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Kurt Lischka
Kurt Lischka
Born	(1909-08-16)16 August 1909 Breslau, German Empire
Died	5 April 1989(1989-04-05) (aged 79) Brühl, West Germany
Conviction(s)	War crimes
Criminal penalty	Life imprisonment (1955) (in absentia) 10 years imprisonment (1980)
SS service
Allegiance	Nazi Germany
Service / branch	Schutzstaffel
Years of service	1933–1945
Rank	SS-Lieutenant colonel (Obersturmbannführer)
Unit	Head of Gestapo

Kurt Paul Werner Lischka (16 August 1909 – 5 April 1989) was an SS official, Gestapo chief and commandant of the Security police (Sicherheitspolizei; SiPo) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst; SD) in Paris during the German occupation of France in World War II.

Biography

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

Lischka headed the operation that resulted in the incarceration of over 30,000 German Jews immediately following the mass destruction of Jewish property in the Kristallnacht 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 as, among other positions, a judge.

As a result of the activities of French lawyer and Nazi hunters Serge Klarsfeld and wife Beate Klarsfeld, 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, personal assistant of SS police chief in Paris, 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 in 1985, he died in a nursing home on 5 April 1989 in Brühl.

References

1. Klee, Ernst (2011). Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich: Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (in German). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag. p. 374. ISBN 978-3-98114834-3.
2. Curtis, Michael (May 1997). "Vichy France and the holocaust". Society. 34 (4): 18–34. doi:10.1007/BF02912205.
3. Robert Wistrich, Who's Who in Nazi Germany (Routledge, 2002) p. 158
4. Graham 1980.
5. Serge Klarsfeld French Children of the Holocaust (New York University Press, 1996) p. 1823

Sources

• Graham, Bradley (1980-02-12). "West German Court Sentences three who Sent Jews to Death Camps". Washington Post.

• 1909 births
• 1989 deaths
• Lawyers from Wrocław
• SS-Obersturmbannführer
• SS and Police Leaders
• Holocaust perpetrators in Germany
• Holocaust perpetrators in France
• Gestapo personnel
• German police officers convicted of crimes
• People from the Province of Silesia
• Nazis convicted in absentia
• Nazis convicted of war crimes
• Prisoners and detainees of Germany
• Prisoners and detainees of Czechoslovakia