Kaltenbrunner, Ernst

Kaltenbrunner, Ernst (1903–46),the son of an Austrian lawyer who followed in his father's footsteps in 1921 when he began studying law at Graz. He joined the Austrian Nazi Party in 1930 and the Austrian SS in 1933 and headed this organization, then proscribed in Austria, from 1937. After the Anschluss (Germany's annexation of Austria in March 1938) he was appointed higher SS and police leader (Hoherer SS und Polizeiführer) in Vienna and in January 1943 was selected by Himmler, to whom Kaltenbrunner gave his total loyalty, to head the RSHA, the Reich Main Security Office of the SS, which gave him control of elements of the Nazi apparatus such as the Gestapo and the methods of extermination for the Final Solution. He was, therefore, responsible for atrocities on an enormous scale and his character fitted his deeds. In February 1944 his organization absorbed the Abwehr, the erstwhile head of which, Admiral Canaris, remarked that Kaltenbrunner had cold eyes and ‘murderer's paws’, and his power grew to such an extent that he became a close confidant of Hitler. He was chosen by the Allies to represent the SS in the dock at the Nuremberg trials, and was sentenced to death and hanged. The novelist Evelyn Waugh who was at the trials noted that Kaltenbrunner was the only one among the accused who looked an obvious criminal.

Bibliography

Black, P. , Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich (Princeton, 1984).