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Capturing Kaltenbrunner

The Pursuit, Capture, and Trial of Hitler’s Hidden Gestapo Chief SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner

9781955656986
280 pages
Little Creek Press
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Overview
Three days after the official end of World War II in Europe, U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps Special Agent Robert E. Matteson led a high-stakes mission into the Austrian Alps to locate and apprehend one of the most dangerous and elusive figures of the Third Reich: SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of Hitler’s Gestapo, Security Service, and Criminal Police. Ruthless and virtually unknown to the public, Kaltenbrunner had gone into hiding, hoping to escape justice for his role in the atrocities of the Holocaust and Nazi terror.

Told in Matteson’s own words, Capturing Kaltenbrunner is a gripping first-person account of wartime espionage, relentless pursuit, and extraordinary courage. From the tense intelligence-gathering operations to the dramatic nighttime mountain raid that led to Kaltenbrunner’s arrest, Matteson recounts with vivid detail the events that culminated in the capture of one of the Nazi regime’s highest-ranking fugitives. The story continues through Kaltenbrunner’s trial at Nuremberg, where his crimes were finally exposed to the world.

Part military memoir, part historical thriller, and part reckoning with justice, Capturing Kaltenbrunner is a unique window into a forgotten chapter of World War II, told by the man who lived it.
Author Bio
Robert Eliot Matteson (1914–1994) was a decorated World War II veteran, U.S. foreign policy expert, and disarmament advocate. A graduate of Carleton College and Harvard, he served in the U.S. State Department and later as a Counter Intelligence Corps agent, leading the capture of SS General Ernst Kaltenbrunner in 1945. Matteson held senior roles in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations, shaping arms control policy during the Cold War. After opposing the Vietnam War, he became the first director of the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute at Northland College. An avid canoeist, mountaineer, and lifelong public servant, he spent his final years in northern Wisconsin with his wife, Jane.

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