank of Obergruppenführer was the highest commissioned SS rank after only Reichsführer SS (Himmler). In other words: Krüger was extremely powerful and your father would undoubtedly have been worried about the consequences of crossing such a man. Furthermore: by not carrying out the wishes of Himmler, which were clearly articulated in an oral rather than written fashion, your father was risking both his own life and that of his family.
According to one source I found: “Krüger was responsible for numerous crimes: during the evacuation of the ghettos, deportation to the extermination camps, in the forced labor camps, mass shootings of the “Action Harvest Festival”, terror against the Polish population (e.g. AB action), and for the expulsion of 110,000 Poles from the Zamość area. After renewed conflicts with Governor General Hans Frank, he was replaced in November 1944 and appointed commander of the Waffen SS Division Prinz Eugen (fighting partisans in Yugoslavia). On May 10, 1945, while in US custody, he committed suicide.”[1] In other words: he was an evil psychopath, a monster and deserves our complete and utter condemnation.
Of course, the Katzmann report (written on behalf of and delivered to Krüger) from June 1943 is also of interest. In it Fritz Katzmann, who was the SS and Police Leader for the District of Galicia, criticized your father for his failure to exterminate the Jews. The exact phrase he used was: “It became more and more apparent that the civil administration (your father) was not in a position to come up with an even remotely satisfactory solution to the Jewish problem.” (“Es zeigte sich immer mehr, dass die Zivilverwaltung nicht in der Lage war, das Judenproblem auch nur einer annähernd befriedigenden Lösung zuzuführen.”). Again, this could have had extremely serious consequences for your father and his family.
On Katzmann I found the following: “During his command in Galicia he was instrumental in the Holocaust… and was said to have been directly responsible for the deaths of 400,000 Galician Jews” [2] Of interest is the fact that: “After 1945 Katzmann lived undiscovered under the name Bruno Albrecht in Darmstadt. Only in 1957, when Katzmann was taken to the Alice Hospital in Darmstadt and died as Bruno Albrecht, did his true identity emerge.”[3]
It would be, as a historian, unprofessional and amiss of me not to mention what has been written about your father too: “Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 21 June 1941, the Soviet-occupied eastern part of the former Austrian province of Galicia was attached to the General Gouvernment as the District of Galicia. Its capital city variously known as L’viv (Ukrainian), L’wow (Polish) and Lemberg (German) had been – after Vienna, Budapest and Prague – the largest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews had lived together for centuries. The first German governor was Karl Lasch, an intimate friend of Frank, who was later arrested and shot for extensive black-market activities on orders of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Wächter was chosen by Hitler “as the best man on the spot” and inserted as Governor on 22 January 1943. His first official visit was to the Greek Catholic Metropolit Andrij Aleksander Szeptycki (Sheptytsky), a very influential and widely respected personality. With his assistance Wächter endeavored to promote a greater degree of co-operation among the occupying Germans and the various ethnic elements in the district of Galicia. Consequently, he immediately found himself in conflict with SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger, the Reichsführer’s representative in the Generalgovernment and executor of his planned large-scale resettlement programs. At the government meeting in Kraków on 17 February, Wächter publicly opposed plans to “germanize” the city of Lemberg, which would have resulted in the expulsion of its entire population stating: “A German colonization of the East during the war would bring about the collapse of production.” Wächter’s continued opposition to Krüger’s policies led to a number of open confrontations. To avoid further altercations, Himmler offered Wächter the chance to relocate to Vienna, which he declined. As Governor of Galicia, while he remained a firm believer in the principle “Germany first”, his administration often went further to accommodate the wishes of the population than it was required to. He was frequently obliged to use his influence and connections by first circumventing General Governor Hans Frank and by exploiting the strained relations between Frank and Himmler to pursue his own policies. Wächter consciously selected men with liberal views for the key posts in his administration, notably his department heads Otto Bauer and Dr. Ludwig Losacker, with whom he consulted before deciding all important issues. In late 1942 Wächter visited the “Reichskommissariat Ukraine” (eastern Ukraine) to witness first-hand the effect of the implementation of the Nazi “Untermensch” (subhuman) philosophy by Gauleiter Erich Koch and his policies of repression and subjugation. On his return in December 1942 he sent a secret ten-page letter to Martin Bormann in the Führerhauptquartier (Führer Headquarters) in Berlin, criticizing the serious mistakes made in the handling of the Ukrainians and their far-reaching ramifications with regard the overall conduct of the German policy in the east during the war against the Soviet Union.”
“Whilst Governor of Galicia, he established a Waffen-SS Division recruited from the Ukrainian population of Galicia, under German supervision, to fight against the hated Bolsheviks. The formation of the unit was approved by Himmler after the disastrous German defeat at Stalingrad. Wächter submitted the proposal to Himmler on 1 March 1943 and on 28 April 28 the SS Division “Galicia” was publicly inaugurated.”[4]
I realise that this letter is growing too long and need to continue at a later date…
[1] https://www.gedenkorte-europa.eu/de_de/article-kruger-friedrich-wilhelm-1894-ndash-1945.html
[2] https://dfg-vk-darmstadt.de/Lexikon_Auflage_2/KatzmannFritz.htm
[3] Ibid