On September 28, 1946, about a year and a half after the end of World War II, the Polish authorities sent a letter to the American military governor in Germany, "requesting the extradition of a person wanted to be prosecuted for a war crime."
The crimes were committed in the years 1945-1942 in the territory of the city of Lviv (today Lviv, located in western Ukraine).
"The wanted man, Otto Wechter, is charged with mass murder - shooting and executions," the extradition request said briefly.
"Under his command as governor of the province of Galicia, more than 100 Polish citizens lost their lives."
Wechter was a senior SS officer, a senior member of the Nazi party in Austria and responsible for the expulsion of Jews from the Austrian government after the Anschluss, annexation of Austria to the Nazi regime on March 12, 1938. After the Polish occupation of Poland in 1939 And established the ghetto in the capital of the Lviv province, as well as the founder of the Ukrainian Division of the SS. He spent the last months of World War II in charge of the Nazi intelligence system RSHA (Reich Security Office) in the occupied parts of Italy.
At the end of the war, Wechter's traces disappeared, until in the summer of 1949 - three years after the Polish extradition request - news of his death was published in Rome after an illness.
A new book called "The Rat Line" written by renowned British Jewish jurist Philip Sands (61) about the Nazi criminal states that Americans learned after the extradition request that Schwechter hid in Rome under a false identity - but they made no effort to prosecute him for his crimes, apparently out of hope That they can mobilize for their needs as part of the Cold War against the USSR.
According to the book, Wechter hoped to emigrate to South America as part of the "Rat Lines" - smuggling channels that allowed senior Nazis to flee Europe, especially to South America, with the active help of the Red Cross and the Vatican, as well as the American intelligence services.
His death, apparently caused by an infectious disease, interrupted the senior Nazi's plans.
"Accused of mass murder."
Otto Wechter, Photo: From Wikipedia
• • •
Historian-jurist Philip Sands has a deep personal connection to the city of Lviv (in German - Lemberg), which he described in his bestseller "West East Street". His mother Ruth and her parents Leon and Rita Buchholz were almost the only members of the family who survived the Holocaust. He grew up in the silence typical of the families of Holocaust survivors, and knew nothing about the fate of his relatives who had been murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators. Eleven years ago, following a lecture he was invited to give at Levib's University, he began diving into his family history.
As part of his work on West West Street, Sands met the German journalist Nicholas Frank, the son of Hans Frank, the Nazi governor of the "Generalgovernment" (the government in the occupied territories of Poland), in whose territory most of the Holocaust victims were murdered. Nicholas, who himself wrote books in which he dealt sharply with his parents' Nazi past, initiated a meeting between Sands and Wechter's son, Horst, thus paving the way for the British jurist to embark on a sweeping historical journey into the Wechter family's story. This was made possible for him, among other things, with the help of a large treasure trove of personal documents held by Horst (82), the fourth of the six children of Otto and Charlotte Wechter. Horst now lives in a crumbling castle in Austria.
The extensive exchange of letters between the parents includes diaries, recordings and other personal documents, which allowed Sands to reconstruct their lives before and during World War II, and also to fascinatingly solve the mystery of Otto's death in Rome, July 14, 1949. The book also describes the difficult emotional conflict. Between Sands, who reveals the extent of Wechter's crimes, and Horst, who continues to cling to the belief that his father was a "good Nazi," who resisted the heinous crimes committed around him and did his best to reduce the number of casualties.
"Horst is not a bad person, he is not anti-Semitic and he does not deny the Holocaust," Sands says in a special interview with Shishvat, "but he tries to build a story of charity for himself by creating a fair image of his father. It sometimes frustrated and angered me, but I tried to control them. "After the book was published, he sent messages to all his relatives and friends, with a copy to me, in which he claimed that the book was terrible, but despite that, he continued to keep in touch with me."
• • •
One of the things that piqued Sands' curiosity about Otto Wechter's life story was that unlike the other Nazi criminals, and despite his senior status, his name is not widely known.
"Wechter was a very senior Nazi who reached the second most important rank in the SS. He was personally appointed by Hitler as governor of the province of Galicia and sat at the top of the Nazi hierarchy, so it's a mystery to me how his name was cleared. I think it was made possible by his wife "
What is bothering Horst in the book? The non-book is very factual and is based on many documents that were in his possession.
"He claims I ignored the most important documents, but there are none. I was very careful to refer to each document and look for things that could strengthen his position in relation to his father, but there simply were not. It is a product of his imagination - pure denial and extreme Pike News. Or for inaccurate use of the material, just claimed that I did not refer to certain documents, which are not.
"After the book came out I received an email from a wonderful Holocaust Museum archivist in Washington. Last September he received an offer from Horst to display on the museum's website all the documents he had given me, and I complied with the request. I do not know why Horst did so, but today anyone can read the documents.
"The archivist told me he had never come across such material, which almost fully documents the couple's private life from the moment they met in 1929 until Otto's death in 1949. Beyond that, we have for the first time information about the Nazis' escape routes, a topic Which was fascinating to me. How and where did Otto hide? How did he get to Rome? Who took care of him there?
"All these things were written in letters in code language that we had to decipher, but now we know exactly what happened. There were people who helped and took care of Wechter and the rest of the Nazi community. It was a network that included people from the Vatican and Italian fascists, but also Americans. 12 hours after Otto arrived in Rome "The Americans were told he had arrived. They knew he was there, they knew the name he was using - and did nothing to stop him."
Because of the beginning of the Cold War, in which each side tried to recruit Nazis against the other?
"Absolutely. Austria served as an important front in preparing for the Cold War, because from 1955 it was committed to neutrality. An inter-bloc struggle was created to acquire the hearts and souls of the Austrians, so the British and Americans did not pursue Austrian Nazis because they wanted to side with the Austrians. Against the communist bloc. "
"Wechter's son claimed the book was terrible, but continued to keep in touch with me."
Philip Sands, Photo: GettyImages
According to Sands, the most frustrating moments for him on this historic journey have to do with Horst Wechter's attitude to the documentary.
"It was painful and frustrating. I showed him a document in which his father writes: 'Tomorrow I have to shoot 50 Poles' - and he tells me:' The document does not say 'I want to shoot them', but 'I must shoot them'.
"Beyond that, I think of Wechter expelling 16,000 Jews from every public office in Vienna after April 1938. Every Jew who lost his job then, from a senior army officer to a postman - that was Wechter's responsibility. By the way, they also had two well-known law professors who taught Wechter, and he removed them from their jobs and paved the way for their deaths.
"I must admit that everything to do with writing about Vienna is emotionally difficult for me. I will always return to Vienna, which is for me the meeting place for two older women, my two great grandmothers, who were deported from there east to their waists with only a small suitcase. This image I created in my head, of two women "Adults, innocent and helpless, who receive such treatment, just boil my blood."
Cover of Sands' book, The Rat Line,
• • •
Otto Gustav Wechter was born in Vienna on July 8, 1901. His father Josef, a monarchist and anti-Semitic nationalist, was a senior officer in the Austro-Hungarian army and was briefly appointed Minister of Defense in the Austrian Republic established after the First World War.
When Otto was 7, his family moved to the city of Trieste, when it was still part of the Austrian Empire.
At the outbreak of World War I, the father was stationed in Galicia and commanded the forces around Lemberg.
Otto, his mother and two sisters moved to the town of Budweise in Bohemia, now in the Czech Republic.
The defeat in World War I caused a shock and economic collapse in the family, and in the chaos created in Austria after the war, Otto finished high school and began studying law.
He was active in nationalist circles, believing in the idea of German-speaking United Nations, and in March 1921 participated in a mass anti-Semitic demonstration in Vienna "The Anti-Semitic Committee" - a political group formed after World War I - demanding the abolition of citizenship and property rights of Jews. The beginning of the war.
At the age of 22, Wechter joined the Austrian branch of the German National Socialist Workers' Party (Nazi Party), just two years after Adolf Hitler took over the party leadership in Munich.
In December 1925 he was certified as a lawyer, and four years later he met his future wife, Charlotte Blackman, a member of a wealthy Viennese family with copper factories.
A tumultuous love story developed between the two, and they married in the fall of 1932. Their life together knew ups and downs;
Wechter had love affairs with other women, and Charlotte had two abortions: the first to punish him for his infidelities, and the second after the war, so she could devote her time to caring for her husband who was hiding from the Allies, though he continued his infidelities.
The faithful wife was an ideological partner in her husband's Nazi way, and in March 1931 even gave him a fancy copy of "Mein Kampf."
In the dedication she wrote: "In struggle and love, in spite of the storm, towards the goal."
Two months later she joined the ranks of the Nazi party.
Otto, for his part, was already at the top of the party in Austria, which included, among others, Arthur Zeiss-Inquart (later the Nazi governor of Austria and the Netherlands, who was executed in Nuremberg for war crimes and crimes against humanity), and Ernest Kaltenbrunner (one of the SS leaders and leaders). Which was also hanged by the Allies following the Nuremberg trials).
Corresponded with code words.
Wechter and his wife Charlotte, after the war,
As a lawyer, Wechter provided legal advice to the Austrian Nazi Party and its members.
In April 1932 he joined the ranks of the SS.
In January 1933 the Nazis came to power in Germany, and two months later Wechter traveled to Potsdam and met Adolf Hitler in person.
A few days later his eldest son, Otto Jr., was born.
In May, the Nazi party in Austria suffered a blow, after Chancellor Engelbert Dolphos banned its activities in the country.
Wechter, like many Austrian Nazis, went underground.
He was arrested for prohibited political activity, released and continued to legally defend members of the Nazi party.
During this time he traveled frequently to Germany, met again and again with Hitler and planned with his comrades a coup attempt in Austria.
On July 25, 1934, while Charlotte was recovering in hospital from the birth of their first daughter, Lislotte, was involved in the activities of a gang of conspirators who had assassinated Chancellor Dolphos in his office.
Dolphus was murdered, but the putsch attempt failed, and some of the accomplices were captured and arrested.
Wechter managed to escape to Germany.
In 1936, Charlotte and their two children joined a car in Berlin.
He then held a senior position in the Reich's Chief Security Office, which was opened by Reinhard Heydrich in Himmler's service.
Among his office colleagues was Adolf Eichmann.
• • •
On March 12, 1938, the German army invaded Austria and annexed it to the Reich.
"The big dream, which we have actually already given up, came true suddenly," Charlotte wrote in her diary.
She spontaneously joined friends who decided to travel from Berlin to Vienna for the historic event.
In the new Austrian Chancellor's office, she met with Vienna's district commander Odilo Globocnik (who later set up the Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps), and urged him to appoint her husband secretary of state in the Nazi administration in Austria.
This task was also successful in her hand.
A new chapter in the life of the Wechter couple opens, when they move to a villa stolen from the Jewish Mendel family in the prestigious 19th district of Vienna.
The landlady, Bettina Mendel, who was a talented horse rider, refused to represent Austria at the 1936 Olympic Games in Germany, and following the Anschluss managed to escape to Australia.
While Charlotte enjoyed her new social status, Otto deepened his involvement in the activities of the Nazi regime and assumed responsibility for purging the Austrian public sector from the Jews who worked there.
According to Sands, Wechter was responsible for removing 16,237 officials and some 6,000 senior officials from work;
He did not refrain from firing even "partial Jews" or people who were married to Jews.
"Otto was unhappy with his job, but performed it with great zeal," Charlotte wrote in her diary.
Sands notes that the couple's anti-Semitism comes from two different sources.
"In Otto's it comes from his father's nationalism and the 'Stabbing in the back' association, according to which the Austrians and Germans did not lose in World War I, but the villains in the home front - especially the treacherous Jews - stabbed the army and stopped the fighting. From the church. "
A few weeks after the outbreak of World War II and the German invasion of Poland, Wechter, at the behest of his friend Zeiss-Inquart, was appointed head of the Krakow district administration.
A month later, he had been promoted to the position of governor of Krakow, and on his first day, he ordered the Jews of the city to carry an ID tape on their arm.
In early 1941 he denied the rights of the Jews in the district, and on March 3 ordered the establishment of the Krakow ghetto and the transfer of all Jews to it, under threat of the death penalty for anyone who did not comply with the order.
The order requiring the Jews of Krakow to carry an identification tape,
On October 20, 1941, four months after the German invasion of the USSR, a cabinet meeting of the Governor-General was held at the Wawel Fortress in Krakow.
About a month later, a meeting of all the governors of the provinces of the Generalgovernment was held with the heads of the SS in the provinces of Galicia and Lublin - including Globocnik, who was already busy setting up the Belzec extermination camp.
Hans Frank updated those present on a new policy that would "somehow" result in the "successful extermination" of the 3.5 million Jews living in the territories under his auspices.
"We must exterminate the Jews wherever we meet them and wherever possible," Frank said a few weeks before the Vanza conference, at which it was decided to implement the final solution.
Three days after the conference, Wechter promoted the governor of Galicia on Hitler's personal instruction, which he saw as "the best man for the job," in the face of the new missions.
He returned to the place where his father had served in the previous World War, but had a higher military rank than him and had very extensive powers.
Charlotte did not join Lemberg later.
• • •
By March 1942, Wechter had already signed an order requiring forced labor for Jews.
A year later, almost all the Jews in the district - about half a million people - were no longer alive.
On August 6, 1942, Belemberg held a meeting of senior Nazi officials on the issue of "solving the Jewish problem in Galicia," and four days later a large aktion began, in which tens of thousands of Lemberg Jews were sent to die in the Belzec camp.
In a letter to Charlotte dated August 16, Wechter says he is very busy, in part because of the "Great Jewish Aktion."
This is one of his few written references to his direct involvement in crimes.
He may have deliberately ignored these issues, and it may be that Charlotte took care to conceal any incriminating evidence against him.
In any case, Wechter says that the head of the SS Himmler visited Blemberg and praised him for his performance.
While the Jews in the area under his control were exterminated, Wechter complained to his wife about problems caring for the garden of their home in Lemberg.
"There are no workers, the Jews are being moved to other places in increasing numbers, and it is difficult to get flour to mark the tennis court," he wrote.
Towards the end of that year a report was published in the New York Times according to which Polish exiles had prepared a list of the top ten Nazis who had committed crimes on Polish soil.
Wechter's name was the seventh.
Wechter (left) with Heinrich Himmler during the war.
The head of the SS praised him for his performance,
In view of the growing military difficulties on the Eastern Front against the Red Army, in 1943 Wechter founded the "Galicia Volunteer Division" of
The SS, the first in whose ranks not Germans from the Reich were recruited but Ukrainians and local Germans (Volksdeutsche).
"Why should only German blood be shed?" He asked Charlotte.
But the situation at the front, and also in the occupied territories, worsened.
In February 1944, Blemberg, Wachter's closest aide, Dr. Otto Bauer, was assassinated by an unknown man in a German military uniform.
Charlotte decided to leave Lemberg to Austria with her six children, taking from the luxurious villa the most beautiful and expensive furniture and items.
She later claimed she did so on the advice of her local servant, who said "the Communists would destroy everything anyway."
Wechter spent two and a half years in Galicia;
"His happiness was immense," Charlotte wrote in her memoirs.
"He was finally able to put his ideas into good control of people."
In late July 1944, in the face of Allied progress, Himmler decided to send Wechter to northern Italy, where the Germans seized power.
Charlotte remained to live in Salzburg.
In the last months of the war his traces disappeared, but not for his wife.
After a brief period of uncertainty, she learned through contacts that he was hiding in the Alps in southwestern Austria, at altitudes not reached by Allied troops.
She met with him and maintained continuous contact with him throughout the last four years of his life, which he spent in hiding.
For a while he even stayed with her and his children in Salzburg, until the neighbors began to whisper and there was a fear of gossip.
Wechter decided to flee to Rome and try to reach South America, like thousands of his colleagues.
Although the correspondence between him and Charlotte is full of code words, intended to prevent Allied intelligence services from following in his footsteps, Sands in ant work has managed to crack almost all of them.
The findings clearly showed that the Americans knew about his stay in Rome until his death.
The forged certificate with which Wechter managed to cross the border into Italy after the war,
• • •
Horst's only daughter, Frederica Magdalena Wechter-Stanfel (44), an artist who herself became a Muslim, is the only one to admit that her grandfather was a war criminal.
"Philip's book is a release from a heavy burden for me," she says in a conversation with me.
"The book led me to finally find out what happened. Until five or six years ago I knew almost nothing about it. I only knew that my grandfather was a Nazi. My mother's family came from a completely different background. She came from Sweden and was a communist, which created tension in the family. But I did not know why.
"My father always said that his father was a 'wonderful Nazi.'
"Mom always said there was no such thing, that a Nazi could not be good. For her, too, this family history was a terrible burden. I always knew there was no such thing as a good Nazi. It's nonsense."
Is your father antisemitic?
"I think not. My mother absolutely did not. Anyway, for years I did not know that my grandmother was such a Nazi. My mother told me about it, and in this book it is expressed very strongly."
"There is no such thing as good Nazis."
Frederica Magdalena Wechter-Stanfel with her husband in Jerusalem, Photo: From the private album
Have you ever considered exploring family history for yourself, or was it too difficult?
"My father handed me the documents and told me to read them, but this whole story made me sick. When I received the documents, it paralyzed me. I was in psychiatric treatment. Many in my family became ill, even those who married the family. The silence regarding the cause. .
Do you think the silence regarding that history is heavier in Austria than in other countries?
"Yes. Very many silenced everything, as if nothing had happened. In Austria the silence was very extreme."
How did your journey to Islam begin?
"In 2012 I found my personal path to Islam and my faith was formed. Theoretically I could have become a Buddhist and I feel a connection to Jesus, but not to the story of the crucifixion. In Islam all believers are believed, even the Jewish prophets. It fascinated me a lot."
How do you feel as a Muslim in Austria?
"In the past, Jews were spoken of as Muslims are today, and I feel similarities. Attempts to ban the word, opposition to Muslim women's wear, reactions to our culture. Sometimes spitting at me in the street. But I feel politicians make sure past winds do not strike again."
How did your father react to your transition to Islam?
"He dispossessed me of his inheritance, though the first reason was that I did not share his opinion of his father. He wanted me to say accept with a committee that his father was a good man and not a mass murderer. Then came Islamization. My husband, by the way, converted to Islam a few years before me.
"We visited Israel together before the Corona began, we were in Jerusalem and the holy places. It was a wonderful spiritual experience, organized by the teachers' school where my husband teaches. We visited the ancient cities, the Bible sites and all the places and things we have in common.
It was very special. "
shishabat@israelhayom.co.il