Bruno Sattler became a member of the Nazi Party during the closing months of 1931.
41 Facts About Bruno Sattler
1.
2.
Bruno Sattler remained in post until October 1944, when the German occupation of the territory was ended.
3.
Bruno Sattler turned up with a false name in Berlin during 1947, but was evidently identified.
4.
Bruno Sattler's family heard nothing more from him and in 1949 he was pronounced dead.
5.
Bruno Sattler had actually been detained, probably in the occupied zone that became the East Germany in October 1949.
6.
Bruno Sattler was born at Schmargendorf, a rapidly expanding municipality on the south-western edge of Berlin, into which it has subsequently been subsumed.
7.
Bruno Sattler therefore passed his "Abitur" only in 1919, the year of his twenty-first birthday.
8.
Bruno Sattler found time to join the Ehrhardt Brigade, one of the "Freikorps" units of defeated former imperial army soldiers that emerged during the months of revolution which broke out after the war.
9.
Bruno Sattler was obliged to cut short his education and earn money in order to support his own needs and those of his mother.
10.
Bruno Sattler had imbibed to the full his parents' "traditional values", which in his case involved not just the rather nostalgic nationalism that was widespread among those hankering for "the good old days, before the war", but a gnawing antisemitism.
11.
One of them was by this time working for the police service, and through this contact Bruno Sattler received and accepted the offer of a job in the police service, joining the "Criminal police" in 1928.
12.
Nevertheless, according to subsequent research by his daughter it was Bruno Sattler who gave the order to shoot.
13.
Bruno Sattler immediately assumed leadership of the new organisation's "Department IV A2", with responsibilities covering Sabotage Prevention, Political-Police Defence and Political Counterfeiting operations.
14.
Bruno Sattler was later part of an equivalent task force mandated to take over the Interior Ministry in Moscow, but Moscow held out.
15.
At the start of 1942 Bruno Sattler was promoted to the rank of "SS-Sturmbannfuhrer" and "[Police] Kriminaldirektor", ahead of his posting to Belgrade.
16.
At the time when Bruno Sattler took charge of the Belgrade Gestapo, the department was already an established key element in the military administration of the region.
17.
In Belgrade, Bruno Sattler worked with a team of approximately 30 people with backgrounds in the Gestapo, Criminal law enforcement and Secret Police work.
18.
The prime target of the network of agents and spies that Bruno Sattler ran were those identified as leaders in the resistance groups.
19.
The number of antifascist resistance fighters arrested on Bruno Sattler's watch in Belgrade was given as around 3,000.
20.
The 1952 trial court was told that Bruno Sattler did not himself participate in any of these hostage shootings.
21.
Bruno Sattler saw his own role as an administrative one.
22.
On or shortly after 9 May 1945 Bruno Sattler crossed the river, armed with six different sets of identity papers and a plan.
23.
In 1949 reports surfaced that Bruno Sattler had successfully undergone a denazification process and was dead.
24.
Bruno Sattler was still being subjected to interrogation in a succession of prisons in East Germany and - according to some sources the Soviet Union.
25.
Bruno Sattler could look forward to a lifelong prison sentence, but for at least as long as the authorities thought they might extract more information from him, his life seems not to have been in immediate danger.
26.
Access, after 1990, to Stasi records do not clarify the precise details of when, how or indeed why Bruno Sattler was killed in 1972.
27.
In one of the files, in records of a questioning of someone else, it is indeed noted that Bruno Sattler had actually been sentenced to death at or shortly following his trial in July 1952.
28.
Beate Niemann, the youngest of the Bruno Sattler's three daughter, was born in November 1942.
29.
Bruno Sattler's father was away in Serbia at the time.
30.
Bruno Sattler nevertheless enjoyed a varied career, which included work as both as a physiotherapist and as a foreign correspondent.
31.
Bruno Sattler began a more structured research exercise, starting by obtaining copies of her father's birth and death certificates.
32.
Bruno Sattler started with what she knew, about his time at university studying Botany and Economics first in Berlin and then at Greifswald.
33.
Bruno Sattler knew he had belonged to the same student fraternities at university as his brothers, father and grandfather.
34.
Bruno Sattler knew he had joined a Freikorps but had very little idea what a Freikorps was.
35.
Bruno Sattler found her father's name in the index and quickly discovered that one of his first administrative tasks, on his arrival in Belgrade, had involved arranging the provision from Berlin of a "Gas van" in order to kill the remaining Jews in the local concentration camp.
36.
Bruno Sattler had been responsible for preparing, organising and directing the mass killing.
37.
Bruno Sattler probably went for long walks in the woods around Berlin.
38.
Bruno Sattler was later told by friends and family that she had "disappeared from circulation" for several weeks.
39.
Bruno Sattler seems never to have read the book on the Freikorps from cover to cover.
40.
Bruno Sattler's mother had always sworn to her that Bruno Sattler had never worn an SS uniform: yet this picture had a note in her mother's handwriting on the reverse of it.
41.
Bruno Sattler broke off relations with her mother as early as 1978 and subsequently lost all contact with her two elder sisters, both of whom "sided with her mother".