The Nazi leaders who built this force needed experienced policemen, said Michael Holzmann, the son of an Austrian Nazi who for many years researched Gestapo activities in that country. “Huber took this opportunity and ceased to be a small investigator in the most successful leader of the Gestapo terror regime in ancient Austria,” he said.
In March 1938, after Germany annexed Austria, Huber was appointed head of the Gestapo in the most important part of the country, including Vienna, the capital. Shortly thereafter, the Gestapo began an extensive hunt for dissidents in Austria, and Huber gave orders “to immediately arrest undesirable Jews, especially for criminal reasons, and to transfer them to the Dachau concentration camp”. A few days later, the first two Jewish transports left Vienna for the countryside, with many more to follow.
Huber remained in his post until the end of the war, receiving more and more personnel and authority. During that time, 70,000 Austrian Jews who were unable to leave the country were murdered, about 40% of the original community, while their properties were looted by the Nazis.
Eichmann confirmed in his trial that he was involved in the deportation of Jews, but he refused to plead guilty to genocide, saying: “I had no choice but to follow the orders I received.”
Huber took a different approach. Speaking to an officer at the Nuremberg war crimes court in 1948 – who interviewed him as a witness, not a suspect – he said he knew nothing about the extermination until the end of 1944, when his deputy said something vague.
“But the historical evidence paints a completely different picture”, says Prof. Moshe Zimmerman, historian and scholar of the Holocaust at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Eichmann may have been a more familiar face for the Jewish community, but who shared the responsibility for carrying out terror against Jews, their collection, their forced boarding of trains and their deportation to the camps, was the police and the Gestapo. under the command of Huber. “