Kurt Lischka

Kurt Werner Lischka (16 August 1909 in Breslau; 16 May 1989 in Brühl) was an SS Lieutenant Colonel and Gestapo chief assigned to Paris in Occupied France during World War II.

Lischka was the son of a bank official who studied law and political science in Breslau and Berlin. After obtaining his degree he worked in various district courts and in the Provincial Court of Appeal in Breslau.

Lischka joined the SS on 1 June 1933, reaching the rank of SS Major in 1938 and then the rank of SS-Lieutenant Colonel on 20 April 1942. On 1 September 1935 Lischka joined the Gestapo and in January 1940 became head of the Gestapo in Cologne.

Lischka headed the operation which resulted in the incarceration of over 30,000 German Jews immediately following the mass destruction of Jewish property in the Crystal Night pogrom in November 1938.

As SiPo-SD chief of Paris Lischka was responsible for the largest single mass deportation of Jews in Occupied France.

Lischka had been imprisoned in France in 1945, then extradited to Czechoslovakia in 1947 for war crimes there, but had been released on 22 August 1950 and settled in West Germany. Though sentenced by a Paris court, in absentia, to life imprisonment, Lischka spent more than 25 years of freedom, working under his own name in the Federal Republic of Germany as, among other positions, a judge. As a result of the activities of Holocaust-survivors Serge Klarsfeld and Beate Klarsfeld, Lischka was eventually arrested in Cologne. Lischka was sentenced to a ten year prison term on 2 February 1980 and, following his early release on health grounds, died in a nursing home on 16 May 1989 in Brühl.