On Sept. 28, 1946, about a year and a half after the end of World War II, Polish authorities sent a letter to the US military governor in Germany, "requesting the extradition … of Otto Wachter who has been charged with mass murder" and who perpetrated war crimes between 1942-1945 in the city of Lemberg (Lviv in modern-day Ukraine).
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Wachter was a senior SS member and a top official of the Nazi Party in Austria and was responsible for the expulsion of Jewish members of the government after the Anschluss – the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany on March 12, 1938.
After the German takeover of Poland in October 1939, Wachter became the governor of Krakow and established the city's Jewish ghetto. He later became the governor of the entire district of Galicia and founded the Ukrainian division of the SS.
In the last few months of the war, he was responsible for the Reich Security Main Office in parts of Italy occupied by Germany.
After the war, he disappeared without a trace, until in 1949 – three years after the Polish extradition request – news broke of his death in Rome due to a disease.
A new book by British-French lawyer Philippe Sands, 61, titled The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive revealed, among other things, that the US knew that Wachter was hiding in Rome, but made no effort to bring him to justice, most likely because they wanted to recruit him to join their efforts against Russia in the Cold War.
According to the book, Wachter was hoping to migrate to South America via the Ratlines – a system of escape routes for senior Nazis fleeing Europe in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Red Cross and the Vatican and US intelligence services – but died before being able to do so.
Sands has a personal connection to Lemberg, which he described in detail in his best-selling book East West Street. His mother Ruth and her parents Leon and Rita Buchholz were among the few family members who survived the Holocaust. Sands grew up in the typical silence that characterized families of survivors and knew nothing of the fate of his relatives who had been murdered by Nazis and their collaborators. Eleven years ago, following an invitation to give a lecture at Tel Aviv University, he began to research his family's history.
While working on East West Street, he met German journalist Niklas Frank, who is known for his intimate and strongly accusatory book about his father Hans Frank, who was governor of the General Government in Nazi-occupied Poland. It is in the territory under his jurisdiction that most Holocaust victims were murdered.
Through Frank, Sands met Otto and Charlotte Wachter's fourth son, Horst (82), who shared with the British jurist a large collection of personal family documents – correspondence between the parents, diaries, recordings – that gave Sands an idea of the Wachters' lives before WWII, and helped solve the mystery of Wachter's death in Rome on July 14, 1949.
The Ratlines also describes the conflict between Sands, who revealed the extent of Wachter's crimes, and Horst Wachter, who continues to insist that his father was a "good Nazi" who opposed the heinous crimes committed around him and did his best to minimize casualties.
"Horst is not a bad person, not an antisemite and he does not deny the Holocaust," Sands told Israel Hayom. "But he is trying to build a story of justification for himself by creating a fair image of his father. It makes me frustrated and angry sometimes, but I try to control these emotions. After the book was published, he sent messages to relatives and friends, sending me a copy, in which he claimed that the book is terrible, but nevertheless, he continues to stay in touch with me."
According to Sands, Wachter was a senior Nazi official, yet his name is relatively unknown among the public.
"Wachter was a very senior Nazi who reached the second most important rank in the SS. He was personally appointed by [Nazi leader Adolf] Hitler as governor of the District of Galicia and was on the top of the Nazi hierarchy, so it is a mystery to me how his name was cleared," he said.
"I think it came about as a result of his wife's efforts, who invested 35 years after the war in clearing the family's name. She destroyed many personal documents she had in her possession, and every time things were published about Wachter in the Austrian press, she went to the newspapers and made sure his name was omitted from the reports. Hers was a very thorough cleaning effort."
Q: What is it about The Ratlines that doesn't sit well with Horst Wachter? Isn't it based on the very documents in his possession?
"He claims I ignored the most important documents, but they are nonexistent. I made sure to refer to every single document and look for things that might support his view of his father, but there simply weren't any. It is a figment of his imagination – pure denial and extreme fake news. He did not accuse me of dishonesty or inaccurate use of material, only claimed that I did not refer to some of the documents, which do not exist.
"After the book came out, I received an e-mail from an archivist at the Holocaust museum in Washington. Last September Horst offered to display on the museum's website all the documents he had given me, which he [the archivist] accepted. I don't know why Horst did it, but anyone today can read those documents.
"The archivist told me that never before had they come across such material that documents the private lives of a couple almost completely from the moment they met in 1929 until Otto's death in 1949. Moreover, for the first time, we have information on Nazi escape routes, a captivating subject for me. Where and how did Otto hide? How did he get to Rome? Who looked after him there?
"All these things were described in the letters in codes that had to be deciphered, but now we know for sure what happened. There were people who helped Wachter and cared for him and the rest of the Nazi members. It was a network that included people from the Vatican and Italian fascists, but Americans as well. Twelve hours after Otto got to Rome the Americans were informed about his arrival. They knew he was there, knew the made-up name he used, and did nothing to apprehend him."
Q: Was it because of the Cold War when each side tried to recruit Nazis to work against the enemy?
"Absolutely. Austria was an important front in the preparation for the Cold War because from 1955 it committed to staying neutral. An inter-bloc struggle began to win over the Austrians' heart and soul, and therefore the Brits and the Americans chased after the Nazis in order to recruit them in the struggle against the Communists."
According to Sands, the most frustrating moments for him on this journey had to do with Horst Wachter's reaction to the documents.
"It was painful and frustrating," he said. I showed him a document in which his father wrote 'Tomorrow I need to bring 50 Poles to be shot in the forest'. And he told me the document didn't say 'I want to shoot them,' or 'I have to shoot them.'
"Moreover, I think of Wachter expelling 16,000 Jews from every public office in Vienna after April 1938. Wachter was responsible for every Jew who lost his job then, from senior positions to a mailman. By the way, two of them were Wachter's former law professors, and he fired them and paved the way to their deaths.
"I have to admit that everything that is connected to the writings about Vienna is very difficult for me. From there two of my great grandmothers were deported to their deaths with nothing but a small suitcase. This image of two elderly women, innocent and helpless, it makes my blood boil."
Wachter was born in Vienna on July 8, 1901. His father Joseph, a monarchist and antisemite, was a senior officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army and served briefly as the Defense Minister of the First Austrian Republic which was established after World War I.
When Wachter was 7 years old, the family moved to Trieste (then part of Austria-Hungary). After the outbreak of WWI, his father was stationed in Galicia and commanded the forces around Lemberg.
Wachter, his mother and two sisters moved to southern Bohemia (modern-day Czechia). Following the defeat in the war, and in the midst of the post-war chaos and the family's financial struggles, Wachter finished high school and began to study law.
He was active in nationalist circles, and in March 1921 even participated in a mass antisemitic demonstration in Vienna organized by a political group formed after WWI that demanded Jews be stripped of their citizenship and their property seized. They also demanded the expulsion of all Jews who moved to Austria since the beginning of WWI.
At the age of 22, Wachter joined the Nazi Party, only two years after Hitler became the leader of the party in Munich. In December 1925, he passed the bar and four years later met his wife-to-be, Charlotte Bleckmann, daughter of a steel magnate. They married two years later in 1932.
Their love story had its ups and downs, with Wachter being unfaithful and Charlotte Wachter having an abortion twice: the first time to punish Wachter for cheating and the second time – after the war – to make time to hide her husband from the Allies, despite the fact that he continued to betray her.
Charlotte Wachter supported her husband's Nazi ways and in 1931 even gifted him with a copy of Mein Kampf. Inside she wrote: "In struggle and in war, despite the storm, for the sake of the goal."
Two months later she also joined the Austrian Nazi Party. By then, Wachter had become a senior official of the party, which included, among others, Arthur Seyss-Inquart and Ernst Kaltenbrunner who were later executed in Nuremberg for committing war crimes and crimes against humanity.
As a lawyer, Wachter provided legal services to the Nazi Party and its members. In April 1932, he joined the SS and met Hitler in person in January 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany. A few days later his eldest son, Otto Jr. was born.
In May, the Nazi Party received a serious blow when its activities were banned by then-Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss. Wachter, like many other Austrian Nazis, went underground. He was arrested for forbidden political activities, was released and continued to represent Nazi Party members. At the same time he often traveled to Germany to meet with Hitler who was planning a coup in Austria.
On July 25, 1934, while Charlotte Wachter was recovering in the hospital after giving birth to their first daughter, Wachter was involved in the activities of the group that assassinated Dollfuss. The chancellor was no more, but the coup was unsuccessful, and several of those involved were arrested. Wachter succeeded in escaping to Germany.
In 1936, Charlotte Wachter and their two children joined Wachter in Berlin. By then, he had become a senior official at a Reich security office that was established by Reinhard Heydrich under the instruction of the head of SS Heinrich Himmler. Wachter worked in the same office as notorious Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann.
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The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive"
On March 12, 1938, the German army invaded Austria and annexed it to the Reich. "The big dream that we had already given up on came true suddenly," Charlotte Wachter wrote in her diary. She also joined a group of friends who decided to travel from Berlin to Vienna for the historic event.
In the new Austrian chancellor's office, she met with the commander of the district of Vienna Odilo Globocnik who went on to establish the Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. She urged Globocnik to appoint her husband for a senior position in Austria, and just like in her many other efforts, she succeeded.
A new chapter began in the Wachters' lives when they moved into a villa in Vienna that was confiscated from a Jewish family in a prestigious district of the capital. Bettina Mendel, the mother of the family that owned the building, was a talented horse rider who refused to represent Austria at the 1939 Olympic Games in Germany and following the annexation managed to escape to Australia.
While Charlotte Wachter was enjoying her newfound social status, her husband assumed the responsibility for the "purification" of the Austrian public sector of its Jews.
According to Sands, Wachter was responsible for the dismissal of 16,237 officials and some 6,000 senior employees. He did not even hold back from firing "partial Jews" or people who were married to Jews.
"Otto was unhappy with his work, but performed it with great zeal," Charlotte Wachter wrote in her diary.
Sands stressed that the couple's antisemitism stemmed from two different reasons.
"For Otto, it came from his father's nationalism and the "knife in the back' claims that said it was the treacherous Jews who brought about the defeat. For Charlotte, antisemitism stemmed mostly from religion, from the church."
Weeks after the outbreak of WWII and Germany's invasion of Poland, Wachter was put in charge of the Krakow administration by Seyss-Inquart.
A month later, he was promoted to governor of the district, and on his first day in office mandated all Jews to wear special identifying ribbons on their arms. In 1941, he stripped the Jews of their rights, and on March 3 ordered the establishment of the Krakow ghetto and the roundup of the city's Jews, threatening a death sentence to anyone who disobeyed.
On Oct. 20, 1941, four months after Germany invaded the USSR, the General Government held a cabinet meeting in Krakow. The minutes quote Wachter saying that "a radical solution to the question of the Jews is inevitable."
A month later all district governors of the General Government met with the heads of the SS in the provinces of Galicia and Lublin, including Globocnik who was by then busy setting up the Belzec extermination camp.
Hans Frank – the head of the General Government – updated those present on a new policy that would "somehow" lead to the "successful extermination" of 3.5 million Jews that lived in the territories under his command.
"We must exterminate the Jews whenever we meet them and whenever we can," Frank said several weeks before the Wannsee Conference in Berlin during which Nazi leadership formulated the Final Solution.
Three days later, Hitler instructed for Wachter to be promoted governor of Galicia, whom he considered to be "the best man for the job." Wachter returned to the same place his father oversaw in WWI only holding a higher military rank and more power. Charlotte Wachter joined him in Lemberg shortly after.
By March 1942, Wachter had already signed an order mandating Jews to do forced labor. Within a year, almost all the Jews in the district – about half a million people – had died.
On Aug. 6, 1942, senior Nazi officials met in Lemberg to discuss "solving the Jewish problem in Galicia." Four days later, tens of thousands of Lemberg Jews were sent to die in the Belzec camp.
In a letter to his wife dated Aug. 16, Wachter wrote he was very busy, in part because of the "great Jewish Aktion." This is one of Wachter's few written references to his direct involvement in Nazi crimes. He may have deliberately refrained from documenting them, or perhaps Charlotte Wachter destroyed other documents. In any case, Wachter wrote that Himmler visited Lemberg and praised his work.
As Jews were being exterminated, Wachter complained to his wife about problems with caring for the garden in their Lemberg home, as "there are no workers. The Jews are being moved to other places in increasing numbers."
At the end of 1942, the New York Times published a list – based on reports by Polish exiles – of top senior Nazi officials who committed crimes in Poland. Wachter ranked seventh on the list.
As a result of growing military challenges on the eastern front vis-à-vis the Red Army, in 1943 Wechter established the SS Galicia volunteer division, which for the first time did not recruit Germans from the Reich but Ukrainians and local Germans.
"Why should only German blood be shed," he wrote to his wife. "The Galicians are insisting that we recruit them. They are reliable."
But the situation on the front, as well as in other territories occupied by Germany, kept deteriorating. In February 1944, Wachter's second hand Otto Bauer was assassinated by an unknown man in a German military uniform.
Charlotte Wachter decided to leave Lemberg with their six children, taking with her the most expensive furniture from the villa. She later claimed she was advised to do so by the local servant, who said "the Communists would destroy everything anyway."
Wachter spent two and a half years in Galicia. "His happiness was immense," his wife wrote in her memoirs. "Finally he could implement his ideas of good control over human beings."
In July 1944, as the Allies were drawing near, Himmler decided to send Wachter to northern Italy, where the Germans seized power. Charlotte Wachter remained in Salzburg.
Towards the end of the war, he disappeared. After a brief period of uncertainty, Charlotte Wachter learned her husband was hiding in the Alps in Austria, at an altitude not reached by Allied troops.
She visited him and the two constantly kept in touch for the rest of the four years of Wachter's life, which he spent in hiding. He even stayed with his wife and children in Salzburg for a brief period of time, but left after neighbors took notice and gossip ensued.
Wachter decided to flee to Rome and try to make his way to South America, as thousands of his colleagues had done. Although correspondence with his wife was full of code words, designed to prevent Allies intelligence from locating him, Sands managed to decipher almost all of them. The findings clearly showed that the US knew about Wachter staying in Rome.
Horst Wachter's only daughter, Frederica Magdalena Wachter-Stanfel (44), an artist and Muslim convert, is the only one to admit that her grandfather was a war criminal.
"Philippe's book releases me from a heavy burden," she told Israel Hayom. "The book led me to finally finding out what happened. Until five-six years ago, I knew almost nothing about it. I only knew that my grandfather was a Nazi. My mother's family came from a completely different background. She came from Sweden and was a communist, which created tension in the family. But I did not know why."
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"My father always said his father was 'a wonderful Nazi.' That he was a good man and did only good things within the Nazi system. He truly believes this. He claimed that his father wanted to change the Nazi system. Mom always said that couldn't have been, that a Nazi couldn't have been good. For her too, this family history was a terrible burden. I always knew there's no such thing as a good Nazi. It's nonsense."
Q: Is your father an antisemite?
"No. And my mother surely isn't one either. In any case, for years, I had no idea that my grandfather was a Nazi. My mother told me about it, and the book expresses it very strongly."
Q: Have you ever wanted to research your family history, or would that be too difficult?
"My father handed me the documents and told me to read them, but this whole story made me sick. When I got the documents, it paralyzed me. I received psychiatric help. Many in my family became ill, and even those who married into the family.
"The silence over the past causes sickness. The heavier it is, the worse it gets and makes everyone sick. Now I feel better, thank God, and I feel that my mission is to talk about it, beyond my pursuit of art and the social counseling that I studied."
Q: Do you think this burden of silence is heavier in Austria than in other countries?
"Yes. So many did not speak about anything, as if nothing ever happened. In Austria the silence was extreme."
Q: How did your journey with Islam begin?
"In 2012, I found my personal path to Islam, and my faith was formed. Theoretically, I could have also become a Buddhist and I also feel connected to Jesus, but not the crucifixion story. Islam believes in all prophets, including the Jewish ones. I found it fascinating."
Q: And what is it like being a Muslim in Austria?
"The way Jews were spoken of in the past is how Muslims are today, and I can see the similarities. Attempts to ban circumcision, opposition to Muslim women's garbs, reactions to our culture. I've been spat at in the street. But I feel politicians are making sure that past winds should not strike again."
Q: How did your father react to your conversion?
"He cut me out of his will, but I think that mostly had to do with the fact that I did not share his opinion of his father. He wanted me to say that his father was a good man and not a mass murderer. Then came Islamization. My husband, by the way, converted a few years before me.
"We visited Israel together before the coronavirus began, we were in Jerusalem and holy sites. It was a wonderful spiritual experience, organized by the teachers' school where my husband teaches. We visited the ancient cities, the Bible sites, and all the places and things we have in common. It was very special."
