Otto Wächter

Baron Otto Gustav von Wächter (8 July 1901 – 14 July 1949) was an Austrian lawyer, Nazi politician and high-ranking member of the SS, a paramilitary organisation of the Nazi Party. He participated in the extermination of Jews in Europe during the Holocaust and was instrumental in creating an SS division consisting of Ukrainians. During the occupation of Poland in World War II, he was the governor of the district of Kraków in the General Government and later of the District of Galicia (now mainly in Ukraine).

In 1944 he was appointed head of the German Military Administration in the puppet Italian Social Republic. During the last two months of the war, he was responsible for the non-German forces at the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in Berlin. In 1940, Wächter ordered the expulsion of 68,000 Polish Jews from Kraków and in 1941 the Kraków Ghetto was created for the remaining 15,000 Jews by his decrees. After the war, wanted by the Polish People's Republic, Wächter managed to evade Allied authorities for four years.

In 1949 he was given refuge by the pro-Nazi Austrian bishop Alois Hudal in the Vatican, where he died the same year, aged 48, reportedly from kidney disease.