Ernst Kaltenbrunner was hanged at Nuremberg prison on the sixteenth of October, 1946, but the shadow he cast did not die with him. His wife Elisabeth, their three children, and the twin infants born to his mistress just weeks before Germany’s surrender were left to navigate a world that treated their surname as synonymous with terror. When the war ended, they lost their protected status, their connections to the Nazi elite, and any hope that the postwar years would be kind to those bearing the name of the highest-ranking SS officer to face the gallows. What followed were decades of silence, scrutiny, and lives lived largely in the shadow of a man whose crimes the Nuremberg Tribunal described as among the most heinous ever committed.
To understand what happened to his family, one must first understand the man himself. Ernst Kaltenbrunner was born on the fourth of October, 1903, in Ried im Innkreis, Austria, a small town not far from Braunau, where Adolf Hitler had been born fourteen years earlier. His father, Hugo Kaltenbrunner, was a lawyer who raised his sons in a household steeped in German nationalism and the völkisch pan-Germanism movement that would later find its most extreme expression in National Socialism. Ernst grew up alongside two brothers, Werner and Roland, both of whom also became lawyers and SS members.
The family was firmly anti-clerical, and Ernst and his wife Elisabeth would later formally declare themselves Gottgläubig, a Nazi term meaning believer in God that signified a rejection of organized religion in favor of a vague spiritual nationalism. Kaltenbrunner studied law at the University of Graz, where he joined the Arminia fraternity and took part in the ritualistic fencing matches known as Mensuren that left the deep scars on his face which would later give him such a fearsome appearance. Standing nearly six feet seven inches tall with those prominent dueling scars and a powerfully built frame, Kaltenbrunner cut an intimidating figure that contemporaries described in almost mythic terms. Walter Schellenberg, the head of Nazi foreign intelligence, later called him a physical giant of a man and a killer, an alcoholic, a paranoia.
It was at Graz that Kaltenbrunner formed a friendship with Adolf Eichmann, the future architect of the Final Solution’s logistics. This connection proved fatal for both men and for the millions who would fall victim to the machinery they helped operate. On the fourteenth of January, 1934, Ernst Kaltenbrunner married Elisabeth Eder, known to family and friends as Lisl. She was born on the twentieth of October, 1908, in Linz, the daughter of a grocer, and had joined the Nazi Party herself, holding membership number 301490.
She was also a member of the NS-Frauenschaft, the Nazi women’s organization. The couple married during a turbulent period in Austrian politics. Just days after their wedding, Austrian authorities briefly imprisoned Kaltenbrunner at the Kaisersteinbruch detention camp for his Nazi activities. He would be jailed again later that year on suspicion of involvement in the assassination of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss, though the charge was eventually reduced to conspiracy.
These early incarcerations only deepened Kaltenbrunner’s commitment to the Nazi cause and elevated his standing among Austrian National Socialists. The marriage produced three children. Their first child, a son named Hans-Jörg, was born on the twenty-eighth of February, 1935. A daughter, Gertrude, followed on the twenty-fifth of July, 1937.
Their youngest daughter, Barbara, was born in 1944 during the final year of the war. The children grew up during their father’s rapid ascent through the SS hierarchy. Following the Anschluss in March 1938, Kaltenbrunner was appointed State Secretary for Public Security in the new Nazi government of Austria. He helped establish the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp near Linz, the first such camp in Austria, and developed an extensive intelligence network that brought him to Heinrich Himmler’s attention.
In January 1943, following the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague the previous June, Kaltenbrunner was appointed Chief of the Reich Security Main Office, the RSHA. This position made him one of the most powerful men in the Nazi security apparatus. The RSHA was a sprawling organization that combined multiple security and intelligence functions under a single command. It included Amt IV, the Gestapo under Heinrich Müller; Amt V, the criminal police known as the Kripo; and Amt VI, the foreign intelligence service under Walter Schellenberg.
Kaltenbrunner also inherited Heydrich’s position as president of the International Criminal Police Commission, the organization that would later become Interpol. Under Kaltenbrunner’s command, the genocide of European Jews accelerated dramatically. Documents presented at Nuremberg showed that he received regular reports on concentration camp activities and was fully aware of the extermination program. He personally visited Mauthausen concentration camp on multiple occasions during his tenure.
During one inspection in the summer of 1943, fifteen prisoners were selected to demonstrate three methods of killing for his observation: shooting in the back of the neck, hanging, and gassing. Afterward, Kaltenbrunner inspected the crematorium and the quarry where prisoners were worked to death. At subsequent briefings with his department chiefs, he reportedly spoke with pride of having helped build up Mauthausen during his time as Higher SS and Police Leader in Austria. In October 1943, Kaltenbrunner told Herbert Kappler, the head of German police and security services in Rome, that the eradication of the Jews in Italy was of special interest for general security.
Four days later, Kappler’s forces began rounding up Jews for deportation to Auschwitz. When Hitler summoned Hungarian leader Admiral Horthy to Klessheim Castle in 1944 to force Hungary’s cooperation with the Final Solution, Kaltenbrunner was present for the negotiations. Kaltenbrunner’s power increased dramatically after the twentieth of July, 1944, assassination attempt against Hitler. He was summoned to Hitler’s wartime headquarters at the Wolfsschanze in East Prussia to lead the investigation into the conspirators.
An estimated five thousand people were eventually executed as a result of this investigation, with many more sent to concentration camps. Kaltenbrunner’s handling of the investigation brought him into Hitler’s inner circle. According to some accounts, he spent several hours daily with the Führer during this period and often bypassed Himmler to report directly to Hitler. Even Himmler, it was said, feared the tall Austrian with the scarred face and volatile temper.
On the fifteenth of November, 1944, Kaltenbrunner was awarded the Knight’s Cross of the War Merit Cross with Swords. The following month, he was granted the additional rank of General of the Waffen SS. On the sixth of February, 1945, as the Reich crumbled, he issued a decree allowing policemen to shoot people deemed disloyal at their own discretion without any form of judicial review. But Kaltenbrunner’s personal life was more complicated than his family image suggested.
By 1943, he had taken a mistress, Countess Gisela von Westarp, a twenty-two-year-old blonde with blue eyes who worked at Himmler’s Berlin headquarters. Gisela came from a Prussian noble family. She had previously been married to Paul Wolff, who divorced her before dying in action at Bizerte in April 1943. According to Robert Matteson, the American intelligence officer who would later capture Kaltenbrunner, Gisela was vivacious and extremely intelligent.
The affair continued throughout the final years of the war, and on the twelfth of March, 1945, just weeks before Germany’s surrender, Gisela gave birth to twins named Ursula and Wolfgang. The birth took place, as she later proudly recalled, in a cow shed on the estate of Prince Hohenlohe in Altausee. One of the twins’ godfathers was Dr. Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician.
The final months of the war brought chaos to the Kaltenbrunner family as Soviet and American forces closed in on the Reich from east and west. Kaltenbrunner made plans for what Nazi leadership hoped would be a last stand in the Alpine Redoubt, a mountainous region stretching from southern Bavaria through western Austria to northern Italy. In late April 1945, Kaltenbrunner relocated his headquarters to Altausee in the Austrian Alps, a region he knew well from summer vacations during his years as the de facto SS leader of Austria. Elisabeth and the three children were sent to the lakeside village of Strobl, while Gisela and the newborn twins remained in Altausee.
The hunt for Kaltenbrunner became one of the primary objectives for American counterintelligence forces in Austria. Special Agent Robert Matteson of the 80th Counterintelligence Corps Detachment led the search. On the sixth of May, 1945, Matteson’s unit found and arrested Elisabeth Kaltenbrunner at the family’s villa in Strobl. According to Matteson’s later testimony, Elisabeth initially refused to reveal her husband’s whereabouts, but provided the first accurate physical description American forces had of the fugitive SS general.
She described him as forty-three years old, six feet four inches tall, weighing two hundred twenty pounds, with a powerful build and distinctive dueling scars. She was taken to 80th Division Headquarters for interrogation. The crucial lead came from Johann Brandauer, the assistant mayor of Altausee, who reported that Kaltenbrunner had been spotted five days earlier at the Wildensee Hut, a remote mountain cabin in the Totesgebirge, the Dead Mountains. Matteson organized a patrol consisting of four local guides, former Wehrmacht soldiers and salt miners who knew the treacherous terrain, along with a squad of American infantry.
The plan called for a nighttime climb through twenty to thirty feet of snow to reach the cabin before dawn. They set out at midnight on the twelfth of May, 1945, climbing for six hours in darkness over glacial terrain. 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 Austrian guides emerging from behind 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.
He claimed to be a Wehrmacht doctor named Unterweger, using authentic papers from a deceased man. But the ruse collapsed spectacularly when the patrol marched their prisoners down to the village of Altausee. In a scene that seemed almost scripted for dramatic effect, Gisela von Westarp and Iris Scheidler, the wife of Kaltenbrunner’s adjutant, happened to spot the men being led through the main street. They broke from the crowd, calling out their names and embracing them.
The Americans now had confirmation of their prisoners’ 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. In 2001, a Dutch citizen on vacation discovered Kaltenbrunner’s personal Nazi security seal in an Alpine lake in Styria, fifty-six years after he had discarded it in his attempt to hide his identity. The seal bore the inscription Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Chief of the Security Police and SD, a final artifact of the immense power he had once wielded.
The discovery made international news and reminded a new generation of the Nazi fugitives who had once sought refuge in those mountains. Kaltenbrunner was transferred first to local American custody, where he was interrogated at Bad Ischl before being sent to the 12th Army Group Headquarters. He was then transferred to Camp Zero 20, a secret British interrogation center outside London, where intelligence officers employed what Matteson later described as unusual treatment to extract information. Kaltenbrunner, who had overseen the Gestapo’s interrogation methods, now experienced the other side of the process.
Eventually, 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 episodes of subarachnoid hemorrhage, brain bleeds that required several weeks of recovery. He was absent for the opening proceedings and did not appear in the dock until late November 1945.
When Kaltenbrunner finally took the stand, his defense strategy was one of blanket denial. He claimed that all documents bearing his signature had been rubber-stamped by his adjutants without his knowledge. He asserted that his position as RSHA Chief was only a title and that Himmler had been responsible for all atrocities. He denied ever visiting Mauthausen concentration camp despite extensive documentation and eyewitness testimony to the contrary.
He claimed he had no knowledge of the Commissar Order under which captured Soviet political officers were executed. At one point, he even claimed credit for ending the Final Solution, asserting that he had protested against the mistreatment of Jews to both Himmler and Hitler. The courtroom responded to his denials 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 of human beings.
Hans Bernd Gisevius, a German intelligence officer who had been 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, and guards reported that Kaltenbrunner complained about being assigned such a stupid attorney. Fellow defendants avoided him. When he tried to shake hands upon entering the dock, his neighbors recoiled.
The press nicknamed him Der Mann ohne Unterschrift, the man without a signature, for his constant refusal to acknowledge documents he had signed. On the thirtieth of September, 1946, the International Military Tribunal delivered its verdict. Kaltenbrunner was found not guilty of crimes against peace, but guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The following day, he was sentenced to death by hanging.
His defense counsel’s attempts to have the sentence commuted failed. The executions took place in the early morning hours of the sixteenth of October, 1946, in a small gymnasium within Nuremberg Prison. For their last meal, the condemned men had been served sausage and cold cuts along with potato salad and black bread, with tea to drink. Hermann Göring had cheated the gallows by swallowing a cyanide capsule just hours before the scheduled hangings.
The remaining ten condemned men were led one by one to the scaffold. Kingsbury Smith of the International News Service was the American press representative selected by lot to witness the hangings. He described Kaltenbrunner entering the execution chamber at 1:36 a. m.
, wearing a sweater beneath his blue double-breasted coat. With his lean, haggard face furrowed by old dueling scars, Smith wrote, this terrible successor to Reinhard Heydrich had a frightening look as he glanced around the room. He wet his lips in apparent nervousness, but walked steadily to the gallows. When asked to state his name, he answered in a calm, low voice.
On the platform, he faced a United States Army Roman Catholic chaplain wearing a Franciscan habit. Kaltenbrunner was invited to make a final statement. His words carried the same mixture of nationalism and denial that had characterized his entire defense. 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 had taken approximately three minutes from the moment he entered the chamber. The executions were carried out by Master Sergeant John C. Woods, the US Army’s chief hangman. Later investigations suggested that the executions were poorly conducted, with the trap doors too narrow and the rope lengths improperly calculated, causing some of the condemned men to die slowly from strangulation rather than instantly from broken necks.
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 newspaper headlines around the world as a convicted war criminal. Unlike Lina Heydrich, who would later sue for and win a widow’s pension by arguing that her husband should be classified as a fallen German soldier, Elisabeth does not appear to have pursued similar legal battles. Whether she was refused such benefits or chose not to seek them is not recorded.
Unlike some wives of executed war criminals, Elisabeth appears to have retreated into private life rather than attempting to rehabilitate her husband’s image publicly. She did not write memoirs, grant interviews, or seek to revise the historical judgment on her husband. She lived out her remaining decades in Austria, maintaining a family life that left almost no trace in the public record. She died on the twentieth of May, 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, an entire lifetime spent in the shadow of his crimes and his execution. The children faced the challenge of growing up under the weight of their father’s legacy. In postwar Austria, the Kaltenbrunner name would have been immediately recognizable to anyone who had followed the Nuremberg trials. How the children navigated school, social relationships, and eventual careers while bearing that name can only be imagined.
Hans-Jörg Kaltenbrunner, the elder son, followed his father, grandfather, and uncles into the legal profession, becoming a lawyer. He settled in the small Austrian town of Gramastetten in Upper Austria, not far from Linz, where his parents had lived before the war. The choice of a legal career was perhaps natural given the family tradition, but it also placed Hans-Jörg in a profession where his father’s crimes against law and humanity cast a particularly long shadow. Unlike many children of Nazi leaders who either embraced or publicly rejected their fathers’ legacies, Hans-Jörg appears to have chosen a path of quiet distance.
He did not give public interviews defending his father’s actions, nor did he make dramatic public renunciations of the kind that brought attention to some descendants of Nazi perpetrators. What is known of Hans-Jörg’s life comes primarily from two sources. Around 1977, historian Peter Black, who was then researching his doctoral dissertation on Ernst Kaltenbrunner at Columbia University, conducted extensive interviews with Hans-Jörg. These interviews, along with correspondence between Black and the son, are now preserved in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s collections.
Black’s biography, Ernst Kaltenbrunner: Ideological Soldier of the Third Reich, published by Princeton University Press in 1984, remains the only comprehensive scholarly study of Kaltenbrunner’s life. It drew heavily on Hans-Jörg’s cooperation, suggesting that the son was willing to assist academic inquiry into his father’s history even if he avoided public commentary. The other glimpse into Hans-Jörg’s life came through an unexpected connection. He was a passionate chess player and became the founding father and honorary president of the chess club SV Gramastetten.
Through international chess tournaments and internet chess, 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 the twenty-fifth of September, 1999, Bobby Fischer, the legendary American chess champion who had defeated Boris Spassky in the famous 1972 World Championship match, visited Hans-Jörg in Gramastetten. Fischer, by then a controversial figure himself, living in exile and known for erratic behavior and anti-Semitic remarks, showed Hans-Jörg and the chess 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 the thirtieth of December, 2007, in Budapest, Hungary, 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.
The phrase hard youth captures in two words 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. How Hans-Jörg processed this burden across seven decades remains largely unknown. But the shape of his life suggests a man who sought normalcy, intellectual engagement, and distance from the public spotlight.
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. This silence may itself be a choice, a decision to avoid any association with the controversies that surrounded their family name. Unlike the children of some Nazi leaders who became public figures either defending or denouncing their parents, the Kaltenbrunner daughters vanished into the anonymity that postwar Austria could offer those who sought it.
The fate of the twin children born to Gisela von Westarp presents a different aspect of the Kaltenbrunner legacy. Ursula and Wolfgang were born on the twelfth of March, 1945, just two months before Germany’s surrender and seven months before their father’s execution. They never knew him as anything other than a historical figure, a name in history books and trial transcripts. Their mother, barely twenty-four years old when the twins were born, raised them alone in difficult circumstances after the war.
Gisela came from a noble Prussian family. Her father was Albrecht Berengar Graf von Westarp and her mother was Constance von Gontard. She had married Paul Wolff in November 1940, but they divorced before his death in combat at Bizerte in April 1943. By the time she met Kaltenbrunner, she was a young war widow working at Himmler’s Berlin headquarters.
The relationship that followed 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 that 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.
