When Ernst Kaltenbrunner was hanged at Nuremberg Prison on October 16, 1946, the noose ended his life, but it did not end the sentence his family would carry. His wife Elisabeth, their three children, and the newborn twins he had fathered with his mistress were left to face a world that recoiled at the sound of their surname. The name Kaltenbrunner no longer meant power or protection. It meant terror, guilt, and the highest-ranking SS officer ever to stand on the gallows.
To understand the fate of his family, you have to understand the man himself. Kaltenbrunner was born in 1903 in Ried im Innkreis, Austria, a short distance from Braunau, where Adolf Hitler had been born fourteen years earlier. His father, Hugo, was a lawyer who raised his sons in a household of German nationalism and anti-clerical sentiment. Ernst and his brothers, Werner and Roland, all became lawyers and all joined the SS.
At the University of Graz, Kaltenbrunner joined a fencing fraternity and took part in ritual duels that left his face permanently scarred. Standing nearly six feet seven inches tall, with a powerful frame and those deep scars, he cut a terrifying figure. One intelligence officer later described him as “a physical giant of a man, a paranoia, a killer, and an alcoholic. ” It was at Graz that he formed a friendship with Adolf Eichmann, a connection that would prove fatal for millions.
In January 1934, Kaltenbrunner married Elisabeth Eder, known as Lisl, a grocer’s daughter from Linz who had joined the Nazi Party herself. Days after their wedding, Austrian authorities imprisoned him for his Nazi activities. He was jailed again that year on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, though the charge was reduced. These early imprisonments only deepened his devotion to the cause.
The couple had three children: a son, Hans-Jörg, born in 1935, a daughter, Gertrude, in 1937, and a youngest daughter, Barbara, in 1944. The children grew up as their father rose through the SS ranks. After the Anschluss in 1938, Kaltenbrunner became State Secretary for Public Security in Austria, helped establish the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, and built an intelligence network that caught Heinrich Himmler’s attention. In January 1943, after Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination, Kaltenbrunner was appointed Chief of the Reich Security Main Office, the RSHA, making him one of the most powerful men in the Nazi security apparatus.
Under his command, the genocide of European Jews accelerated. Documents presented at Nuremberg showed he received regular reports on camp activities and visited Mauthausen personally. During one 1943 inspection, fifteen prisoners were selected to demonstrate three methods of killing for his observation: shooting in the back of the neck, hanging, and gassing. He then inspected the crematorium and the quarry where prisoners were worked to death.
At briefings with his department chiefs, he reportedly spoke with pride of having helped build up Mauthausen. In October 1943, he told Herbert Kappler, the police chief in Rome, that the eradication of the Jews in Italy was of special interest for general security. Four days later, Kappler began rounding up Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. When Hitler summoned Hungary’s leader, Admiral Horthy, in 1944 to force cooperation with the Final Solution, Kaltenbrunner was present.
His power grew sharply after the July 20, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler. He led the investigation and was soon spending hours daily with the Führer, often bypassing Himmler to report directly to Hitler. It was said even Himmler feared the tall Austrian with the scarred face and volatile temper. By February 1945, as the Reich crumbled, Kaltenbrunner issued a decree allowing policemen to shoot anyone deemed disloyal without judicial review.
His personal life was more complicated than his public image suggested. By 1943, he had taken a mistress, Countess Gisela von Westarp, a vivacious twenty-two-year-old blonde who worked at Himmler’s Berlin headquarters. The affair continued through the final years of the war. On March 12, 1945, just weeks before Germany’s surrender, Gisela gave birth to twins, Ursula and Wolfgang, in a cow shed on the estate of Prince Hohenlohe in Altaussee.
One of the twins’ godfathers was Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician. In the chaos of the war’s final months, Kaltenbrunner relocated his headquarters to Altaussee in the Austrian Alps. Elisabeth and the three children were sent to the lakeside village of Strobl, while Gisela and the newborn twins remained nearby.
The hunt for Kaltenbrunner became a priority for American counterintelligence. Special Agent Robert Matteson of the 80th Counterintelligence Corps led the search. On May 6, 1945, Matteson’s unit found and arrested Elisabeth at the family’s villa in Strobl. She initially refused to reveal her husband’s whereabouts but provided the first accurate physical description American forces had of the fugitive: forty-three years old, six feet four inches tall, 220 pounds, with a powerful build and distinctive dueling scars.
The crucial lead came from the assistant mayor of Altaussee, who reported that Kaltenbrunner had been spotted five days earlier at a remote mountain cabin in the Totesgebirge, the Dead Mountains. Matteson organized a patrol of local guides, former soldiers, and salt miners who knew the terrain, along with a squad of American infantry. They set out at midnight on May 12, climbing through twenty to thirty feet of snow in darkness. When they reached the cabin, Matteson approached alone, disguised as a lost Austrian hiker.
A man who was not Kaltenbrunner answered the door. Matteson handed him a note from Gisela urging Kaltenbrunner to surrender to the Americans rather than risk capture by the Russians. The man denied knowing anyone by that name, but when he spotted the guides emerging from the rocks with rifles, he retreated inside and grabbed a weapon. After a tense ten-minute standoff, Kaltenbrunner, his adjutant Arthur Scheidler, and two SS guards emerged with their hands raised.
Kaltenbrunner attempted one final deception, claiming to be a Wehrmacht doctor named Unterweger using authentic papers from a deceased man. But the ruse collapsed when the patrol marched the prisoners down to Altaussee. Gisela von Westarp and Iris Scheidler, the adjutant’s wife, happened to spot the men being led through the main street. They broke from the crowd, calling out the prisoners’ names and embracing them.
The Americans now had confirmation of their identity. In the cabin, investigators found Kaltenbrunner’s RSHA identification card, his Gestapo badge number two, second only to Himmler’s, and a family photograph hidden in the stove’s ash pan. Fifty-six years later, in 2001, a Dutch tourist on vacation discovered Kaltenbrunner’s personal Nazi security seal in an Alpine lake in Styria, where he had discarded it in his attempt to hide his identity. The seal bore the inscription “Chief of the Security Police and SD,” a final artifact of the immense power he had once wielded.
The discovery made international news. Kaltenbrunner was transferred to American custody, interrogated, and eventually sent to a secret British interrogation center outside London. Then he was transferred to Nuremberg to stand trial alongside the other major war criminals. His case was complicated by health problems; during the initial stages of the trial, he suffered two brain hemorrhages and was absent for the opening proceedings.
When he finally took the stand, his defense was one of blanket denial. He claimed his adjutants had rubber-stamped documents without his knowledge. He claimed his position as RSHA Chief was only a title and that Himmler had been responsible for all atrocities. He denied ever visiting Mauthausen despite documentation and eyewitness testimony.
He even claimed credit for ending the Final Solution, saying he had protested against the mistreatment of Jews to Himmler and Hitler. The courtroom responded with laughter. The most damning testimony came from Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, who testified that under Kaltenbrunner’s orders, he had overseen the gassing of millions. A German intelligence officer involved in the resistance against Hitler described Kaltenbrunner as even worse than “that monster Heydrich.
” His own defense counsel reportedly found him impossible to work with. Fellow defendants avoided him; when he tried to shake hands upon entering the dock, his neighbors recoiled. The press nicknamed him “the man without a signature. ”
On September 30, 1946, the International Military Tribunal found him not guilty of crimes against peace but guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The next day, he was sentenced to death by hanging. The executions took place in the early morning hours of October 16 in a small gymnasium within Nuremberg Prison. Hermann Göring had cheated the gallows by swallowing cyanide hours earlier. The remaining ten condemned men were led one by one to the scaffold.
An American press representative described Kaltenbrunner entering the execution chamber at 1:36 a. m. , his lean, haggard face furrowed by old dueling scars. He wet his lips in nervousness but walked steadily to the gallows.
When invited to make a final statement, he said, “I have loved my German people and my fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people, and I am sorry this time my people were led by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge. ” As the black hood was raised over his head, he murmured, “Germany, good luck. ” His trap was sprung at 1:39 a.
m. The execution was carried out by Master Sergeant John C. Woods. Later investigations suggested the executions were poorly conducted, with trap doors too narrow and rope lengths improperly calculated, causing some men to die slowly from strangulation.
Austria in the late 1940s was a place of food shortages, displaced persons, and Allied occupation. Elisabeth was now the widow of a man whose name appeared in headlines around the world as a convicted war criminal. Unlike Lina Heydrich, who later sued for and won a widow’s pension, Elisabeth appears to have retreated into private life. She did not write memoirs, grant interviews, or attempt to rehabilitate her husband’s image.
She lived out her decades in Austria, leaving almost no trace in the public record. She died on May 20, 2002, in Linz, the city where she and Ernst had married sixty-eight years earlier. She outlived her husband by more than fifty-five years. The children faced the burden of growing up under the weight of their father’s legacy.
In post-war Austria, the Kaltenbrunner name was immediately recognizable. Hans-Jörg, the elder son, followed the family tradition into law, becoming a lawyer in the small town of Gramastetten, not far from Linz. He did not defend his father in public, nor did he make dramatic renunciations. Around 1977, historian Peter Black conducted extensive interviews with Hans-Jörg for his doctoral dissertation, which became the only comprehensive scholarly biography of Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
The son’s willingness to cooperate suggested he was open to academic inquiry, even if he avoided public commentary. Hans-Jörg was also a passionate chess player, becoming the founding father and honorary president of the chess club SV Gramastetten. His fellow club members later recalled, “He came to know many interesting personalities. His perfect Oxford English and excellent Latin suggested a man of considerable education and cosmopolitan outlook.
” Most remarkably, on September 25, 1999, Bobby Fischer, the legendary American chess champion, visited Hans-Jörg in Gramastetten. Fischer, by then a controversial figure living in exile, showed Hans-Jörg and the club members the decisive game that had won him his world title. The connection between the son of the highest-ranking Nazi executed at Nuremberg and the world’s most famous chess champion remains one of history’s stranger coincidences. Hans-Jörg Kaltenbrunner died on December 30, 2007, in Budapest during a business trip.
He suffered a heart attack. A tribute from his chess club described him as a highly educated and cosmopolitan polyglot who had a hard youth. Those two words capture what must have been an almost unimaginably difficult childhood: being a ten-year-old boy when American soldiers arrested your mother, learning that your father was in custody, watching the Nuremberg trials unfold in the press, and eventually being told that your father had been hanged as a war criminal. Of Hans-Jörg’s sisters, Gertrude and Barbara, even less is known.
They appear to have lived entirely private lives, leaving no public record of their occupations, marriages, or attitudes toward their father’s legacy. Unlike children of some Nazi leaders who became public figures, the Kaltenbrunner daughters vanished into the anonymity post-war Austria could offer. The twin children born to Gisela von Westarp never knew their father as anything other than a historical figure. They were born just two months before Germany’s surrender and seven months before his execution.
Their mother, barely twenty-four when they were born, raised them alone in difficult circumstances. Gisela came from a noble Prussian family. She had married Paul Wolff in November 1940, but they divorced before his death in combat in April 1943. By the time she met Kaltenbrunner, she was a young war widow.
The relationship produced the twins and entangled her fate with that of one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals. What remains is the historical record: the crimes Ernst Kaltenbrunner committed, the trial that convicted him, the execution that ended his life, and the long decades during which his family lived with consequences they did not choose but could not escape. In the end, the Kaltenbrunner family story is not one of dramatic confrontation with evil, but of something perhaps more common and more difficult to narrate: the ordinary passage of time in the shadow of extraordinary horror.
