Background
Kurt Lischka was born in Wroclaw on 16 August 1909, the son of a bank official.
Kurt Lischka was born in Wroclaw on 16 August 1909, the son of a bank official.
Studied law and political science in Wroclaw and Berlin.
Lischka was active in different district courts and worked in the Provincial Court of Appeal in Wroclaw. He entered the SS on 1 June 1933, reaching the rank of SS Major five years later and being promoted to SS Lieutenant-Colonel on 20 April 1942. On 1 September 1935 Lischka joined the Gestapo and in January 1940 became head of the Gestapo office in Cologne. Transferred to France, he became Knochen's deputy in November 1940 in the security police and SD throughout occupied French territory. He also served from 15 January 1943 as Commander of the security police and SD in Paris, as well as chief of the department which oversaw the internment camps and which executed detainees.
Lischka’s forte was ‘the Jewish Question’, in which he had specialized since 1938 when he took over the Referat IVB (Jewish Affairs) in the Gestapo.
At the end of 1938 he had been appointed head of the Reich Centre for Jewish Emigration in Berlin and, during the war, had been instrumental in planning and supervising the deportation and subsequent murder of 80,(KMJ Jews in France and of other ‘enemies’ of the Third Reich.
Lischka was arrested on 10 December 1945 after going into hiding in Schleswig-Holstein. He was interned by the British and then by the French, before being handed over to the Czechs on 2 May 1947 for his activities at the end of the war when he was head of the Referat for the Bohemian Protectorate in the Reich Main Security Office. Released and returned to West Germany on 22 August 1950, Lischka lived unmolested in the Federal Republic, even though a French court sentenced him in absentia to hard labour for life on 18 September 1950 for his wartime role in the ‘Final Solution' in occupied France. Lischka worked for a time as a commercial employee and even became a judge in the Federal Republic, his French life-sentence notwithstanding.
Thanks to the efforts of the French Jew ish lawyer and Holocaust survivor. Serge Klarsfeld, Lischka was eventually brought to trial in Cologne at the end of the 1970s. He was accused of war crimes together with his former adjunct in Paris, Ernest Heinrichsohn (Mayor of Burgstadt, Bavaria), and Herbert-Martin Hagen, a top SD official in occupied France who had also been sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia but nonetheless became a prominent West German industrialist after the war. The Cologne War Criminals Trial against Lischka, Hagen and Heinrichsohn was the most important trial of ex-Nazis since the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem and regarded by many as the Mast major Nazi trial’.
On 2 February 1980 the Cologne County Court found Lischka guilty of war crimes and sentenced him to ten years' imprisonment.
Schutzstaffel , Germany
June, 1933
Gestapo , Germany
September 1, 1935