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As an SS brigade leader and major general of the police, Franz Josef Huber (1902–1975) was one of the leading Nazi henchmen in Austria.

As head of the Vienna Gestapo and temporary superior of Adolf Eichmann, he was responsible for the deportation and murder of tens of thousands.

But he hardly had to answer for it.

Instead, he made another career in the early Federal Republic - in the Federal Intelligence Service (BND).

This "discovery" is worth an exclusive report with a blocking period to the television magazine "Report München" of the Bavarian Broadcasting Corporation: According to this, Huber was recruited in December 1955 by the "Federal Intelligence Service or its predecessor organization", "although the authorities knew all of Huber's Nazi past" , reports "Report Munich" on April 6th, 9.45pm in the first.

In addition, BR Hörfunk and BR24 are dedicated to research, which, as they say, is based on "hundreds of pages of never published documents from the archives of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND)".

However, the "Report" article mainly confirms the old experience that discoveries are easier the less one knows.

The explosive topic of employing Holocaust perpetrators in the Federal Intelligence Service in the 1950s and 1960s has been intensively researched for years.

And since 2016 it has been known that Franz Josef Huber has worked for the German secret service since 1957 at the latest.

Sabrina Nowack: "Security risk Nazi exposure: Personnel reviews in the Federal Intelligence Service in the 1960s" (Ch. Links Verlag. 528 pp., 24.99 euros)

Source: Ch.Links Verlag

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Since October 2016, Sabrina Nowack's doctoral thesis on the "security risk of Nazi exposure" has been available.

As a doctoral candidate for the most famous German secret service expert Wolfgang Krieger from the University of Marburg, she was part of the team of the Independent Historical Commission, which the then BND boss Ernst Uhrlau had appointed at the beginning of 2011 to investigate the Nazi entanglements of the former West German foreign intelligence service, which had been all-German since 1990.

On pages 456 and 457 of her 524-page book, which should be known to everyone interested in the history of German secret services, Sabrina Nowack writes about Franz-Josef Huber: “1.

April 1957 Joined the BND "with the administrative number" V-5076 "and the service name" Hahn ".

Additional information about him can be found in the “Lexicon of Secret Services in the 20th Century”, published in 2003 and edited by historian Matthias Uhl, among others.

Huber, born in Munich in 1902, became a policeman in his hometown after the First World War and in 1926 switched to the political police, for which he was initially involved in monitoring the right-wing parties.

So also the NSDAP, which at the time was still a splinter party.

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A good year after Hitler came to power in April 1934, Huber went to the Secret State Police Office in Berlin.

There he was responsible for Department II 1 C, which was responsible for “Reaction, Opposition and Austrian Affairs”.

After the "Anschluss" of the Republic of Austria in 1938, he became head of the Stapo control center in Vienna, as the regional branches of the Gestapo were called.

The Vienna office was the largest in the entire Third Reich, larger than the Berlin branch on Burgstrasse (but of course not larger than the headquarters also located in the Reich capital, namely on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse)

Huber's place of work was Vienna for the next seven years, but his competencies increased: from 1942 he was "Inspector of the Security Police and SS Security Service" in Vienna, and from December 1, 1944 as "Commander of the Security Police".

In other words: Huber was Himmler's governor in Vienna for seven years.

And as such for a time Adolf Eichmann's superior, who in 1938/39 gained experience in organizing deportations at the “Central Office for Jewish Emigration”.

Huber was thus directly responsible on the one hand for the suppression of every opposition and on the other for anti-Semitic politics.

From 1941 onwards, tens of thousands of Jews were transported from and via Vienna to ghettos or directly to the extermination camps in German-occupied Poland.

How many of the 65,000 murdered Austrian Jews Huber was specifically responsible for the death is difficult to say, because he expanded his competencies in the course of the Second World War - from the “Reichsgau” Vienna to the Lower Danube and Upper Danube districts.

Heinrich Himmler on a "visit" in the Mauthausen concentration camp.

In the door of the barrack Franz-Josef Huber

Source: Federal Archives

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After the end of the war, as can be seen in the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Huber was arrested and interned in the course of the “automatic arrest” against all higher SS members.

Strangely enough, a tribunal in Nuremberg classified him as “less burdened” and imposed a prison sentence of twelve months on probation and a fine of 500 DM.

It was only the appellate court that turned it into five years of a labor camp - but Huber avoided starting his remaining sentence (internment was always taken into account) by going into hiding.

Huber had been in contact with the Gehlen organization since the mid-1950s, and in 1957, as can be read from Sabrina Nowack, he joined the BND as a “full-time employee with flat-rate pay”.

Apparently no one in Pullach was interested in the fact that Huber was responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of Holocaust victims and was one of the close collaborators of Reinhard Heydrich and his successor as Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller.

At the end of 1963 the internal processing of such contaminated sites began at the BND;

a young agent named Hans-Henning Crome was responsible.

His special department, the “Org.

85 ”, cleared up dozens of suspected cases and recommended consequences.

In the case of Huber, this should lead to termination.

In fact, the SS criminal in the BND service was only given leave and retired on July 31, 1967.

Criminal proceedings against him did not materialize, because a supposedly minor amendment to the law in 1968 introduced a “cold amnesty” for Holocaust criminals.

Huber died at the age of 73 in 1975 in his hometown of Munich.

His work for the BND was, no question, a scandal - as was the employment of Walther Rauff, the inventor of the “mobile gas chambers”, for example.

Only it has been known since October 2016 at the latest.

But to know that, you have to read big books like Sabrina Nowack's.

“Report Munich”

, ARD, 9.45 p.m., April 6, 2021

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