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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

11. Murdering Hundreds of Thousands

Himmler inspecting SS Division Galicia in 1944. COAT

As Galicia’s governor, von Wachter 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 half a million in his province were sent to their deaths, and thousands more were murdered in reprisals for partisan activities.

The horrors in Galicia only ended when the province was lost to the advancing Red Army in July, 1944. As a major war criminal, indicted for atrocities by the Polish government in exile as early as 1942, von Wachter went on the lam as soon as the war ended. He evaded capture, 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.

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.