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I share @bertholdseliger's lack of surprise at the “revelation” that Vienna's Gestapo chief was recruited for West-German intelligence post-war. Good to see this stuff get more traction now, but it's only half the story. A thread about my grandfather Zalel Schwager for context / https://twitter.com/BertholdSeliger/status/1379710337688215552
Returning from emigration in '45, as a Jewish (by birth not faith) communist, he was encouraged by the Party to take a job in the Austrian police to make sure it wasn't infiltrated by ex-Nazis. In fact, he sat on a commission that checked on individual policemen's Nazi pasts /
Those tests weren't terribly severe as you had to somehow run a police service, and there weren't enough bonafide antifascists around to run a police service. Fellow travellers of the Nazi regime were admitted, men who had engaged in torture or war crimes weren't. At first... /
But soon more senior ex-Nazis found their way back into the force, and with the onset of the Cold War anticommunist cred was becoming more important. My grandfather's affiliations, on the other hand, were now a problem. But even though he was very critical of the party line, /
..being a stubborn character who had gone through a lot and had lost almost all of his family to the Holocaust, he refused to quit the Communists when he got well-meaning advice to do so for the sake of his career./
He'd been a major in the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, so he joined the police in that same rank in '45 (he also had to pass an exam). Then, while all around him people with shady pasts rose through the ranks, he kept being mysteriously overlooked.. /
..belatedly becoming an Oberstleutnant. Eventually, he was told he could become an Oberst (the next higher rank) if he was willing to run a prison. So he took his superiors on a tour of that prison and showed them the cell...
..where he himself had been incarcerated after the Palace of Justice fire of 1927. And with that he turned down the promotion. I'm telling his story here because my grandfather had been very much on the right side during the war. / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_Revolt_of_1927
In French emigration he and his wife had been part of an Austrian underground association of people of various political persuasions who shared the aim of ending Nazi rule and bringing Austria back into existence. Sounds unlike me to say this, but they were actual patriots. /
But in the end the Austrian state found him less worthy of promotion than former Nazis. And that's what it boils down to. That's the context I wanted to give to that story of a former Gestapo chief being recruited to the BND. /
These weren't unfortunate mistakes, this was the logic on which the West was built. And before we go there, I'm aware that similar things happened in the East as well, but this I know from up close. /
The guy on the right here is Zalel (sadly don’t know who his friend is). He’s on the wall in my study because he was my favourite person in the world as a child. He died when I was 14.
And that’s him with my mum and my grandmother in 1946 or 7, I guess. Thanks for reading.
