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THE GAULEITER

In the few years immediately following the 1939-45 War, there was a considerable build-up of Axis POWs, particularly in Italy and Austria. It was difficult to repatriate them because of the severe damage that had been done to the rail network. This was in any case needed to supply our own military bases. Fuel shortages more or less ruled out repatriation by road.

From time to time, rail transports with room for a few POWs became available, and before they were allocated to these, the prisoners had to be screened, because it was well known that war criminals, witnesses to war crimes, and other undesirables were hiding amongst the genuine prisoners.

It was the job of CSDIC and later IntOrg at the Allied Commission for Austria to carry out this work, and I was one of the team that visited camps to screen the men in the camps. At first, this consisted of a general interrogation, plus a check on the Field Post Numbers in the men’s’ Paybooks.

Former SS personnel were always, automatically sent for further interrogation at special centres. They were easy to spot, as they were routinely tattooed with their blood group under the left upper arm. Some of them tried to erase this tattoo, but the scars were usually very obvious.

On one of my visits to the Wolfsberg Camp in Austria, I noticed a large solitary man wearing an ill-fitting uniform bearing the rank badges of an Obergefreiter (Senior Lance Corporal). His general manner was that he should at least have been a senior officer. He wandered around the camp on his own. He never appeared to speak to anyone. I interrogated him. He gave minimum answers. He had been in reserve units throughout the War, he said. He had never seen action.

I inspected his paybook. It was pristine. Now, a soldier’s paybook goes around with him in his pocket, gets sweaty and dog-eared, pages get torn. Over the years, different clerks make the entries in all sorts of illegible handwritings. The entries were, in fact, in different coloured inks. The handwritings were different, but looked as if one person had done them all, sloping the letters in different directions. I was very suspicious.

I made discreet enquiries around the camp, but no one knew, or wanted to tell me, anything about him. I was walking in a quiet part of the camp when one of the orderlies from the camp medical centre came up to me and said, in a low voice, ‘That big man you are enquiring about — you should ask him whether his name is Kaltenbrunner.' He melted away as quietly as he had come. This was nothing like the name he had given me — it was some normal German name like Schulz or Schmidt.

Before I took any further action, I decided to do some research in our library in Vienna. I looked through the files, and found one on a man called Kaltenbrunner. He had been the Nazi Gauleiter of Croatia, and was wanted by the Yugoslavs for war crimes on account of atrocities he had ordered there. There were several Press photographs in the file. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the man in the Wolfsberg Camp.

A few weeks later, I went back to Wolfsberg with two colleagues and a small Military Police guard. I confronted my Obergefreiter with the photographs. He wriggled, and tried to make out that it must have been some other man just like him, but finally gave in.

The MPs took him away. I understand that, some months later he was handed over to the Yugoslav authorities, who tried him and found him guilty of atrocities carried out in and around Zagreb. I believe that he was executed by them.

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