Arthur Seyss-Inquart

July 22, 1892 – October 16, 1946

Austrian Nazi politician who was chancellor of Austria for two days in March 1938 before the Anschluss and later Reichskommissar of the occupied Netherlands, where he shared responsibility for the deportation of Dutch Jews. He was convicted at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946.

Who else was alive Wikipedia

Biography

Arthur Seyss-Inquart was born in 1892 in Stannern, a German-speaking village in Moravia, and his family moved to Vienna in 1907. He studied law at the University of Vienna, served with distinction in the Austro-Hungarian army during the First World War and completed his degree in 1917 while recovering from wounds. In 1921 he opened his own law practice.

A successful lawyer with German nationalist sympathies, he became a state councillor under Kurt Schuschnigg in 1937. Under pressure from Hitler, Schuschnigg made him interior minister in February 1938, and when Schuschnigg resigned on 11 March he was appointed chancellor. German troops crossed the border the next day on the strength of an invitation telegram issued in his name. He signed the law reducing Austria to a German province, joined the Nazi Party on 13 March and governed the new Ostmark as Reichsstatthalter, ordering the confiscation of Jewish property. He also sat in the Reichstag and became a minister without portfolio in 1939.

After the invasion of Poland he served as deputy to Governor-General Hans Frank until May 1940, when Hitler made him Reichskommissar for the occupied Netherlands. He subordinated the Dutch economy to Germany, sent hundreds of thousands of Dutch civilians to forced labour, authorised hundreds of executions, including reprisal and hostage killings, and oversaw the deportation of the large majority of the country's Jews; of about 140,000 registered, some 30,000 survived. Late in the war he helped limit the scorched-earth orders and agreed to Allied food drops.

Hitler's testament named him foreign minister. He was arrested in Hamburg in May 1945, tried at Nuremberg, and convicted of war crimes, crimes against humanity and waging aggressive war. He was hanged on 16 October 1946.