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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
The war was over, but one of Hitler’s most dangerous men was still on the run—and capturing him would take courage, cunning, and relentless pursuit.

Three days after the official end of World War II, 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, and the superior of Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. Virtually unknown to the public, Kaltenbrunner had gone into hiding high in the Austrian Alps, 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 in vivid detail the historic events that culminated in the capture of the highest-ranking Nazi official still at large at war’s end. 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 nearly hidden 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, earning the prestigious Silver Star for his role in Kaltenbrunner’s capture. A graduate of Carleton College and Harvard, he held senior roles in the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations, shaping arms control policy during the Cold War and later serving as a regional director for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). An avid canoeist, mountaineer, and lifelong public servant, he spent his final years in northern Wisconsin and St. Paul, Minnesota, with his loving lifelong partner and wife, Jane.

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