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40 Fascinating Facts About the Relatives of Nazis After WWII

Khalid Elhassan March 14, 2019 24 min

26. Baron Otto Gustav von Wachter

Otto von Wachter was an Austrian aristocratic and fervent Nazi, who fled to Germany in 1932 after participating in a failed coup, and joined the SS. After Germany’s conquest of Poland, he was made governor of Krakow and Galicia, where he committed war crimes and crimes against humanity that claimed the lives of over 100,000 civilians. He evaded capture after the war, thanks to the help of a pro-Nazi Austrian bishop who hid Wachter in the Vatican until his death in 1949 of kidney failure.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.