In 1939 he was the dean of the Faculty of Foreign Policy at the University of Berlin, a position he accessed thanks to his affiliation with the National Socialist Party, to which he had belonged since his youth. In 1935 he joined the dark SS and thanks to the impressive academic career of Reinhard Heydrich, a senior officer of the Reich Central Security Office took him to work at his side.
Many historians consider Heydrich the darkest figure within the group that surrounded Hitler, they said “the man with the iron heart” which, in that context, was a description that could only highlight its extreme cruelty. “The executioner” (he was also called that) was responsible for organizing the Kristallnacht (The night of broken glass) in 1938.
The son of a well-known opera singer, he was a man of great culture with a Wagnerian devotion, the character that inspired in Visconti that memorable scene of Nazi leaders enjoying “The fall of the gods”.
Franz Six joined the group of SS leaders where he dedicated himself to creating anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic propaganda while managing the media to spread Nazi ideology, attentive to any deviation from the press.
On September 17, 1940, the same day that Hitler gave up invading England, he commissioned Six to make a list of all the British who would have to be eliminated if he took over Great Britain. To this end, he had compiled a “black book” with 2,820 people who were to be eliminated as soon as possible. It was obviously included sir Winston Churchillbut also characters like Sigmund Freud, Bertrand Russell and Bernard Baruch (an American financier of Jewish origin). The list continued with Freemasons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and even Boy Scouts! but it excluded members of the royal house, descendants of aristocratic German families who had changed their surname to Windspor during the First World War.
As the project to invade England was postponed, Six was assigned as head of the Vorkommen Moscow where in a few days he eliminated 144 people, including 38 Jewish intellectuals. As they had done in Poland, it was essential to destroy the most notable parts of the community, those that could make a difference. For these “services” he was promoted to SS Oberführer by Himmler himself, who would reappoint him as Brigadeführer at the end of the war.
Throughout those years millions of Jews, Gypsies and Russians were taken to concentration camps where they served as slave labor or were directly exterminated within the Final Solution scheme that Six and Heydrich had helped design. Originally the idea was to deport the Jews and it was even thought of sending them to Madagascar, but as millions of people were captured, the original plan changed to extermination, under the dark euphemism of “Final solution”.
One of the clerks who devised this sinister plan was Eichmann, who had escaped from Germany using “the way of the rats”to Argentina where he lived comfortably under pseudonyms, although he did not hide his anti-Semitism. He was kidnapped in Buenos Aires by the Mossad, transferred to Israel and tried for his participation in this sinister plan. During the trial in Israel, Eichmann’s defense attorney, Dr. Robert Servatius he called Six as a witness. After being tried in Nuremberg, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, but only served 7 years in prison. When he was summoned by Eichmann’s defense he was already working as a public relations executive and management consultant for a major German automobile company.
Servatius requested that he make a statement in person, but the prosecutor in the case, Gideon Hausner He stated that if he showed up in Israel he would be arrested as a war criminal. During his remote testimony, Six acknowledged being Eichmann’s boss. Eichmann obviously hid behind the “due obedience” and I argue that I am just a gear –very efficient– in the well-oiled Nazi criminal machine.
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Both Eichmann, Six, and Heydrich (who was assassinated in Prague during the war) were educated people, remarkable professionals who fell into the traps of Hitler’s populist, jingoistic and racist discourse and acted as automatons of a scheme of “totalitarian dictatorships in their own right. what did you call them Hannah Arendt, institutions where the trivialization of evil prevailed, that is, the dilution of responsibilities in a bureaucratic context that reified human dignity.
Probably the cause of the impunity that protected Six was his participation in the Gehlen Organization, precursor of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, in the 1950s, as an anti-communist entity.. His performance in Russia made him an ideal specialist for the world conflict that many believed would be bloodier than the war that had just ended. In its place was waged a long spasmodic conflict and arms race that filled the world with weapons of mass destruction.
Six died on July 9, 1975 in Bologna, of a heart attack while vacationing in Italy.
Source: Ambito
