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Wilhelm Höttl (March 19, 1915-June 27, 1999) was an Austrian Nazi Party member, S.S. officer, secret agent, author, and Doctor of History.
Höttl (often transcribed as "Hoettl") was born in Vienna in March 1915. In 1938, at the remarkably young age of twenty-three, he received a doctorate in history from the University of Vienna. While still a student there, he joined the Nazi party (member 6309616) and the SS (no. 309510). From 1939 until the end of the war in Europe, Höttl was employed almost without interruption by Germany's central intelligence agency, the RSHA. He was first stationed in Vienna with the SD foreign bureau and then moved to Berlin where he was promoted to the rank of Major. In 1944 Höttl became Lieutenant-Colonel with the title of Acting Head of Intelligence and Counter Espionage in Central and South-east Europe. In March he was assigned to Budapest, where he served as second in command to Heinrich Himmler's SS representative in Hungary, and as political advisor to Hitler's ambassador there, Edmund Veesenmayer, who reported to Berlin, for example, on the large-scale deportations in 1944 of Jews from Hungary.
After the war, Höttl figured prominently as a prosecution witness at the Nuremberg Trial. In an affidavit dated November 25, 1945, the thirty-year old Höttl described a conversation he held with Adolf Eichmann in August 1944 during the closing days of the war. The meeting of the two men took place at Höttl's office in Budapest:
"(Eichmann) expressed his conviction that Germany had lost the war and that he personally had no further chance. He knew that he would be considered one of the main war criminals by the United Nations, since he had millions of Jewish lives on his conscience. I asked him how many that was, to which he answered that although the number was a great Reich secret, he would tell me since I, as a historian too, would be interested and that probably he would not return anyhow from his command in Romania. He had, shortly before that, made a report to Himmler, as the latter wanted to know the exact number of Jews who had been killed. Approximately 4 million Jews had been killed in the various concentration camps, while an additional 2 million met death in other ways, the major part of which were shot by operational squads of the Security Police during the campaign against Russia."
The hearsay evidence in Höttl's affidavit is the original source for the claim that six-million Jews perished in the Holocaust. Holocaust deniers have questioned the affidavit's veracity and its "six-million" number. Eichmann, at his 1962 trial in Jerusalem, denied the affidavit's attributed motivation, characteristically remarking, "I have never stated that I have anyone's death on my conscience."
Sources
- The Secret Front by Wilhelm Höttl, with an introduction by David Kahn (author of The Codebreakers), Enigma Books, 1954, ISBN 1-929631-07-3
- The Trial of Adolf Eichmann, Vol 4, Session, 88. [1]
- David Kahn, The Secret History of the Author of the Secret Front, Online publication.[2]
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