People of the Revolution and the USSR

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1888–1971 ✕ Traffic accident

Commander of the Waffen-SS IX Mountain Corps who led the German forces in the siege of Budapest and refused to surrender

He joined the army in 1907 and in the First World War served as a General Staff officer, including with the German military mission in Constantinople. Moving to the police in 1919, he headed Chile’s Carabineros and became inspector general of police schools, then joined the SS and served on Himmler’s staff. He commanded the SS Polizei Division from late 1939 and the VI SS Army Corps (Latvian) from 1943. Appointed commander of the IX SS Mountain Corps in Budapest in December 1944, he led the German forces in the siege from 24 December 1944 to 11 February 1945 and refused all invitations to surrender, setting off a long and bloody siege. Taken prisoner by the Soviets after the failed breakout, he was sentenced in 1949 to 25 years, released in 1955 and killed in a traffic accident at Bielefeld in 1971.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1893–1946 ✕ Executed by hanging

Baltic German Nazi ideologue from Reval who served as Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories in 1941–1945

Born in 1893 in Reval (Tallinn), in the Governorate of Estonia of the Russian Empire, he studied architecture at the Riga Polytechnical Institute. In 1918 he left for Germany with the retreating German army and in January 1919 joined the German Workers’ Party, eight months before Hitler; in 1923 he became editor of the party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter. In 1930 he published his racial treatise The Myth of the Twentieth Century, and he fed Hitler’s belief in Jewish conspiracies by introducing him to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Appointed Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories on 17 July 1941, he had Hinrich Lohse installed as Reichskommissar for Ostland, though his own authority was severely limited. He saw the Baltic lands as German “Lebensraum”. Found guilty on all four counts at Nuremberg, he was hanged on 16 October 1946.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1893–1946 ✕ Executed

Nazi Germany’s foreign minister, he played a key role in negotiating the German-Soviet nonaggression pact.

Joachim von Ribbentrop served as Germany’s foreign minister from 1938 to 1945. He played a key role in negotiating the 1939 German-Soviet nonaggression pact, which made possible Germany’s invasion of Poland that September. He also directed diplomatic efforts to persuade Axis partners to deport Jews to German killing centers and to hand over their Jewish citizens in Germany to deportation. The International Military Tribunal convicted him on all four counts and sentenced him to death; he was hanged on October 16, 1946.

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1895–1946 ✕ Executed by hanging

Higher SS and Police Leader who directed the mass shootings at Kamianets-Podilskyi, Babi Yar and Rumbula

The son of a textile factory owner in Hornberg in the Black Forest, he fought as an officer in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1929 and the SS in 1930, and from 1933 was police president and head of the political police in Brunswick. Chosen by Himmler in June 1941 as Higher SS and Police Leader for southern Russia and Ukraine, he controlled all Einsatzgruppen killings in his area and used his method in the mass shootings at Kamianets-Podilskyi (23,600 killed) and Babi Yar (33,771 killed). Moved to Ostland in November with orders to complete the extermination of Riga’s Jews, he watched over two days as 25,000 people were killed at Rumbula. Taken prisoner fighting the Red Army in April 1945, he was sentenced to death at the Riga trial and hanged in Riga on 3 February 1946.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1896–1964 ○ Died in his home village

Nazi Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein who, as Reichskommissar for Ostland in 1941–1944, ordered the ghettoisation and expropriation of Jews

Born into a peasant family in Schleswig-Holstein, he was severely wounded in the First World War. He joined the Nazi Party in 1923, became Gauleiter of Schleswig-Holstein in 1925 and in 1933 also Oberpräsident of the province. Appointed Reichskommissar for Ostland on 25 July 1941, he shuttled between Riga and Kiel; his decree of 27 July ordered lists of Jews, the yellow badge, the confiscation of their property and their concentration in ghettos. Asked to explain his order forbidding the execution of Jews in Libau (Liepāja), he wrote on 15 November asking whether all Jews were to be liquidated regardless of economic interests, yet he stayed at his post for three more years. He fled Ostland without authorisation on 13 August 1944 and was removed. Sentenced in 1948 to ten years, he was released for ill health in 1951 and died in his home village in 1964.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1897–1945 ✕ Suicide

Nazi Party propaganda chief and minister who promoted antisemitism and dictatorship.

Joseph Goebbels was a Nazi Party propaganda leader who headed the party organization in Berlin from 1926 and became its propaganda chief in 1930. Appointed minister of propaganda by Hitler in 1933, he brought the press, film, radio, and cultural life under Nazi ideological control and promoted antisemitism and persecution of Jews. He was a chief instigator of the November 1938 pogrom and later campaigned for total war.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1904–1942 ✕ Died of wounds from an assassination attack

Nazi official who led SS intelligence and police agencies in implementing the Holocaust.

At the 1942 Wannsee Conference, Heydrich coordinated German state agencies for the murder of Europe’s Jews.

Heydrich joined the SS in 1931 and built and led its Security Service (SD); in 1936 he took command of the Security Police, including the Gestapo and criminal police. When the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) was established in 1939, he became its chief, unifying the Security Police and SD under an agency central to Nazi persecution and mass murder of Jews and political opponents. Appointed acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia in 1941, he oversaw executions of resistance figures and the ghettoization and deportation of Jews. He chaired the January 1942 Wannsee Conference to coordinate ministries in the murder of European Jews; wounded in an attack by Czech resistance agents in May, he died on June 4.

Germany state institutions Fascists and Nazis 1904–1977 ○ Natural death

SS diplomat who, as Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary in 1944, pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz

Born in Bad Kissingen, the son of a schoolteacher, he studied political science in Munich and took his doctorate in 1928. He joined the Nazi Party in 1932 and took part in forcing the resignation of Austria’s Chancellor Schuschnigg, the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1939 and the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in 1941. Promoted to SS-Brigadeführer, he became Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary when Germany occupied it in March 1944, with authority over all occupying forces except the Wehrmacht, chiefly the Gestapo, and pressed the Hungarian government to deport its Jews to Auschwitz. In June he cabled Ribbentrop that some 340,000 Jews had been delivered to the Reich, and in October he helped the Arrow Cross take power. Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial in 1949, he was released in 1951 and died in Darmstadt in 1977.