Bruno Sattler

Bruno Sattler became a member of the Nazi Party during the closing months of 1931. After the Hitler government took power at the start of 1933 he joined the Gestapo, achieving a succession of promotions during the ensuing decade. In 1942 he was posted to Belgrade with the rank of "SS-Sturmbannführer", as Gestapo Police Chief for occupied Serbia. He remained in post until October 1944, when the German occupation of the territory was ended. He turned up with a false name in Berlin during 1947, but was evidently identified. In October 1947 he was abducted by the Soviet security services from what later became known as West Berlin, and taken to the eastern part of the city in the Soviet occupation zone. His family heard nothing more from him and in 1949 he was pronounced dead. He had actually been detained, probably in the occupied zone that became the East Germany in October 1949. Several major atrocities committed during the Nazi era were associated with Sattler, and it became known much later that in 1952 he faced trial "for his Gestapo activities". It was only by chance that a year later his wife learned that he was still alive. By then, he was serving a life sentence after being convicted of war crimes by the Greifswald District Court. According to some sources, the circumstances of Sattler's death in the prison hospital at the jail in Leipzig-Meusdorf in 1972 never became clear. Elsewhere it is stated that he was shot dead in his prison cell.