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ERNST KALTENBRUNNER (1903 – 1946) SS-Obergruppenfuhrer who headed the RSHA (Gestapo and Kripo) and SD, replacing Reinhard Heydrich. Executed following conviction for multiple war crimes. NAZIS SEIZE THE ASSETS OF SCIENTIST EUGENE STEINACH Fine content and association on official letterhead as Higher SS and Police Leader, Vienna, June 29, 1939 to JOSEF BURCKEL (1895-1944), Gauleiter of the Saar Palatinate and Vienna who promoted anti-Jewish decrees and seized Jewish property, also deporting nearly 50,000 Jews to their deaths. Kaltenbrunner asks Burckel to sign and return to him instructions to Bankhaus Krentschker in Vienna, who had been commissioned by the Vienna Foreign Exchange Office, to handle the financial affairs of ‘the Steinach case…to transfer the Jewish property of the named person after the Reich emigration tax and personal taxes etc. in the amount of RM 120,000 have been paid…We ask you to return [this] after you have signed so that the rest of the process may be arranged from here…’ Several stamp dockets, file holes in margin, else very good. The ‘Steinach’ referred to was the eminent Austrian scientist EUGENE STEINACH (1861-1944), a physiologist and pioneer in endocrinology. Steinach played a significant role in discovering the relationship between sex hormones (estrogen and testosterone) to human physical identifiers. Steinach received six nominations for the Nobel Prize in Physiology from 1921 to 1938, although he never received the prize. When the Nazis seized power in Austria in March 1938, Steinach and his wife, who was also of Jewish descent, were on a lecture tour in Switzerland. The new regime destroyed Steinach’s library and his research material and prevented him and his wife from returning to Vienna. Steinach’s wife committed suicide in Zurich in September 1938, and Steinach died lonely and disillusioned near Montreux in May 1944.
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