Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter (8 July 1901 – 14 July 1949) was an Austrian lawyer, Nazi politician and high-ranking member of the SS, a paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party. He participated in the extermination of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust and was instrumental in creating an SS division consisting of Ukrainians.
During the occupation of Poland in World War II, he was the governor of the district of Kraków in the General Government and later of the District of Galicia (now mainly in Ukraine). In 1944 he was appointed head of the German Military Administration in the puppet Italian Social Republic. During the last two months of the war, he was responsible for the non-German forces at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin.
In 1940, Wächter ordered the expulsion of 68,000 Polish Jews from Kraków and in 1941 the Kraków Ghetto was created for the remaining 15,000 Jews by his decrees. After the war, wanted by the Polish People's Republic, Wächter managed to evade Allied authorities for four years. In 1949 he was given refuge by the pro-Nazi Austrian bishop Alois Hudal in the Vatican, where he died the same year, aged 48, reportedly from kidney disease.
Early life Otto Gustav von Wächter was the third child and only son of Martha (née Pfob), daughter of the owner of the Graben Hotel in the centre of Vienna. His father, Joseph Freiherr von Wächter, was born in northern Bohemia and served in the Austro-Hungarian Army. In the last year of the First World War, Joseph was decorated with the Knight's Cross of the Order of Maria Theresa, which earned him the title of Freiherr (Baron). In 1922, after the First Austrian Republic was established, he was twice nominated as Minister of Defence in the Cabinets of Johann Schober (in the first replacing Carl Vaugoin).
Otto von Wächter spent his first years in Vienna before the family moved to Trieste (then part of Austria-Hungary) in 1908. For the duration of the First World War, he lived in southern Bohemia, studying and taking his Matura school leaving examinations in 1919 in České Budějovice, then called by its German name, Budweis, where everyday life was dominated by the national differences between Germans and Czechs.
The family moved to Vienna, where Wächter studied law and joined national and sporting organizations. In April 1923, he joined the Sturmabteilung (SA) and became Austrian Champion in M8+ (eight-man rowing team). He received his doctorate in 1924 and in 1929 began practicing as a lawyer. His clients included indicted members of the Nazi Party, which he joined on 24 October 1930 (party No: 301093). On 11 September 1932, Wächter married Charlotte Bleckmann (born 20 October 1908), daughter of a Styrian steel magnate. The couple eventually had six children, including four daughters and two sons: Otto Richard (1933–1997) and Horst Arthur (born 1939).
Wächter continued to work for the Nazi Party in Vienna as an organizer and defender of accused Nazis in court and played a leading role in the organization of the failed July Putsch of 25 July 1934, which eventually led to the assassination of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. After the failed coup, Wächter fled to Nazi Germany. He entered the Schutzstaffel (SS No: 235368) on 1 January 1932 and completed his German military service in Freising, Bavaria. In 1935, his Austrian citizenship was revoked and German citizenship conferred upon him while he completed his academic training and education as a lawyer in Germany. In 1937, he started working in the relief organization for Austrian National Socialists seeking refuge in Berlin.
The day after the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938, Wächter returned to Vienna, where he took on the post of state commissar in the "Liquidation Ministry" under the Nazi governor of Austria, Arthur Seyss-Inquart, from 24 May 1938 to 30 April 1939. The government body he headed was known as the "Wächter-Kommission" and was responsible for the dismissal and/or compulsory retirement of all Austrian officials who did not conform with the Nazi regime. Because the former Austrian bureaucracy was strictly antisemitic, only a small fraction of the officials were actually dismissed.This was particularly apparent in the public sector, where the elimination of the Jews had already started in the First Austrian Republic. In 1933, among the 160,696 civil servants, just 682 belonged to the mosaic religion: Maderegger p. 240 cit. after Irene Harand, So oder so? Die Wahrheit über den Antisemitismus (One way or another? The truth about Antisemitism), Vienna, 1933.
World War II Governor of Kraków
Following the invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Germans established a state known as the General Government which was ruled over by Hans Frank. Until 1940, his deputy was Arthur Seyss-Inquart, who took Wächter with him to the General Government, where Wächter was appointed governor of the administrative district of Kraków, Poland. Wächter chose the two crowns of Galicia in the coat-of-arms issued for the nobility of his father.Letter to his father, Kraków, 9 December 1939 – Archive Wächter As Governor of Kraków, he was under the direct and local supervision of Frank and had to face the fanatical actions of the local SS and police forces.
The arrest on 6 November 1939 of the entire staff of professors and academics of the Jagiellonian University and other academic institutions and their subsequent deportation to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, an event known as Sonderaktion Krakau, resulted in worldwide condemnation. Wächter publicly criticised the action, which took place without his knowledge, and reportedly tried to free the academics.He disparagingly referred to the action as "smut" in a letter to his wife, dated 17 December 1939 – Archive Wächter Due to the "Special Action Kraków", he was indicted by exiled Poles in New York in 1942.
In his capacity as governor, an execution warrant for 52 Poles in Bochnia was issued 18 December 1939 under Wächter's signature, as reprisal for killing two Viennese police officers.This is the only time Wächter is named in the Nuremberg Trial Proceedings: Vol. 12, 112th day (23 April 1946), p. 106. The circumstances of the execution naming Wächter's intervention is described by General Glaise von Horstenau in Broucek, p. 445 Likewise in December 1940, a decree organizing the expulsion of the city's 68,000 Jews also appeared under his name, as did a further decree ordering the remaining 15,000 Jews to move into the newly created Kraków Ghetto ("Jewish Residence Zone") issued 3 March 1941.
Unlike his wife who was often in the company of the Franks, Wächter tried to keep his distance from them. The family lived in a pseudo-Romanesque villa in Przegorzaly on a steep slope above the Vistula outside Kraków, which belonged to Professor Szyszko-Bohusz, head of the restoration measures of the Royal Wawel.Schenk p. 60: "She interfered constantly in construction and plundered palaces in Warsaw and Krakow museums". The harsh judgement of Professor Szyszko-Bohusz on Baroness Wächter is to understand on (sic) the background of his employment in the Wawel during the whole period of the war. The atmosphere of the confiscated building did not meet with the approval of Wächter's wife, so she built a house which she called "Wartenberg Castle". Frustrated with the severe limitations of his role, Wächter was about to resign from his office in Kraków when he received a new posting in Galicia.Wächter Archive, memories of Charlotte Wächter.
Governor of Galicia Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, the Soviet-occupied eastern part of the former Austrian province of Galicia was attached to the General Government as the District of Galicia. Its capital city, variously known as L'viv (Ukrainian), Lwów (Polish) and Lemberg (German), had been the fourth-largest in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where Poles, Ukrainians and Jews had lived together for centuries. The first German governor was , an intimate friend of Frank, who was later arrested and shot for extensive black market activities on the orders of Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Wächter was chosen by Adolf Hitler "as the best man on the spot",, Wächter Archive sound recording of Charlotte Wächter. and installed as Governor on 22 January 1943.
His first official visit was to the influential and respected Greek Catholic Metropolit Andrij Aleksander Szeptycki (Sheptytsky). With his assistance, Wächter endeavored to promote a greater degree of co-operation among the occupying Germans and the ethnic elements in the District of Galicia. Consequently, he immediately found himself in conflict with SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, Himmler's representative in the General Government and executor of his planned large-scale resettlement programs. At the government meeting in Kraków on 17 February, Wächter publicly opposed plans to "germanize" the city of Lemberg, which would have resulted in the expulsion of its entire population, stating: "A German colonization of the East during the war would bring about the collapse of production."In a five-page letter to Wächter, after emph0asising that he was Wächter's senior in both 0age and rank, Krüger reminded him that his recen0t public pronouncements on this issue were a direct confrontation to the policies of the Reichsführer-SS: "Even though you wear the uniform of an SS Brigade Leader, in performing the tasks provided to you, you have never guided that you are members of the SS."
Wächter's continued opposition to Krüger's policies led to a number of open confrontations. To avoid further altercations, Himmler offered Wächter the chance to relocate to Vienna, which he declined. As Governor of Galicia, he remained a firm believer in the principle of "Germany first". He was frequently obliged to use his influence and connections by first circumventing General Governor Hans Frank and by exploiting the strained relations between Frank and Himmler to pursue his own policies. Wächter selected men with liberal views for the key posts in his administration, notably his department heads Otto Bauer and , whom he consulted before deciding all important issues.Losacker p. 127.Losacker was dismissed from all his functions on 10 October 1943 for defending Poles and put into an SS penal squad on the Italian front; Bauer was shot by a Soviet agent, Nikolai Iwanowitsch Kusnezow, on 9 February 1944 in place of Wächter after W. had been warned by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists underground organisation UPA, calling him "a very decent human" (written in italics in the original): letter 28 September 1943 in Archive Wächter.
In late 1942, Wächter visited the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (eastern Ukraine) to witness firsthand the effect of the implementation of the Nazi Untermensch (subhuman) philosophy by Gauleiter Erich Koch and his policies of repression and subjugation. On his return in December 1942, he sent a secret ten-page letter to Martin Bormann in the Führer Headquarters in Berlin, criticizing the serious mistakes made in the handling of the Ukrainians.
Whilst Governor of Galicia, he established a Waffen-SS Division recruited from the Ukrainian population of Galicia, under German supervision, to fight against the Red Army. The formation of the unit was approved by Himmler after the disastrous German defeat at Stalingrad. Wächter submitted the proposal to Himmler on 1 March 1943, and, on 28 April, the SS Division Galicia was publicly inaugurated.Despite mandatory enrollment requirements, on 30 October 1943 the Supplementary Office of the Waffen-SS produced the following breakdown for the registrations: Volunteered/Registered 80,000; called up for service 19,047; actually reported 13,245.
Involvement in the Holocaust