Wisliceny, Dieter

(1911–1948)

   As a member of Adolf Eichmann’s staff, Wisliceny was responsible for the mass deportation of Jews from Slovakia, Greece, and Hungary. In 1931, he joined the Nazi Party and in 1934 joined both the Schutzstaffel (SS) and the Sicherheitsdienst (SD). In 1940, he acted as the advisor on Jewish affairs to the Slovak government, but because of his opportunism and concern for money, he soon acquired a reputation for accepting bribes. During the summer of 1942, Wisliceny was bribed by the Bratislava-based Jewish Relief Committee to delay the deportation of Slovakian Jews. He also negotiated the ill-fated Europa Plan, initiated by Rabbi Michael Dov Weissmandel, to save the remnants of European Jewry for a ransom of $2 million to $3 million, to be paid for by Jewish organizations abroad. Wisliceny accepted a bribe of $50,000 as a first installment, although he had no intention of halting the deportations.

   In 1943 and 1944, Wisliceny was assigned to Salonika, where he introduced the definition of a Jew in accordance with the Nuremberg Laws. He ordered Jews to wear the yellow Star of David badge, and subsequently ordered Jewish physicians and lawyers to mount Jewish stars in their offices. Wisliceny also required the stars to be placed by Jewish tenants on their apartment doors for the purpose of identification. These directives were ordered in preparation for an efficient roundup and deportation of Greece’s Jews to Auschwitz. Wisliceny’s mission to Salonika was ultimately successful inasmuch as he was instrumental in the subsequent annihilation of Greek Jewry. His last assignment was in March 1944, when he joined Eichmann in Hungary to organize the deportation of the country’s Jewish population to Auschwitz. In Hungary, Wisliceny served as the liaison in the failed blood-for-goods negotiations, in which Eichmann offered to save the lives of one million Jews in exchange for goods, including 10,000 trucks.

   After the war, Wisliceny served as a witness at the Nuremberg Trials and presented a vivid description of the implementation of the Final Solution. He is the source of the alleged comment attributed to Eichmann that “he would leap into his grave laughing,” because the feeling that he had the death of five million Jews on his conscience was to him “a source of extraordinary satisfaction.” Soon after the trial, Wisliceny was extradited to Czechoslovakia, and while awaiting trial wrote several affidavits attesting to his role in the destruction of European Jewry, including his role in the Europa Plan, the bargaining over Jewish lives in Hungary, and Eichmann’s central role in the implementation of the Final Solution. The latter affidavit was used at the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Wisliceny was found guilty by a Czech court for complicity in mass murder and was executed in February 1948.