Walter Kutschmann

Walter Kutschmann (24 July 1914 – 30 August 1986) was a German SS-Untersturmführer and Gestapo officer, a member of an Einsatzkommando, based first in Lwów, Poland (today Lviv, Ukraine), and later in Drohobycz. He was culpable for the massacre of 1,500 Polish Jews in Lwów, Poland in the years 1941–42.

Walter Kutschmann was born in Dresden in 1914, the son of a dentist. In 1928, he joined the Hitler Youth. In 1932, he enlisted in the Luftwaffe, in which he served until 1936. He began to study law, but left this career path to join the Condor Legion, loyal to the forces of Francisco Franco in Spain, participating in the Spanish Civil War. There he was later the third secretary of the German Consulate in Cádiz. Kutschmann was a relative latecomer to the Nazi Party (membership number 7,475,729) and the SS (membership number 404,651).

At the start of the Second World War, he moved to Leipzig, where he joined the SiPo (Security Police) forces commanded by Karl Eberhard Schöngarth. He was promoted to SS-Untersturmführer and was the commanding officer of an Einsatzgruppe that operated in Drohobycz, Poland. Under his leadership, Kutschmann participated in the massacre of Lwów professors in 1941. In 1942, he ordered the murder of 1,500 Polish intellectuals in the Lwów region, in Brzeziny and Podhajce in what is now part of Ukraine. Witnesses said that the Ukrainians who were ordered to dig the graves for the killings were themselves later slain on Kutschmann's orders. Witnesses also claim that Kutschmann shot a 17 or 18-year-old Jewish housemaid in Drohobycz in 1941, after he accused her of having transmitted a venereal disease to him. In 1944, on the orders of intelligence officer Hans Günther von Dincklage, he was transferred to Paris, where he was briefly associated with Coco Chanel during Operation Modellhut. While in France at the end of 1944, Kutschmann defected to seek refuge in Vigo, Spain under the guise of a Carmelite monk named Pedro Ricardo Olmo Andrés, residing in Vigo.

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