Narrator: Marchand Steenkamp.
About the story: Walter Kutschmann was a former SS officer and World War 2 Nazi criminal deeply involved in the atrocities committed during the German invasion of Eastern Europe. Born in Dresden in 1914, he joined the Hitler Youth at an early age and later served in the Luftwaffe. He fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War before entering Nazi intelligence and the SS. As a member of Einsatzgruppe units under SS-Brigadeführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth, Kutschmann played a leading role in the 1941 massacre of Lwów professors, where dozens of prominent Polish academics and their families were executed. He was also responsible for the deportation of thousands of Jews, the murder of intellectuals in Eastern Galicia, and direct executions, including the killing of a teenage Jewish housemaid in Drohobycz. In 1944, he was transferred to France where he briefly participated in Operation Modellhut, a failed Nazi intelligence plot involving Coco Chanel and aimed at contacting Winston Churchill for a separate peace deal. As Germany collapsed, Kutschmann fled to Argentina, where he lived under the false identity Pedro Ricardo Olmos. Tracked down in the 1970s through the efforts of Simon Wiesenthal and journalists, he evaded extradition for years. In 1985, he was finally arrested again, but died of a heart attack in a hospital before facing trial.
Kutschmann’s story represents the broader postwar phenomenon of Nazi fugitives escaping justice by fleeing to South America. His legacy is a reminder of the brutal operations carried out by the Einsatzgruppen, the Holocaust in Poland, and the international networks that helped war criminals vanish. His failed extradition marked a missed opportunity for historical reckoning. Wiesenthal, upon hearing of his death, simply stated: “The Lord closed his file”
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