Friedrich Rainer

In the course of the Austrian Anschluss to Nazi Germany on 13 March 1938, Rainer was recruited to serve as the organizational staff leader in the office of Josef Bürckel, the Reichskommissar responsible for the annexation of the Austrian lands. On 22 May 1938, Rainer was personally appointed by Hitler as Gauleiter of the Nazi Party in the Reichsgau Salzburg. Upon the 1938 elections, he also was elected a member of the Reichstag in Berlin.[5]

When World War II broke out, Rainer was appointed as Reich Defense Commissioner of Wehrkreis (Military District) XVIII, headquartered in Salzburg, which comprised his Reichsgau along with Reichsgau Carinthia, Reichsgau Styria and Reichsgau Tirol-Vorarlberg. This gave him control of civil defense matters over a very large area. On 15 March 1940, he was additionally appointed as the Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) of Salzburg, thus uniting under his control the highest party and governmental offices in his jurisdiction. Rainer remained in these offices at Salzburg until 27 November 1941, when he was succeeded by Gustav Adolf Scheel.[6]

On 27 November 1941, Rainer was appointed as the Gauleiter and Reichsstatthalter of Reichsgau Carinthia, which also involved ruling over the adjacent occupied Yugoslavian territories in Upper Carniola. On 16 November 1942, Rainer was made Reich Defense Commissioner of Carinthia. On 21 June 1943 he was promoted to SS–Obergruppenführer.[7] After Italy abandoned its German ally on 8 September 1943, Rainer took over the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral as High Commissioner. This act established him as the chief of the civil administration in the Italian region of Friuli, as well as in Yugoslavian Istria and Inner Carniola.

On 7 May 1945, eight days after Hitler's suicide, Rainer transferred his official functions to an executive board and fled to the mountainous area around the Weißensee lake in Carinthia. After being given leads by the local population, British occupation troops arrested Rainer and transferred him to Nuremberg Prison in October 1945.[8] On 12/13 June 1946, he appeared at the Nuremberg Trials as a defence witness for the former Austrian chancellor Dr Arthur Seyss-Inquart.

On 13 March 1947, Rainer was extradited to Yugoslavia. Here he wrote an 80-page work on the Nürnberg Trials for Yugoslav authorities.[8] On 10 July 1947, he was brought before a military court of the Yugoslav 4th Army at Ljubljana. He was found guilty of crimes against the people and sentenced to death by hanging on 19 July 1947. His widow received a death certificate from Yugoslavia after the war, which showed that same date. For decades afterward, the date of his execution was unknown and could only be speculated. In 2010, documentation came to light in the Slovenian National Archives in Ljubljana which may well have answered the question. An entry in the diary of Boris Kraigher, former interior minister in Slovenia, indicates that Dr Rainer was executed with a number of other prisoners in late November 1950. He would have been 47 years old if this is correct. The long delay in Rainer's execution is reportedly due to Tito's secret police having utilized him as an informant. Upwards of 3,000 pages of his words, written from the Summer of 1947 through late 1949, and probably into 1950, have been deposited in the Slovenian National Archives.[9]