Kurt Werner Lischka (16 August 1909 in Breslau (now

Wrocław Wrocław (; german: Breslau, or . ; Silesian German: ''Brassel'') is a city in southwestern Poland and the largest city in the historical region of Silesia. It lies on the banks of the River Oder in the Silesian Lowlands of Central Europe, rou ...

) – 16 May 1989 in Brühl) was an SS official,

Gestapo The (), abbreviated Gestapo (; ), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of Prussia into one orga ...

chief and commandant of the Security police ('' Sicherheitspolizei''; SiPo) and Security Service (''

Sicherheitsdienst ' (, ''Security Service''), full title ' (Security Service of the '' Reichsführer-SS''), or SD, was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party in Nazi Germany. Established in 1931, the SD was the first Nazi intelligence organization ...

''; SD) in Paris during the

German occupation of France The Military Administration in France (german: Militärverwaltung in Frankreich; french: Occupation de la France par l'Allemagne) was an interim occupation authority established by Nazi Germany during World War II to administer the occupied zo ...

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposing ...

Biography

Lischka was the son of a bank official. He studied law and political science in Breslau and

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

. After obtaining his degree he worked in district courts and in the Provincial Court of Appeal in Breslau. Lischka joined the SS on 1 June 1933, reached the rank of SS major in 1938 and then SS lieutenant colonel on 20 April 1942. On 1 September 1935 Lischka joined the Gestapo and in January 1940 became head of the Gestapo in

Cologne Cologne ( ; german: Köln ; ksh, Kölle ) is the largest city of the German western state of North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) and the fourth-most populous city of Germany with 1.1 million inhabitants in the city proper and 3.6 millio ...

. Lischka headed the operation that resulted in the incarceration of over 30,000

German Jews The history of the Jews in Germany goes back at least to the year 321, and continued through the Early Middle Ages (5th to 10th centuries CE) and High Middle Ages (''circa'' 1000–1299 CE) when Jewish immigrants founded the Ashkenazi Jewish ...

immediately following the mass destruction of Jewish property in the

Kristallnacht () or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (german: Novemberpogrome, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) paramilitary and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation fro ...

pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. As SiPo-SD chief of Paris, Lischka was responsible for the largest single mass deportation of Jews in Occupied France.

Capture and death

Lischka was captured and imprisoned in France in 1945, then extradited to Czechoslovakia in 1947 for war crimes but released on 22 August 1950. He settled in West Germany. Though a Paris court sentenced him ''in absentia'' to life imprisonment, Lischka lived out more than 25 years in freedom, working under his own name in the

Federal Republic of Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated between ...

as, among other positions, a judge. As a result of the activities of French lawyer and

Nazi hunter A Nazi hunter is an individual who tracks down and gathers information on alleged former Nazis, or SS members, and Nazi collaborators who were involved in the Holocaust, typically for use at trial on charges of war crimes and crimes against huma ...

Serge Klarsfeld Serge Klarsfeld (born 17 September 1935) is a Romanian-born French activist and Nazi hunter known for documenting the Holocaust in order to establish the record and to enable the prosecution of war criminals. Since the 1960s, he has made notab ...

and his wife

Beate Klarsfeld Beate Auguste Klarsfeld (née Künzel; born 13 February 1939) is a Franco-German journalist and Nazi hunter who, along with her French husband, Serge, became famous for their investigation and documentation of numerous Nazi war criminals, inc ...

, Lischka was eventually arrested in Cologne. Lischka was sentenced to a ten-year prison term on 2 February 1980 alongside two other former Gestapo men:

Herbert Hagen Herbert Martin Hagen (20 September 1913 – August 1999) was a German SS-''Sturmbannführer'' of Nazi Germany and a convicted war criminal. Hagen served as personal assistant to the SS police chief in Paris Carl Oberg, heading the Gestapo depa ...

, personal assistant of SS police chief in Paris Carl Oberg sentenced to 12 years and Ernst Heinrichsohn, who worked in the Gestapo's "Jewish affairs" department in Paris, sentenced to six years. Following Lischka's early release on health grounds, he died in a nursing home on 16 May 1989 in Brühl.

''French Children of the Holocaust'' (New York University Press, 1996) p. 1823

References

Sources

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Lischka, Kurt 1909 births 1989 deaths Lawyers from Wrocław SS-Obersturmbannführer SS and Police Leaders Holocaust perpetrators in Germany Holocaust perpetrators in France Gestapo personnel People from the Province of Silesia Reich Security Main Office personnel