Bruno Sattler (17 April 1898 – 15 October 1972) became a member of the Nazi Party during the closing months of 1931. After the Hitler government took power at the start of 1933 he joined the Gestapo, achieving a succession of promotions during the ensuing decade. In 1942 he was posted to Belgrade with the rank of "SS-Sturmbannführer", as Gestapo Police Chief for occupied Serbia. He remained in post until October 1944, when the German occupation of the territory was ended. He turned up with a false name in Berlin during 1947, but was evidently identified. In October 1947 he was abducted by the Soviet security services from what later became known as West Berlin, and taken to the eastern part of the city in the Soviet occupation zone. His family heard nothing more from him and in 1949 he was pronounced dead. He had actually been detained, probably in the occupied zone that became the East Germany in October 1949. Several major atrocities committed during the Nazi era were associated with Sattler, and it became known much later that in 1952 he faced trial "for his Gestapo activities". It was only by chance that a year later his wife learned that he was still alive. By then, he was serving a life sentence after being convicted of war crimes by the Greifswald District Court. According to some sources, the circumstances of Sattler's death in the prison hospital at the jail in Leipzig-Meusdorf in 1972 never became clear. Elsewhere it is stated that he was shot dead in his prison cell.
Life Provenance and early years Bruno Sattler was born at Schmargendorf, a rapidly expanding municipality on the south-western edge of Berlin, into which it has subsequently been subsumed. During the First World War he deferred the final part of his schooling in order to serve with the Imperial Army in France. He therefore passed his "Abitur" (school graduation exam) only in 1919, the year of his twenty-first birthday. Passing the Abitur opened the way to university-level education, and he embarked on a course of study in Applied Economics and Botany. He pursued his studies for three years. He also found time to join the Ehrhardt Brigade, one of the "Freikorps" units of defeated former imperial army soldiers that emerged during the months of revolution which broke out after the war. In March 1920 Sattler took part, on the side of the right-wing insurgents, in the anti-government "Kapp Putsch" (short-lived uprising -) which failed in its objective of overthrowing the new republican government) Sattler's father died in 1922. Any accumulated savings that the family might have had were eaten up by the collapse in the value of money. Sattler was obliged to cut short his education and earn money in order to support his own needs and those of his mother. He worked at a succession of casual jobs. One of these was a selling job which involved selling watches and silver jewellery at Berlin's Wertheim department store. Bruno Sattler had imbibed to the full his parents' "traditional values", which in his case involved not just the rather nostalgic nationalism that was widespread among those hankering for "the good old days, before the war", but also a gnawing antisemitism. It did nothing for his self-esteem that the young man had ended up selling watches in a store established and owned by a leading Jewish entrepreneur.
Police service Meanwhile, he remained in contact with his "Freikorps" comrades from the time of the insurrection. One of them was by this time working for the police service, and through this contact Sattler also received and accepted the offer of a job in the police service, joining the "Criminal police" in 1928. Almost immediately he was picked out for a training programme for future "Criminal Commissars". He was also becoming more politicised. By 1945 the National Socialist Party had more than ten million members, but in the early 1930s, although the intensified polarisation of politics was beginning to spill out into the streets, National Socialism was still a minority movement. Membership numbers run more or less chronologically, though there appear to have been several batches running concurrently. From Sattler's membership number it is apparent that he joined the party in October or November 1931. Further evidence of his political preferences and inclinations comes from his switch from the "Criminal Police" to the "Political Police" in 1933.
Gestapo The change of government in January 1933 was followed by a rapid retreat from democracy. During those early months, the old Prussian Secret Police service was renamed as the "Geheime Staatspolizei" ("Gestapo"): equivalent political police services from other parts of Germany were merged into it to create, for the first time in Germany, a nationwide political police service. Bruno Sattler was an eager early recruit. After the passage during March of the Enabling Act, a series of further measures were implemented by the government during the summer of 1933 which had the effect of abandoning parliamentary government and outlawing political parties (with the obvious exception of the ruling party). The authorities were particularly keen to stamp out political activism by those who had hitherto been members of the Communist Party or of the Social Democratic Party. During the second half of the year Sattler was appointed to take charge of the Gestapo department responsible for surveillance of those who had been active members of the Social Democratic Party and of Trades Unions affiliated to the party, along with certain other fringe parties and movements of the centre-left. According to a surviving Gestapo organisation chart dated 22 January 1934 he was at that time in charge of "Department III B2: SPD, SAP, Reichsbanner, Trades Unions and Special Projects". During this period he was the handler of a number of "V-Männer" (informants). One of these, recruited by Sattler in the summer of 1936, was Herbert Kriedemann who after the war served as a long-standing member of the West German Bundestag (parliament) (SPD) between 1949 and 1972. Kriedemann, who was identified in Gestapo records by the code-name "S-9", always refuted reports to this effect; but researchers reacted to his denials by investigating his involvement in greater depth: a number of plausible sources insist that Herbert Kriedemann was one of Bruno Sattler's "Gestapo spies", irrespective of Kriedemann's own denials.
It was as an ambitious still relatively young Gestapo officer, on the night of 1/2 February 1934, that Sattler was responsible for the killing of four communist detainees, John Schehr, Eugen Schönhaar, Erich Steinfurth and Rudolf Schwarz at the "Schäferberg" (just outside Berlin), "while they were attempting to escape". The incident later became mythologised, and the subject of a frequently broadcast ballad-song, in East Germany. Although Sattler was in charge of the group of Gestapo men escorting the prisoners when the incident took place, it was never known whether or not he fired any of the fatal shots. Nevertheless, according to subsequent research by his daughter (who became a journalist) it was Sattler who gave the order to shoot.
Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) In September 1939 the Reich Security Main Office Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RSHA) was established by Heinrich Himmler. Bruno Sattler immediately assumed leadership of the new organisation's "Department IV A2", with responsibilities covering Sabotage Prevention, Political-Police Defence and Political Counterfeiting operations. A few months later he was posted to Potsdam to work alongside Reinhold Heller of the "SS". As overall head of Department IV, during the summer of 1940 he was briefly posted to newly occupied Brussels, responsible for taking care of the files of the Second Socialist International which had been based in the Belgian capital between 1935 and 1940.
Like other RSHA staff, Sattler was assigned to what the head of the RSHA, Reinhard Heydrich, liked to refer to as the "Kämpfende Verwaltung" ("Fighting Administration") - elsewhere identified as Germany's "[paramilitary] taskforces", which were much expanded at the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union. In this context he seems to have served in Byelorussia and Russia, although even his family was being kept in the dark as to his whereabouts by this point. Between September 1941 and January 1942 Sattler was listed as an "orderly officer" of "Advance Command Moscow" of the Special Commando with "Taskforce Group B". It emerged much later that during 1941 Sattler was a member of the "Einsatzgruppe B" (taskforce) which is believed to have murdered 90,000 in Smolensk. He was later part of an equivalent task force mandated to take over the Interior Ministry in Moscow, but Moscow held out. After "Advance Command Moscow" was dissolved, the unit comprising the survivors was rebranded as "Department SK 7c".
Belgrade At the start of 1942 Sattler was promoted to the rank of "SS-Sturmbannführer" and "[Police] Kriminaldirektor", ahead of his posting to Belgrade. In Belgrade he took over "Department IV" which was the Gestapo department responsible for security in occupied Serbia. In this role he reported directly to SS-Oberführer Emanuel Schäfer, the Befehlshaber der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD. Sources covering Sattler's time in Belgrade between 1942 and 1944 lean heavily, both directly and indirectly, on court reports of Sattler's (at the time) secret trial, held at the District Court in Greifswald in July 1952. There is an inevitable focus on the atrocities in which he was involved. Complementary research that would not have been possible before 1990 has nevertheless endorsed assessments relating to his culpability, notwithstanding sometimes highly critical evaluations of the East German justice system.
At the time when Sattler took charge of the Belgrade Gestapo, the department was already an established key element in the military administration of the region. From Sattler's party-loyal perspective, there was nevertheless much unfinished business left by Schäfer's predecessor as BdS, SS-Oberführer Wilhelm Fuchs. Schäfer found that there were still 6,280 Jews - mostly women and children - alive at the nearby "Semlin" Concentration Camp. By July 1942, SS-Gruppenführer Harald Turner, the chief of the military administration staff, was able to report in a letter that Serbia was "Judenfrei" (Free of Jews). In more general terms, as the 1952 trial report noted, the responsibilities of the Gestapo in Belgrade were the same as those of Gestapo officers throughout the occupied territories of Europe: with a particular focus on the fight against Communism and the [anti-Nazi] Resistance Movements. In Belgrade, Sattler worked with a team of approximately 30 people with backgrounds in the Gestapo, Criminal law enforcement and Secret Police work. While assigned to "Department IV" in Belgrade, they all enjoyed the status of Gestapo officers. An "ethnic German" simultaneous translator, able to work with the necessary local languages, was permanently available to each of them.