(Berlin) Public TV ARD on Tuesday revealed that Franz Josef Huber, responsible for the deportation of tens of thousands of Austrian Jews and those close to Adolf Eichmann, had been employed after the war, without concern, by West German intelligence services.
This is reviewed by the archives of the West German Service, the BND, which show that this SS general who commanded the Gestapo in Vienna was operating there from 1955 to 1967, shielded from potential legal action.
Huber, a former Munich policeman, assumed his position as head of the Nazi secret police in that city right after the annexation of Austria by Germany in 1938 and held that position until 1944.
As such, he was responsible for deporting tens of thousands of Austrian Jews to the Nazi death camps. A total of 65,000 Austrian Jews, most of them from Vienna, were exterminated during World War II.
Thus Huber worked side-by-side with Adolf Eichmann, the organizer of the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Eichmann, who was tried for his crimes only 60 years ago in Jerusalem, created most notably the Central Agency for Jewish Immigration in Vienna.
After the defeat of the Third Reich, Hopper was captured by the Americans, before being released in 1948. The SS General, according to the ARD, showed “cooperation” with the Allied forces. He thus evaded prosecution for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“The Cold War was imminent,” ARD quoted Budo Heshelhammer, a historian from the German Federal Intelligence Service, as saying, “so they (the Americans) were looking above all for hard-line anti-communists.” “Unfortunately, they often searched and found such types among ex-Nazis.”
After retiring in 1967, Franz Josef Huber received a pension from the German Civil Service, while continuing to work for an office equipment company.
He lived under his name until his death in Munich in 1975, at the age of 73.
The German Federal Intelligence Service “knew perfectly well that Huber was not a petty Gestapo killer, but rather a general in the SS, operating in the most intimate circles of the Nazi terror apparatus and responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands. Jews and opponents of the regime, another historian, Stephan Meining, explains.” Who participated in the study of the archive.
