Arthur Seyss-Inquart (22 July 1892 – 16 October 1946) was the Chancellor of Austria from 11 to 13 March 1938, succeeding Kurt Schuschnigg, and a Minister Without Portfolio of Nazi Germany until 1945. Seyss-Inquart briefly served as Foreign Minister of Germany from 30 April to 7 May 1945, succeeding Joachim von Ribbentrop. He was hanged for war crimes during World War II in 1946 at the Nuremberg Trials.
Biography[]
Seyss-Inquart in uniform
Arthur Seyss-Inquart was born on 22 July 1892 in Stonarov (Stannern), Jihlava (Iglau), in the Province of Moravia in Austria-Hungary. He was an ethnic German in a predominantly-Czech region. Although he studied law at the University of Vienna, he joined the Austrian Army in August 1914 at the start of World War I and became a lawyer after the war. He became a state councillor in 1937 under Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg of Austria and was made Minister of the Interior in 1938, the same year that he became a member of Austrian National Socialism. On 11 March 1938 Seyss-Inquart became the last Chancellor of Austria, and two days later he joined the Nazi Party of Nazi Germany and united Austria with Germany in the Anschluss.
Nazi official[]
Seyss-Inquart became an Ostmark leader and was also made the administrative chief of southern Poland under the General Government of Hans Frank after 1939, when Germany conquered Poland during World War II. He allowed the Abwehr to murder Polish intellectuals, among others, and he was later made Reichskommissar in the Netherlands, where he put down the Dutch Resistance with the help of a turned British intelligence officer. An unwavering anti-Semite, Seyss-Inquart killed 110,000 Dutch Jews. He was also responsible for a scorched earth policy during the 1944 Allied invasion of the Netherlands to liberate it from German control. In April 1945 he was made Foreign Minister of Germany after the death of Hitler and the falling out of favor of Joachim von Ribbentrop. However, he was captured by the Royal Welch Fusiliers on 7 May 1945 at the Elbe Bridge in Hamburg. One of the men who arrested him was Norman Miller (Norbert Mueller), a German Jew who fled to the United Kingdom before the war and whose whole family was killed at the Jungfernhof concentration camp in Latvia.
Nuremberg Trials[]
Seyss-Inquart after the hanging
Seyss-Inquart was tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the 1946 Nuremberg Trials by a tribunal of American, British, French, and Russian judges. He was found guilty of wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes against humanity and the last one of the defendants to walk up to the scaffolding in October 1946. Seyss-Inquart was hanged, saying that he hoped that the lesson from the war and Nuremberg Trials would be that peace and understanding should exist between peoples, shortly before he died.
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