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
Father of the Katyusha rocket, the engineer who perfected the RS‑82 and RS‑132 and coined the word 'cosmonautics'
During the 1921 Kronstadt rebellion, mutineers arrested Langemak and sentenced him to death. He was held from 2 March to 18 April and freed only after the Red Army crushed the uprising — twenty years before he would build the rockets that became the Katyusha.
Of German descent, Langemak began developing smokeless-powder rockets at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL) and, as chief engineer of the Rocket Research Institute (RNII, 1934–1938), brought the RS-82 and RS-132 solid-fuel rockets to operational readiness. These became the core munition of the BM-13 Katyusha multiple rocket launcher: one of the most iconic Soviet weapons of World War II. He introduced the term 'cosmonautics' into the Russian language and corresponded with Tsiolkovsky about the peaceful space applications of rocketry. Arrested on false charges during the Great Purge in 1937, he was shot on 11 January 1938, rehabilitated in 1955, and posthumously made a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1991.
Career timeline
1916–1918Entered Petrograd University for Japanese philology; graduated from Naval Ensign School, served in the fleet
1919–1922Mobilized into the Red Army; battery commander and assistant division chief, Kronstadt Fortress
1923–1928Graduated from the Red Army Military-Technical Academy
1928–1933Led development of smokeless-powder rockets RS-82 and RS-132 at the Gas Dynamics Laboratory (GDL)
1934–1937Deputy director and chief engineer of RNII (NII-3); Military Engineer 1st Rank
1937–1938Arrested by NKVD; sentenced to death by Military Collegium, shot same day, 11 January 1938
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
Communist who ran an anti-fascist sabotage network before the war and headed the Stasi from 1953 to 1957
Born in Münden in the Province of Hanover, he took part in the sailors’ revolt of 1918, joined the KPD in 1919 and led party military wings; he sat in the Reichstag in 1932–1933. In exile he organised the “Wollweber League” in 1936–1940, which carried out 21 known acts of sabotage against ships of fascist nations, and supplied arms to the Spanish Republicans. Back in Germany in 1946 he ran shipping administration. In July 1953, when Zaisser was removed and the Ministry for State Security was downgraded to a State Secretariat, he became its head, and in November 1955 Minister of State Security again. He clashed with Ulbricht and Honecker and sided with Schirdewan, resigned in 1957, and in 1958 was removed from the Central Committee for “factional activity”. He died in East Berlin in 1967.
Career timeline
1918Took part in the sailors’ revolt
1932–1933KPD Reichstag deputy
1936–1940Organised the Wollweber League sabotage network
Frankfurt School philosopher and the pre-eminent theorist of the 1960s New Left
'In its advanced positions, it is the Great Refusal — the protest against that which is' — One-Dimensional Man (1964)
Herbert Marcuse was a central philosopher of the Frankfurt School who fused Marxism with Freudian psychoanalysis to develop a critical theory of modern capitalist society. In Eros and Civilization (1955) he analyzed the repressive structures of capitalist society and explored the utopian potential of liberated Eros, while in One-Dimensional Man (1964) he diagnosed advanced industrial society as a 'one-dimensional' order where technological abundance erodes critical consciousness, introducing the concept of repressive desublimation. A German-Jewish émigré who fled Nazism for the United States, he served in the OSS during the war and later taught at Brandeis and UC San Diego, becoming the intellectual pillar of the 1960s student movements and the New Left. His radical thought, crystallized in the 'Great Refusal,' has had a lasting impact on critical theory and emancipatory politics.
Career timeline
1932Joined Institute for Social Research (Frankfurt School) in exile, Geneva
1934–1942Researcher, Institute for Social Research, Columbia University, New York
1942–1951Analyst, OSS and State Department; head of Central European Section
1954–1965Professor of political theory, Brandeis University
Communist who chaired the German Economic Commission, the forerunner of the GDR government, and led East German economic policy
Born in Feuerbach near Stuttgart, he worked as a metal presser at Bosch and passed through the Spartacists and the USPD into the KPD in 1919, becoming the party’s leading agricultural policy maker in the 1920s. Imprisoned after the Nazis came to power, he emigrated to the Soviet Union and in the Spanish Civil War commanded the XI International Brigade. Interned in France and handed to the Gestapo by Vichy in 1942, he was liberated at Mauthausen. In March 1948 he became chairman of the German Economic Commission (DWK), which carried out the eastern currency reform and the first plans. In the GDR he was a Politburo member, deputy prime minister and chairman of the State Planning Commission; at the Politburo session of 8 July 1953 he recommended replacing Ulbricht, yet kept his posts. Minister of Machine Construction and then of Foreign Trade, he died of a heart attack in 1961.
Career timeline
1919Joined the KPD
1923Head of the KPD agricultural division
1937–1938Commander of the XI International Brigade
1943–1945Mauthausen concentration camp
1948–1949Chairman of the German Economic Commission
1950–1961SED Politburo member; deputy prime minister
1955–1961Minister of Foreign and Inter-German Trade
East German heavy-industry minister who faced the striking workers outside the House of Ministries on 16 June 1953
The son of a coppersmith from Lauterbach in Hesse, he was working underground at seventeen, served in the First World War and in 1918 sat on a soldiers’ council. He joined the USPD in 1920 and the KPD in 1922, becoming the party’s political secretary in Saxony and a Reichstag deputy. Arrested in 1933, he survived the Nazi years in prisons and in concentration camps including Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg. After the war he was Saxony’s minister for economics and planning, then deputy chairman of the German Economic Commission, and in the GDR minister of industry and of heavy industry. On 16 June 1953 he walked into the crowd outside the House of Ministries and tried to address it from a desk, but was whistled down. In 1958 Ulbricht pushed him out of his offices for a “deviant attitude”, and he turned to writing. He died in East Berlin in 1975.
Career timeline
1922Joined the KPD
1932–1933Reichstag deputy
1933–1945Imprisoned; held in Sachsenhausen and Flossenbürg
1948–1949Deputy chairman of the German Economic Commission
1949–1955Minister of Industry, then of Heavy Industry
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
East German jurist who succeeded Fechner as justice minister after the 1953 uprising and led its harsh political trials
Born into a liberal middle-class family in Bernburg, Anhalt, she was among the first women to study law in Germany. A Social Democrat, she married the physician Georg Benjamin, brother of Walter Benjamin, in 1926 and joined the KPD in 1927. Barred from practising law under the Nazis, she lost her husband in Mauthausen in 1942. After the war she worked in the justice administration of the Soviet zone, and as vice-president of the GDR Supreme Court presided over show trials of political undesirables and Jehovah’s Witnesses. On 15 July 1953 she succeeded Max Fechner, who had opposed prosecuting the striking workers, as minister of justice, and her heavy sentences against those arrested in June earned her the names “Red Hilde” and “the Red Freisler”. Ulbricht forced her to resign in 1967. She died in East Berlin in 1989.
Editor of Neues Deutschland who helped draft the 1953 New Course, moved against Ulbricht and was purged as a “faction”
Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Gleiwitz, he became a correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt and an agent of Soviet military intelligence (GRU). Exiled in the Soviet Union from 1939, he edited the newspaper of the National Committee for a Free Germany. Back in Berlin in 1945 he ran the Berliner Zeitung and helped found Neues Deutschland, whose editor always followed Moscow’s line. In June 1953 he and Zaisser set themselves against Ulbricht, and he helped formulate the New Course approved by the Central Committee. After the uprising he proposed a collective leadership, but in July he was removed from the Central Committee for “anti-party factionalism” and in January 1954 expelled from the SED. He worked at the Central Archives in Merseburg, died in 1966 and was rehabilitated only in 1989.
Career timeline
1930Recruited as a GRU agent
1943Editor-in-chief of Freies Deutschland
1945Editor-in-chief of the Berliner Zeitung
1950–1953SED Central Committee member and Politburo candidate
1953Removed from the Central Committee for “anti-party factionalism”
Economist and the SED’s chief ideologue until 1958, when he was expelled from the Politburo in the Schirdewan affair
Born in Leipzig, he joined the USPD in 1919 and the KPD in 1920 and worked as an editor on party papers. From 1926 he studied in Moscow at the International Lenin School and the Institute of Red Professors. In exile from 1933 he was Ulbricht’s secretary in Paris; in Moscow he lost his teaching posts in 1936 for alleged deviations, and in the war became chief editor of Moscow Radio’s German service. Returning with the Ackermann Group in 1945, he ran the party’s propaganda and education work, joined the Politburo in 1950 and was Central Committee secretary for propaganda from 1950 to 1955, effectively the party’s chief ideologue. In June 1953 he set up the command in Halle that put down the uprising. After 1956 he opposed the complete collectivisation of agriculture, and in 1958 he was expelled from the Politburo. He then directed the Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences.
Career timeline
1920Joined the KPD
1926–1932International Lenin School and Institute of Red Professors, Moscow
1941–1944Chief editor of Moscow Radio’s German service
1950–1958SED Politburo member
1950–1955Central Committee secretary for propaganda
1958–1969Director of the Institute of Economics, Academy of Sciences
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
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.
Career timeline
1928Doctorate in political science, Munich
1932Joined the Nazi Party
1939Worked on dismembering Czechoslovakia
1941Arranged the proclamation of the Independent State of Croatia in Zagreb
1944Reich plenipotentiary in Hungary
1949–1951Sentenced to 20 years at the Ministries Trial; released 1951
German communist who drafted the KPD’s 1945 appeal and argued for a “special German road to socialism”
The son of a hosier from Thalheim in Saxony, he joined the KPD in 1926 and attended the International Lenin School in Moscow. After underground work and exile under the Nazis he directed a political school of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, and in Moscow ran the “Free Germany” radio station. In 1945 he led the KPD group sent to Saxony and drafted the party’s appeal of 11 June 1945. In 1946 he argued that socialism could be built in Germany without a preceding dictatorship of the proletariat, a “special German road to socialism” he had to recant after Tito’s break with Stalin in 1948. He served as deputy foreign minister and first head of the GDR’s foreign intelligence service, and in 1953 was stripped of all posts for supporting Zaisser. Gravely ill with cancer, he took his own life in 1973.
Career timeline
1926Joined the KPD
1935KPD Central Committee member and Politburo candidate
1945Head of the KPD group in Saxony; drafted the 11 June appeal
Exiled writer who recorded children’s experiences of the Spanish war
She drew on children she met at an International Brigades home, seeking to represent their memories and emotions rather than treating them only as an audience for propaganda.
German Jewish writer for children and young readers. After fleeing Nazi Germany for France, she worked at the Ernst Thälmann children’s home established by the International Brigades in Spain. Children’s experiences informed her novel Vier spanische Jungen. Deported to Auschwitz in 1942, she is believed to have been murdered there; the exact date of her death is unknown.
Career timeline
1925–1929Studied law in Berlin and Heidelberg but left without a degree.
1931Published her first stories in the children's book series Sonne und Regen im Kinderland.
1932Published Müllerstraße, Jungens von heute, about the lives of working-class children in Berlin.
1934Her youth novel Janko, der Junge aus Mexiko, written in Parisian exile, was published in Strasbourg.
1937Tsao und Jing-Ling, Kinderleben in China appeared in a Swiss trade-union newspaper through Lisa Tetzner's advocacy.
1937–1938Travelled in Spain to research a children's book on the civil war on the side of the International Brigades.
1938Completed Vier spanische Jungen at the end of the year; the novel was published only in 1987.
SS officer who ran the deportation of Europe’s Jews to the death camps and in 1944 oversaw that of Hungary’s Jews to Auschwitz
Born to a Calvinist family in Solingen, Germany, he grew up in Austria, where the family moved in 1914, and joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932. In 1938 he was posted to Vienna to organise Jewish emigration from Austria. Head of RSHA Sub-Department IV B4 from December 1939, he attended the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 and prepared its minutes, after which he and his staff were responsible for deporting Jews to the extermination camps. After Germany occupied Hungary in March 1944 he oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jews; by the time the transports stopped in July, 437,000 of its 725,000 Jews had been deported. Captured by US forces after the war, he escaped from a detention camp and reached Argentina in 1950, but in 1960 Israel’s Mossad abducted him; tried in Jerusalem, he was hanged in 1962.
Career timeline
1932Joined the Austrian Nazi Party and the SS
1933–1938Jewish affairs, SS Security Service
1938–1939Central Agency for Jewish Emigration, Vienna
1939–1945Head of RSHA Sub-Department IV B4
1944Oversaw the deportation of Hungary’s Jews
1950–1960In hiding in Argentina
1960–1962Abducted by Mossad, tried in Jerusalem, executed
