Otto Wächter

The Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter (born July 8, 1901 in Vienna, died August 14 or September 10, 1949, in Rome, Italy), was a lawyer, an SS general officer and a National Socialist politician, governor of Cracow and Galicia.

From 1923 he was a member of the SA, from 1930 a member of the Nazi party NSDAP holding high positions in Vienna. From 1933 he was an SS Sturmführer, from 1935 an SS Hauptsturmführer, from 1938 an SS Oberführer, from 1939 an SS Brigadeführer, and in 1944-1945 an SS Gruppenführer and Police Lieutenant General.

Dr. Otto Wächter worked as an attorney in Vienna from 1932 to 1934. He played a leading role in the July Putsch of 1934 in Vienna, which led to the assassination of Chancellor Dollfuss, who had suspended democracy and was governing by decree since March 1933. After the failed Nazi coup of July 25, 1934, Wächter fled to Germany and was deprived of Austrian citizenship. Hitler allegedly thanked him by sending him to Dachau for a while, but Wächter was still an SS officer in October 1934 and got three successive promotions in 1935.

Following the Anschluss, from May 24, 1938 to April 30, 1939 Wächter held the post of state commissaire in the "Liquidation ministry" under the Nazi governor of Austria Seyss-Inquart. The "Wächter-Kommission", the governement body he headed and which was named after him, was responsible for the dismissal and/or compulsory retirement of all Jewish officials in Austria.

From October 1939, he was the governor of the administrative district of Cracow, where in December 1940 he issued a decree organizing the persecution and expulsion of the city's 68,000 Jews. On 3 March 1941 Wächter issued another decree ordering the remaining 15,000 Jews to move into the newly created Ghetto ("Jewish Residence Zone"). According to Holocaust researcher Robin O'Neil, in 1941 Otto Wächter was among the leading advocates in the General Government who were in favor of "total Jewish extermination" by gassing. O'Neil adds that «At a meeting in Cracow [with Governor-General Hans Frank] on October 20, [1941] Wächter commented that "an ultimately radical solution to the 'Jewish Question' is unavoidable".».

In 1942-1944 Wächter was the governor of the Galicia district of the General Government. Over half million Jews were living in the district's area when the Germans invaded Ukraine. The mass murder of Jews began under the military occupation, which lasted until 1 August 1941, when the civil admnistration took over. From that date on 32 ghettos were established in the Galicia district. On August 17, 1942 the planning for the fate of the Jews in the Lviv region of Galicia was being discussed at a conference chaired by Himmler at his own residence, which was attended by Otto Wächter and three other SS officers, namely his fellow Austrian Odilo Globocnik (the chief of Operation Reinhard), Fritz Katzmann, and Losacker. In his book The Murderers Among Us Simon Wiesenthal wrote that he saw the Galicia governor, SS Brigadeführer Dr. Otto Gustav Wächter in person in the Lviv Ghetto (established in August-September 1942), when four thousand elderly Jews were rounded up, including his mother, to be sent to death camps. By the end of 1943 virtually the whole Jewish population had been killed or sent to the Belzec death camp.

In September 1943, Wächter was sent to Northern Italy as "Chief of the military administration to the plenipotentiary General of the German Wehrmacht in Italy", coincidentally with the transfer of the Operation Reinhardt personnel (including chief exterminator Odilo Globocnik) to Italy, and stayed there until 1945.

After the war, Wächter found refuge in Rome under the protection of Austrian Bishop Alois Hudal, rector of the Teutonic College of Santa Maria dell'Anima. He lived "as a monk in a Roman monastery", under the false name of Otto Reinhardt, until his death in 1949, thus escaping the Nuremberg Trial, where some of his already documented criminal practices where referred to in his absence. He died in a roman hospital "in the arms" of Bishop Hudal.