La Vengeance Sanglante de la Famille d'Ernst Kaltenbrunner et la Brutale Capture du Chef de la RSHA

Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Gestapo and successor to Reinhard Heydrich, was the man who transformed the SS of the Third Reich into the most efficient instrument of extermination during the Holocaust and World War II. On May 12, 1945, American soldiers found him in a cabin in the Austrian Alps with forged documents in the name of Dr. Ernst Unterholzer. They identified him within minutes: nearly two meters tall with an unmistakable scar on his left cheek. He had coordinated the deportation of 437,000 Hungarian Jews in 56 days alongside Adolf Eichmann. He had led the investigation into the July 20, 1944, plot that resulted in more than 5,000 arrests and nearly 5,000 executions. He had planned to assassinate Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt in a single night in Tehran through Operation Great Leap. He had overseen the construction of the Mauthausen concentration camp and coordinated with Hitler and Himmler the deportation machinery that killed millions at Auschwitz and in the camps of occupied Europe. He was not an imported German. He was the most accomplished product of Austrian Nazism: the man who secretly organized the Anschluss for eight years of illegality and prepared the surrender of his own country before Germany's arrival. Austria imprisoned him twice before 1938. By the time Hitler entered Vienna, he had already laid the groundwork. At the Nuremberg Trials, he was the only survivor to have directly directed the operational apparatus of extermination. He claimed never to have killed anyone. He was right in the narrowest sense of the word and completely wrong in every other respect. This documentary reconstructs his escape from Berlin, his capture under a false identity, the Nuremberg trials where documents dismantled his defense piece by piece, and his execution in the early hours of October 16, 1946. It also tells what no other documentary has recounted: what happened to his family—to his wife and three children, to his aristocratic mistress and the newborn twins—and to the family name that, decades later, still appeared intact on lawyers' diplomas and at the bottom of an Austrian lake.