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Veesenmayer, Edmund (born 1904) Reich Plenipotentiary and Hitler's deputy in Hungary towards the end of World War II, SS Major General Edmund Veesenmayer was born in Bad Kissingen on 12 November 1904. After studying economics, he lectured at Munich Technical College and the Berlin School of Economy. An early member of the NSDAP, he subsequently made his career in the SS before being transferred to the German Foreign Office as Wilhelm Keppler's (q.v.) protégé. Veesenmayer frequently travelled to the Balkans and was used on confidential missions by the Foreign Office. He also had considerable business interests in Austria, being a member of the board of Donauchemie AG (Vienna), the Länderbank AG (Vienna) and the Standard Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft (Berlin). From the spring of 1941 he was attached to the German legation at Zagreb, recommending the deportation of Serbian Jews. This became Veesenmayer's special area and he later wrote long reports to von Ribbentrop (q.v.) complaining about the failure of Hungary and Slovakia to renew deportation of Jews. Promoted on 15 March 1944 to SS Brigadeführer, Veesenmayer was sent to Hungary as Reich Plenipotentiary where, from March to October, he engaged in anti-semitic activities and was intimately involved in the ‘Final Solution’, providing Adolf Eichmann's (q.v.) commando with diplomatic cover. Nominally, Veesenmayer was still responsible to von Ribbentrop and the Foreign Office, but he reported primarily to Ernst Kaltenbrunner (q.v.) at the RSHA on his efforts in securing the co-operation of the Hungarian authorities with the German police in implementing the liquidation of Hungarian Jewry. On 2 April 1949 the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg sentenced Veesenmayer to twenty years’ imprisonment for war crimes. He was released from Landsberg prison in December 1951, thanks to the intervention of the US High Commissioner in Germany.