German Jewish Expressionist playwright who took part in the Bavarian revolution
After volunteering for the German army in World War I and being wounded at Verdun, Toller was discharged in 1917; his wartime experience turned him toward pacifism, and he joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany. In April 1919 he served six days as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and took part in its armed resistance; sentenced to five years for high treason, he wrote several major plays in prison. Exiled after the Nazis came to power, he continued warning against Nazism and died by suicide in New York in 1939.
Career timeline
1914Volunteered for the German army and served in World War I.
1917Discharged from military service after wartime injury and ill health.
1919As a member of the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany, joined the leadership of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and served as its president, April 6–12.
1919Sentenced to five years in prison for high treason over his role in the republic's armed resistance.
1925Released, expelled from Bavaria, and went to Berlin.
1933After the Nazi seizure of power, left Germany and went into exile, moving through Switzerland, France, and England before the United States.
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.
Career timeline
1919Joined the German Workers’ Party
1923Editor of the Völkischer Beobachter
1930Published The Myth of the Twentieth Century
1941–1945Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories
A Luftwaffe chief who organized Nazi war and plunder
In August 1940, redirecting the air offensive toward London and civilian cities gave the RAF time to recover.
Hermann Göring rose from a First World War fighter ace to a central power-holder in Nazi Germany and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe. He helped build dictatorship and the machinery of aggressive war by directing the Prussian police, the creation of the Gestapo, rearmament, and wartime economic mobilization. During the Battle of Britain in 1940, he overestimated the Luftwaffe and was involved in shifting attacks from the RAF's struggling airfields and fighter defences toward British cities, giving Fighter Command time to recover. After the war, the Nuremberg Tribunal condemned him as a major war criminal, and he committed suicide on the eve of his execution.
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.
Baltic Landeswehr strike-troop commander who led the Liepāja coup and fell at Riga
In the assault on Riga he led a small detachment across the Daugava bridge toward the citadel holding hundreds of anti-Bolshevik prisoners; he fell in the charge, but his men reached the citadel and freed them.
A Baltic German baron from Courland who fought as a Bavarian uhlan officer in the First World War, he became a staff officer and strike-troop commander of the Baltic Landeswehr in 1919. On 16 April he led the Liepāja coup against the Ulmanis government, and on 22 May he was killed at twenty-five in the attack that retook Riga from the Red Army.
Career timeline
1913Read law at Heidelberg University
1914Volunteered for the 2nd Bavarian Uhlan Regiment; served on the Western and Eastern fronts
1915Promoted to lieutenant
1917Company commander, 18th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Western front
1919.01Took command of the Baltische Landeswehr shock troops
1919.04Led the coup that toppled the Ulmanis government at Liepāja
The German general who surrendered Paris rather than destroy it
On 25 August 1944, he signed the capitulation of the German garrison in Paris.
Dietrich von Choltitz was a German professional officer who served in both world wars and carried out Nazi Germany’s war on the Eastern and Western Fronts. As military governor of Paris in August 1944, he did not execute Hitler’s order to destroy the city and surrendered the garrison to French forces, helping make the liberation of Paris possible. British recordings made after his capture also preserve his admission of responsibility for the liquidation of Jews in Crimea, so his refusal in Paris does not erase his wider responsibility for the war.
Career timeline
1914–1918Officer, Royal Saxon Army 107th Infantry Regiment, Western Front
1919–1939Reichswehr officer, commander of III Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment
1939–1940Commander, 16th Air Landing Infantry Regiment, Poland and the Netherlands campaigns
1941–1942Commander, 16th Infantry Regiment, Crimea and Siege of Sevastopol
1943Commander, 11th Panzer Division and XLVIII Panzer Corps, Eastern Front
1944Commander, LXXVI Panzer Corps and LXXXIV Army Corps, Italy and Normandy
1944Commander of Greater Paris and military governor, surrendered on 25 August
1944–1947Interned at Trent Park and a US prisoner-of-war camp
A social democrat who moved from municipal politics into state power amid Germany's division
On 30 November 1948, he was elected Lord Mayor of the “provisional democratic magistrate” in Berlin's Soviet sector.
Friedrich Ebert Jr. was a German politician who moved from the Social Democratic Party to the leadership of the Socialist Unity Party, carrying both the symbolism of being the first president's son and the consequences of his own choices. The Nazis detained him in concentration camps for illegal political activity; after the war, he became a central figure in the Soviet zone as social democracy was forcibly fused with communism and the SED consolidated power. On 30 November 1948 he led the extraordinary assembly in the Soviet sector that deposed Berlin's elected magistrate and installed a rival East Berlin magistrate, then combined municipal reconstruction with senior work in East German state institutions.
Career timeline
1919–1925Editor of the Social Democratic daily Vorwärts
1927–1933Brandenburg an der Havel city councillor
1928–1933Member of the Reichstag
1946–1949President of the Brandenburg Landtag
1946–1979SED Central Committee and Politburo member
1948–1967First Lord Mayor of East Berlin
1949–1979People's Chamber and Council of State leadership
1971–1979Chairman of the SED People's Chamber faction
Nazi Party leader and Hitler’s deputy, sentenced to life imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials.
Hess joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and became a close associate of Hitler. He was appointed deputy party leader in 1933, and in 1939 Hitler placed him second after Hermann Göring in the line of succession. In May 1941 he flew alone to Scotland in an attempt to negotiate an end to the war with Britain; the British government rejected his proposals and held him as a prisoner of war. After the war, the Nuremberg tribunal convicted him of crimes against peace and sentenced him to life imprisonment, which he served at Spandau Prison.
SS special-unit commander implicated in the Wola massacre
Waffen-SS commander of a unit recruited from convicted criminals; from 1940 he led it in anti-partisan operations in occupied Poland and Belarus, massacring civilians on a mass scale.
Nazi German SS officer and war criminal. From 1940 he commanded the special unit bearing his name, which committed war crimes in Poland and Belarus. During the suppression of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising, his formation participated in the massacre of civilians in Wola. His command responsibility belongs within the history of Nazi occupation policy and the SS and police command structure.
Career timeline
1913Enlisted in the Württemberg Army as a machine gunner; rose to lieutenant in World War I and received the Iron Cross in both classes.
1919–1921Joined the Freikorps and helped crush the German Revolution, workers' uprisings, strikes and communist revolts by force.
1922–1934Took a doctorate in political science at Frankfurt and joined the Nazi Party, but in 1934 was imprisoned for a sexual offence involving a minor and theft, expelled from the party and stripped of his doctorate and military honours.
1937–1939Served with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, was wounded three times, and on the strength of that service had his 1934 conviction annulled and his party membership restored in 1940.
1940Took command of the Oranienburg poacher unit recruited from convicted poachers; renamed Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, it was assigned guard and anti-partisan duties in occupied Poland.
1943Expansion of the unit to regimental size was authorized, and in Belarus it conducted anti-partisan operations that massacred civilians on a mass scale.
1944Took part in suppressing the Warsaw Uprising and the Wola massacre, and was then deployed against the Slovak National Uprising.
1945Was seriously wounded fighting Soviet forces near Guben in February and sent to the rear; in April he deserted and went into hiding.
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.
Career timeline
1914–1918German army officer and pilot
1929–1930Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1932–1945Reichstag deputy
1933–1938Police president and head of political police, Brunswick
1941Higher SS and Police Leader, southern Russia and Ukraine
SPD leader who survived ten years in Nazi camps and, after the war, refused the merger with the Communists
Born in Kulm in West Prussia, he lost his right arm in the First World War and joined the SPD in 1918. As a member of the Württemberg Landtag and the Reichstag he fought the Nazis. Arrested in July 1933, he refused to sign a renunciation of political activity and spent ten years in concentration camps. In 1945 he rebuilt the party from Hanover, rejected the merger with the Communists urged by Otto Grotewohl in the Soviet zone, and called the KPD “red-painted Nazis”. Elected SPD chairman in 1946 and the Bundestag’s first leader of the opposition in 1949, he called for the nationalisation of heavy industry and a united Germany and opposed Adenauer’s integration with the West. He died in Bonn in 1952.
Career timeline
1918Joined the SPD
1930–1933Reichstag deputy
1933–1943Held in Nazi concentration camps
1946–1952SPD chairman
1949–1952Leader of the opposition in the Bundestag
First woman to lead a major European communist party, and its sharpest anti-Stalinist apostate
“We are condemned to death, since terror reigns in Leningrad.” — her letter to Maslow, intercepted by Soviet censorship and read aloud at a Comintern special session, sealed her break with Stalin (February 1926).
Co-chair of the KPD (1924–1925), the first woman to lead a major European communist party. Born to a Vienna philosophy professor, she co-founded the Austrian Communist Party in 1918 and then, with Arkadi Maslow, led the KPD's ultra-left in Berlin, providing the theoretical groundwork for the 1923 uprising. A fierce factional warrior who publicly denounced Trotsky at the Fifth Comintern Congress, she was expelled in 1926 after refusing to submit to Stalin and spent the rest of her life as an anti-Stalinist left intellectual. Her dramatic trajectory took her from Comintern leadership to US intelligence cooperation in exile, and finally back toward communism in her final years.
Career timeline
1918Co-founds the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ); member no. 1
1919–1921Moves to Berlin, joins the KPD
1921–1923Berlin district leader; with Maslow develops the left-wing 'theory of the offensive'
1924–1925KPD co-chair; Reichstag and Prussian Landtag deputy; candidate member of the Comintern Executive
1924Leads the German delegation to the Fifth Comintern Congress; publicly denounces Trotsky
1925–1926Detained in Moscow; refuses Stalin's demand to submit to the party line
1926Expelled from the KPD for supporting the United Opposition
1928Briefly joins the Leninbund, soon departs
1933–1941Exile in Paris; cooperates with Trotsky, founds the Gruppe Internationale
1941–1955Exile in the US; publishes Stalin and German Communism (1948)
1947Testifies before HUAC against her brothers Gerhart and Hanns Eisler
1955–1961Returns to Paris; publishes From Lenin to Mao (1956), renouncing anti-communism
SPD organiser in the Soviet zone who signed the merger with the KPD, then left the SED in 1948 and fled west
The son of a shipyard worker in Elbing, he joined the SPD in 1913 and became a white-collar union official in Brunswick, where he worked closely with Otto Grotewohl. Under the Nazis he belonged to a Social Democratic resistance circle and was imprisoned with Grotewohl in 1938. In May 1945 he and Grotewohl rebuilt the SPD in Berlin; he sat on its Central Committee and was the first SPD signatory of the agreement with the KPD and of the unity declaration. Elected to the SED Central Secretariat in 1946, he was isolated as the party was Stalinised and in September 1948 was relieved of all functions. In October he wrote a letter of resignation warning that the “party of a new type” would lead to a totalitarian dictatorship, and fled to the West. He died in 1964.
Career timeline
1913Joined the SPD
1938Imprisoned with Grotewohl
1945Member of the SPD Central Committee
1946Member of the SED Central Secretariat
1948Relieved of all functions, left the SED and fled west
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.
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.
Career timeline
1926–1945Nazi Party Gauleiter for Berlin
1930–1945Nazi Party propaganda chief
1933–1945Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda
The West German economic statesman who shaped currency reform and the social market economy
On 21 June 1948, he announced by radio the abolition of price controls and compulsory rationing for selected manufactured goods.
Ludwig Erhard was an economist and politician who conceived West Germany’s postwar order as a combination of competitive markets and social security. As director of the Bizonal Economic Administration in 1948, he helped prepare monetary reform and, alongside the introduction of the Deutsche Mark, began a staged relaxation of price and production controls that opened the institutional path to recovery. He is often mythologized as the sole architect of the economic miracle, although Allied reform, international conditions, and the recovery of production by workers and firms all mattered, while price liberalization initially raised living costs and provoked working-class resistance. As economics minister and later chancellor, he helped make that order part of West Germany’s political identity, but resigned in 1966 amid recession and the collapse of his coalition.
Career timeline
1919–1922Studied business administration at Nuremberg Business School
1925Received a doctorate in economics from Frankfurt University
1947Led the Bizonal Special Office for Money and Credit
1948–1949Director of the Bizonal Economic Administration
1949–1963West German Federal Minister of Economics, also Vice-Chancellor from 1957
1963–1966Second Federal Chancellor of West Germany
1966–1967Chairman of the Christian Democratic Union
Marxist playwright who weaponized theatre for class struggle through epic theatre and the Verfremdungseffekt
When I read Marx's Capital, I understood my plays — Marx was the only spectator for my plays I'd ever come across.
Bertolt Brecht was the 20th century's most important Marxist playwright and the founder of epic theatre, a poet and director who transformed the stage into a forum for class consciousness and anti-capitalist critique. After embracing Marxism under Karl Korsch in the late 1920s, he developed the Verfremdungseffekt — a defamiliarization technique that broke emotional immersion to provoke critical reflection — and with works like The Threepenny Opera, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Good Person of Szechwan, he fused avant-garde form with popular idiom to anatomize capitalism and war. Driven out by the Nazis in 1933, he lived in exile in Scandinavia and the US—where HUAC investigated him in 1947—before returning to found the Berliner Ensemble with Helene Weigel in East Berlin in 1949, defining postwar theatre worldwide until his death in 1956.
Career timeline
1922Wins Kleist Prize for Drums in the Night
1924Moves to Berlin; assistant dramaturg at Deutsches Theater
1928The Threepenny Opera premieres, biggest Berlin hit of the 1920s
1933Flees Nazi Germany; begins 15-year exile through Scandinavia and the US
1947Testifies before HUAC in Hollywood; leaves the US the next day
1949Founds Berliner Ensemble in East Berlin with Helene Weigel
SS officer who led Einsatzgruppe A in 1941, instigating the Kaunas pogrom and directing the murder of Baltic Jews
Born into a pastor’s family in Sternenfels, he took a doctorate in law at Tübingen. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932, headed the Gestapo in Württemberg and then Breslau, and in 1938 became formal head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Given command of Einsatzgruppe A in February 1941, he followed Army Group North into the Baltic states in June. He had Klimaitis start a pogrom in Kaunas and Arājs raise a unit in Riga, staging the killings as the “self-cleansing” of the local population. By the winter of 1941 he reported that Einsatzgruppe A had murdered some 249,420 Jews, and at the end of November he became commander of the Security Police and SD for Ostland. He was fatally wounded by Soviet partisans near Krasnogvardeysk, Russia, in March 1942.
Career timeline
1927Doctorate in law, Tübingen
1932Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1938Head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, Vienna
1941Commander of Einsatzgruppe A; Security Police commander for Ostland
At Posen in October 1943, he told SS officers that standing firm before 100, 500, or 1,000 corpses and staying 'decent' was 'a glorious chapter that has not and will not be spoken of.'
Heinrich Himmler was a central Nazi leader who expanded the SS and police into a bureaucratic apparatus for racial rule and mass murder. He directed the concentration-camp system, extermination policies, and killing formations in occupied Europe, making him one of the principal perpetrators of the Holocaust and the murder of millions of other victims. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he approved and directed the German reprisal that treated the city and its population as targets for destruction, massacre, and deportation. After attempting unauthorized negotiations with the Western Allies as Germany’s defeat became unavoidable, he was dismissed by Hitler, captured by British forces, and died by suicide in custody.
Career timeline
1923Joined the Nazi Party and took part in the Beer Hall Putsch.
1925Joined the Schutzstaffel, or SS.
1929–1945Led the SS as Reichsführer-SS.
1936–1945Served as Chief of German Police, controlling the police and apparatus of political repression.
1943–1945Served concurrently as Reich Minister of the Interior.
1944Directed the destruction of Warsaw and the massacre and deportation of civilians during the uprising.
1945Was dismissed over unauthorized peace contacts, then captured and died by suicide in custody.
“Li De”, the only Westerner on the Long March and the Comintern military adviser blamed at Zunyi
Sent to China as a Comintern agent under the name Li De, he was nearly the only foreigner on the Long March, and the Zunyi Conference of 1935 removed him and Bo Gu from command. East Germany revealed only in 1964 that Li De was Otto Braun.
A German Communist from Munich who escaped prison in 1928 and studied at the Frunze Military Academy in the Soviet Union. Sent to Shanghai as Comintern military adviser in 1932, he entered the Jiangxi Soviet in 1933 and with Bo Gu directed a positional defence that lost the fifth encirclement campaign. On the Long March the Zunyi Conference of 1935 condemned his and Bo Gu’s military leadership and elevated Mao. He returned to Moscow in 1939 and after the war lived in East Germany as a translator and lecturer, publishing his memoir A Comintern Agent in China in 1973.
A senior Nazi SS coordinator who became a late-war negotiating envoy
On 8 March 1945, Wolff met Allen Dulles in Switzerland to discuss terms for the surrender of German forces in northern Italy.
Karl Wolff was a senior Nazi SS officer who served as Heinrich Himmler’s chief of staff and stood close to the regime’s central decisions and crimes. As the highest SS and police leader in occupied Italy, he oversaw a system marked by the deportation of Jews, forced labor, and repression of the resistance, responsibilities not erased by his later negotiations. In 1945 he conducted the secret Operation Sunrise talks with OSS chief Allen Dulles in Switzerland, helping secure the early surrender of German forces in northern Italy, though his influence and motives were limited. After the war he was convicted for facilitating mass murder.
Career timeline
1917–1920Officer candidate in the Imperial German Army’s 115th Infantry Regiment, serving on the Western Front
1931Joined the Nazi Party and the SS
1935–1943Chief of the Reichsführer-SS Personal Staff
1943–1944Highest SS and Police Leader in Italy
1944–1945Plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in Italy
1945German negotiating representative in Operation Sunrise, involved in the surrender in northern Italy
1964–1969Convicted by a Munich court for facilitating the murder of 300,000 Jews and sentenced to 15 years, released in 1969
Exiled SPD functionary who succeeded Schumacher as SPD leader and leader of the West German opposition
Born in Magdeburg, the son of a bricklayer, he joined the SPD in 1918 and led the Socialist Workers’ Youth. In May 1933 he went into exile in Prague with the party executive, helped form the exiled SPD (Sopade), and by way of Paris and Lisbon spent the war in London. Returning in February 1946, he worked in Kurt Schumacher’s office in Hanover and that year became his deputy, running the party organisation and its international contacts. After Schumacher’s death in 1952 he became party chairman, parliamentary leader and leader of the opposition. He lost to Adenauer as candidate for chancellor in 1953 and 1957, and backed the 1959 Godesberg Programme, with which the SPD broke with Marxism. He died in Bonn in 1963.
Career timeline
1918Joined the SPD
1928Chairman of the Socialist Workers’ Youth
1933Exile in Prague; member of the exiled SPD executive
1946SPD deputy chairman
1952–1963SPD chairman and leader of the opposition
The SS general who commanded the repression of the Warsaw Uprising
In a report during the Warsaw Uprising, Reinefarth wrote: “We have more prisoners than ammunition to kill them.”
Heinz Reinefarth was a lawyer who joined the Nazi Party and the SS before becoming a commander in Germany's occupation war. During the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he led a battle group combining combat, police, and security units, playing a central role in the command structure of the 5 August assault on Wola and the mass killing of civilians. Despite Polish demands for his extradition, he escaped prosecution and conviction after the war and served as a mayor and state legislator in West Germany. His career links command responsibility for war crimes with postwar impunity in a single life.
Career timeline
1927Completed his law training in Jena and began working in the legal profession.
1932Joined the Nazi Party and the SS.
1942Served as SS general inspector of civil administration in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.
1944Became Higher SS and Police Leader in Wartheland.
1944.08Commanded Kampfgruppe Reinefarth in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.
1945Commanded the fortress of Küstrin and was captured by U.S. forces.
1951–1964Served as mayor of Westerland.
1962–1967Served in the Schleswig-Holstein Landtag.
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.
Career timeline
1931–1942Chief of the SS Security Service (SD)
1936–1942Chief of the Security Police, titled Chief of the Security Police Main Office, 1936–1939
1939–1942Chief of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA)
1941–1942Acting Reich Protector of Bohemia and Moravia
