Franz Josef Huber, the powerful Nazi Gestapo general who, after WWII, continued to spy on West Germany

Franz Josef Huber He was, since the German annexation of Austria, the head of the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna, the second largest of the Nazi police after Berlin. He held this post from March 1938 until the end of 1944, where he was primarily responsible for the deportation to the death camps of tens of thousands of Austrian Jews. Nearly 70,000 of them, 40% of the entire Jewish population of Austria, was assassinated during the Holocaust.

Huber was not a normal general, he was a great gyrfalcon who rubbed shoulders with senior Nazi officials like Heinrich Himmler, Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller or Adolf Eichmann. At the end of World War II, he was arrested and imprisoned by American troops, who had already put him on their list of people to be captured. After three years of arrest, he was released and has never been prosecuted for his crimes.

Huber was recycled and, according to BDN files, the West German Secret Service to which the newspaper had access The New York Times, from 1955 to 1967 worked for German intelligence. That year he took early retirement because the BDN believed he could no longer hide Huber’s past and that he was “endangering the service”.

Huber received a state pension and also worked for a company that made office supplies. Min a hurry at the age of 73 in Munich, where he had settled, never hiding his true identity. Huber reported directly to Heinrich Müller, head of the Gestapo.

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Müller was in charge of the Gestapo, the border police, the central security office of the Reich and of the “Jewish Affairs Department” headed by Eichmann. He was one of the most powerful officials in the Nazi system. He was last seen on May 1, 1945 in Berlin. It has never been clarified whether he had died during the fall of Berlin to the Soviets, whether he had committed suicide or whether he had managed to escape. His body has never been found.

Americans they had Huber on their list of top Nazi officialsHe is to be captured because they were aware of his crimes since he was appointed head of the Gestapo headquarters in Vienna. His first job was to send all the leaders of the country’s Jewish community to the Dachau concentration camp near Munich.

Huber had 900 Gestapo agents under his command and its headquarters at the Hôtel Métropole, of unfortunate memory as a place of interrogation and torture of Jews and political dissidents in the Austrian capital. The building, a gem of neoclassical architecture, was demolished in 1945 when the Soviets occupied part of the city in 1945.

The Americans questioned Huber, who admitted that he had visited the Dachau, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen camps. But he assured that he had never seen any cruel or inhumane act and that the prisoners were not mistreated. Tens of thousands of people died in these fields tortured, killed or without food until they starve.

The Americans, who had already visited the camps, did not believe his testimony but ended up releasing him because they considered that he was “cooperating”, which conveyed interesting information. A Nuremberg denazification court ruled in 1945 that Huber was not responsible for his crimes. The Americans thought they could use Huber to find the missing Müller.

German historians believe that the BND knew full well who Huber was, that he was not an ordinary general but a senior Gestapo official responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. United States and Germany they allowed me to live in peace after WWII and until his death because they saw him as a useful piece in the Cold War world.

Research The New York Times claims US intelligence documents show Huber was used because his WWII network of contacts it made it possible to recruit agents in the Soviet bloc. Austria was, in the early years of the Cold War, one of the main points of contact between the Western and Soviet secret services. German public television, ARD, is preparing a documentary on Huber.

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