Background
Arthur Seyss-Inquart was born in Stannern, near Iglau, in Moravia, on 22 July 1892, the son of a secondary school teacher.
Arthur Seyss-Inquart was born in Stannern, near Iglau, in Moravia, on 22 July 1892, the son of a secondary school teacher.
During World War I he served in the Tyrolean Kaiserjaeger (Imperial Chasseurs) and was seriously wounded. After 1918 he returned to Vienna, where he became a barrister after studying law at the University and was an enthusiastic advocate of Anschluss (Austrian union with Germany).
In 1931 the intelligent, pleasant-mannered, ambitious young lawyer secretly joined the Austrian Nazi Party and in May 1937 he was appointed an Austrian State Councillor. During the next year, Seyss-Inquart was Hitler’s Trojan Horse in Austria, the pro-Nazi quisling whom he used to pressure the Chancellor Schuschnigg and to undermine Austrian independence. Under German pressure, Seyss-lnquart was appointed Austrian Minister of the Interior on 16 February 1938, with absolute control over the police and internal security. On 2 March 1938 Schuschnigg was forced to resign and though President Miklas at first refused to accept Seyss-lnquart as his Chancellor, he was forced to capitulate. The next day German troops entered Austria and Seyss-lnquart as the new Chancellor also took over presidential powers, forcing a law through Parliament whereby Austria ceased to exist as an independent State and became ‘a province of the German Reich’. Promoted to SS Lieutenant-General on 15 March 1938 for his services towards the Anschluss, Seyss-lnquart remained Reich Governor of the Ostmark (Austria) until 30 April 1939.
After the setting up of the General Government of Poland on 12 October 1939, Seyss-lnquart was appointed deputy to the Nazi Governor, Hans Frank. From May 1940 to 1945 he was Reich Commissioner in the occupied Netherlands where he was responsible for recruiting labour for deportation to Germany and for the rounding up of Dutch Jews.
Under his rule the Dutch economy was made completely subservient to the German Reich and living standards declined. Extremely valuable works of art were confiscated and in 1943 textiles and consumer goods seized for the German population. Five million Dutchmen were sent as workers to the Reich and 117,0 out of the 140,000 Dutch Jews were deported to their deaths in Poland. Those Dutch Jews in mixed marriages were given the alternative of deportation to Auschwitz or sterilization, according to regulations approved by Seyss-lnquart on 28 June 1943. Summary justice was also meted out to Resistance elements and collective fines imposed on all Dutch cities where they were suspected to exist. Proposed as Foreign Minister by Hitler during the last days of his life in the Fuhrerbunker,
Seyss-lnquart was arrested in May 1945 by Canadian troops and tried at Nuremberg.
He was found guilty of war crimes, including direct responsibility for deportations and the shooting of hostages, and was executed in Nuremberg prison on 16 October 1946.