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Throwing Slaves Overboard to Drown and Other Dark Moments From History

Khalid Elhassan July 26, 2020 35 min

Plateau - Slave ship — Slave ship hold. History Channel

12. Galicia’s Horrific Governor

Otto von Wachter, left, with Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler. Daily Mail

Relocating Jews to Krakow’s Ghetto was the first step on the road to extermination. From there, most Jews were transported to the death camps, from which few emerged alive. However, that was not the worst for von Wachter, who went on to write even more dark chapters in the Nazis’ book of horrors.

The baron’s activities in Krakow were just a prelude to the atrocities he would visit upon hundreds of thousands, when he was made governor of Galicia, in today’s Ukraine. 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. The baron did not disappoint his idol.

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.