On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed the Austrian border without resistance. Within hours, swastika flags hung from public buildings across Vienna.
Crowds gathered in the city center, cheering and saluting as loudspeakers broadcast triumphant speeches and church bells rang. The atmosphere mixed excitement, fear, and uncertainty.
For many Austrians, the Anschluss promised opportunity and advancement within the expanding structures of the Third Reich. For others, especially Jews and political opponents, it marked the beginning of exclusion, humiliation, and persecution.
In a city transformed overnight, careers were reshaped and loyalties tested. Ambitious young men already committed to National Socialism saw their path suddenly open before them. One of them was Siegfried Seidl.
Seidl was born on August 24, 1911, in Tulln an der Donau, then part of Austria-Hungary. He grew up without a father, who went missing during the First World War.
After the war ended in November 1918, Seidl lived in a society shaken by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The new Austrian Republic faced political instability, economic crisis, and deep divisions between left and right.
Like many young men of his generation, Seidl was drawn early to radical nationalist ideas. On October 15, 1930, at the age of 19, he joined the Nazi Party with party number 300,738.
In September 1931, he entered the SA, the Nazi paramilitary formation that used violence to intimidate political opponents. In May 1932, he transferred to the SS, which would become responsible for repression, racial policy, and the concentration camp system.
His decision to join these organizations long before the annexation of Austria showed that his commitment to Nazism was ideological rather than opportunistic. From 1935 until 1938, he studied history and German studies at the University of Vienna.
The annexation of Austria into the German Reich in March 1938 transformed Austrian political life. Opponents were soon persecuted, and Jews were rapidly excluded from public life.
On March 2, 1939, Seidl married Elisabeth Stieber, a former kindergarten teacher and a devoted member of the Nazi Party and the National Socialist Women's League. The couple had three children.
Their private life unfolded alongside Seidl's growing role inside a system preparing for war and mass persecution. The Second World War began on September 1, 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
Soon after the outbreak of war, Seidl was called into police service because of his SS membership. In January 1940, he was attached to the Reich Security Main Office, or RSHA, the central authority coordinating the secret police, criminal police, and intelligence services.
Within the organization, he worked in Department 4B4 under Adolf Eichmann, who was responsible for organizing the deportation of Jews from across Europe. Seidl was then sent to Poznań in German-occupied Poland, where he oversaw the resettlement of Poles and Jews from newly annexed territories.
In October 1941, Eichmann ordered Seidl to establish the Theresienstadt Ghetto in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, roughly 60 kilometers, or 37 miles, north of Prague. The Protectorate had been created after Germany occupied the Czech lands in March 1939.
Theresienstadt was intended to serve several purposes. It functioned as a transit camp for Jews from Germany, Austria, and the Protectorate who were to be deported to extermination camps in Eastern Europe.
At the same time, it was used for propaganda, presented as a model Jewish settlement to mislead the international community, including representatives of the International Red Cross.
From November 1941 until July 1943, Seidl served as commandant of the Theresienstadt Ghetto. Under his authority, approximately 121,000 people were deported to Theresienstadt.
Around 25,000 died there, and almost 44,000 were deported farther east, where most were murdered.
The ghetto was overcrowded from the beginning. Food was scarce, medical care insufficient, and sanitation poor. The majority of inmates were elderly, making them especially vulnerable.
Seidl exercised wide powers. He insisted on strict discipline and demanded to be addressed formally as Mr. Camp Commandant. He shaped the early regulations of the camp and used his power to ban heating or lighting in the barracks, with devastating consequences for the old and sick.
People over 70 were assigned to cleaning duties. Those who disobeyed orders risked torture or inclusion on the next transport to the east.
Witnesses described Seidl as elegant and outwardly cultivated, interested in music and stamp collecting. Together with his family, he lived in a three-bedroom apartment at a nearby hotel, owned a riding horse, enjoyed hunting, and owned a sports car and a Mercedes company car.
This contrast between his private comfort and the suffering within the camp reflected a wider pattern among the SS leadership. Many perpetrators combined bourgeois lifestyles with direct participation in persecution and mass murder.
Seidl was also often present during the arrival of transports. Survivors testified that he used a whip to force exhausted prisoners to move faster.
On one occasion, Seidl beat a blind invalid war veteran named Oskar Löwy with a riding whip and punched him in the face so hard that his prosthetic eye broke. The only reason was that Oskar had asked about storing his luggage in a locker.
On another occasion, he had a prisoner named Arthur Miller, who arrived at Theresienstadt on the 13th transport from Vienna, beaten so severely that he died a few days later. Miller's offense was that he had played a role in the sale of his parents' mill.
Under orders from Eichmann, Seidl also organized the public hanging of 16 Jews accused of smuggling letters outside the camp. He carried out the order without hesitation.
In the autumn of 1942, when thousands of elderly prisoners died, he reportedly commented that the clock was ticking correctly, a remark that revealed his indifference to mass death.
On July 3, 1943, Seidl was transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. At the time, the camp was still developing and held relatively few prisoners compared to its later overcrowded state.
At Bergen-Belsen, Seidl served as head of the camp Gestapo and was also responsible for Jews from neutral countries and regions such as Spain or South America who were interned there. He allegedly interfered with personal documents and placed some individuals on deportation lists to Auschwitz, where extermination was systematic.
From Bergen-Belsen, he transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria to prepare for the deportation of Hungarian Jews. In March 1944, Seidl traveled to Budapest and joined the fifth Einsatzgruppe, a mobile SS killing formation.
He became part of Eichmann's special deployment command, which coordinated the deportation of Hungarian Jews. Between May 15 and July 9, 1944, in less than 60 days, approximately 440,000 Jews were deported from Hungary.
The majority were transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and upon arrival around 80 percent were sent directly to the gas chambers. Crematoria could not keep up with the number of bodies, and open pits were used to burn the dead.
Seidl participated in organizing confiscations and deportations in the city of Debrecen. He later oversaw Hungarian Jews held in forced labor camps and concentration camps in Vienna and Lower Austria.
The war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. After the collapse of Nazi Germany, Seidl attempted to hide in Austria under a false name in Vienna, but he was arrested in July 1945.
He was initially held by American occupation forces before being transferred to Austrian custody. Czechoslovakia requested his extradition because of his crimes in Theresienstadt, but Austrian authorities refused, arguing that many victims had been Austrian Jews.
In October 1946, Seidl was brought before the Austrian People's Court, a special tribunal established to prosecute Nazi crimes and collaboration. He faced charges related to executions and abuses committed during his leadership of Theresienstadt.
He was acquitted of specific murder accounts but convicted of high treason and crimes against humanity. During the trial, he first claimed that he had only followed orders, a common defense among former SS officers.
Later, he admitted his part in the atrocities. As a consequence of his wartime crimes, the doctorate he had received in 1941 was formally revoked. Seidl was sentenced to death and ordered to forfeit all of his property.
After hearing the verdict, he calmly bowed, but he turned pale and started trembling. In the days that followed, he begged for mercy despite having shown none to his own victims.
Even his wife and mother petitioned the president for clemency, saying he had three children. The petition was rejected.
On February 4, 1947, at 6:00 in the morning, the 35-year-old Siegfried Seidl was hanged in Vienna. As the noose was placed around his neck, Seidl told his executioner he was not sorry for the Jews he had killed and that he had nothing to regret.
He was pronounced dead seven minutes later.