21. Von Wachter in Galicia
When Galicia’s governor was arrested and shot for corruption and extensive black market activity, Hitler personally picked Otto von Wachter to fill the vacant slot in 1943. There, the baron capitalized on the Ukrainians’ hatred of the communists to recruit a Waffen-SS division from the local population, the SS Division Galicia. He also continued overseeing the rounding up and transportation of Jews and others to their deaths: during his time as governor, about 500,000 in his province were sent to their deaths, and thousands more were murdered in reprisals for partisan activities.
The horrors in Galicia only came to an end when the entire province was lost to the advancing Red Army in July 1944. As a major war criminal, indicted by the Polish government in exile as early as 1942 for atrocities, it was unsurprising that von Wachter went on the lam as soon as the war ended. He evaded capture after the Third Reich’s collapse, hiding in the Salzburg mountain district in Austria for four years, before crossing the border into Italy. There, he was sheltered by a pro-Nazi Austrian bishop, who hid von Wachter in the Vatican until his death in 1949 of kidney failure.
