22. The Genocidal Baron
Baron Otto Gustav von Wachter (1901 – 1949) was an Austrian aristocrat and fervent Nazi. A member of the SS as well as a practicing lawyer, he represented Austrian Nazis until 1934, when his participation in a failed coup that included the assassination of Austria’s Chancellor forced him to flee to Germany. He returned to Austria in 1938 after it was annexed by Germany, and ran a commission that oversaw the firing or compulsory retirement of all Austrian officials who did not conform to the Nazi regime.
In 1940, von Wachter was made governor of Krakow in the recently conquered Poland, in which capacity he ordered the killing of numerous Poles in retaliation for partisan activities. He also directed the expulsion of tens of thousands of Jews from their homes, and their forcible relocation to the Krakow Ghetto. From there, most of them were eventually transported to the death camps, from which few emerged alive. However, von Wachter’s activities in Krakow were just a prelude to the horrors he would visit upon hundreds of thousands, when he was made governor of Galicia, in today’s Ukraine.
