The Nazi leaders who built the force needed experienced police officers, says Michael Holzmann, the son of an Austrian Nazi who has been investigating Gestapo activities in the country for years. “Huber seized this opportunity and from a small investigator became a most successful leader of the Gestapo terror regime in the former Austria,” he said.
In March 1938, after Germany annexed Austria, Huber became the Gestapo chief of the most important part of the country, including Vienna, the capital. Shortly afterwards, the Gestapo began an extensive hunt for dissidents in Austria, and Huber ordered “to immediately arrest unwanted, especially criminally motivated Jews, and transfer them to the Dachau concentration camp.” A few days later, the first two transports left Vienna for Jews to the camp, with much more to follow.
Huber remained in his post until the end of the war, gaining more and more personnel and authority. During that time, 70,000 Austrian Jews who could not leave the country were killed, nearly 40 percent of the original community, while their property was looted by the Nazis.
Eichmann confirmed during his trial that he was involved in the deportation of Jews, but denied being guilty of genocide, saying, “I had no option but to follow the orders I received.”
Huber followed a different approach. In 1948, he spoke to an official of the war crimes tribunal in Nuremberg – who was questioned as a witness, not as a suspect – he knew nothing of the extermination until the end of 1944, when his deputy told him something vague.
“But the historical evidence paints a very different picture,” says prof. Moshe Zimmerman, a historian and Holocaust scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. ‘Eichmann was perhaps a more familiar face to the Jewish community, but the one who shared the responsibility for carrying out the terror against the Jews, their gathering, their forced boarding of the trains and their deportation to the camps, was the police and the Gestapo under Huber. ”