Theodor Adrian von Renteln

Theodor Adrian von Renteln was born in Khodzi, Russia. He studied law and economics, but became a journalist. In 1928, he joined the NSDAP and the following year, he became the head of the National Socialist Secondary School Students' League. In 1931, he was appointed the head of the Hitler Youth, but he gave up leadership of the two organizations upon his election to the Reichstag.

On March 29, 1933, he became a member of the “Central Committee for Deflecting Jewish Atrocity and Boycott-Mongering,” participating in the boycott of Jewish businesses and other forms of persecution. In June 1933, he was appointed President of the German Council of Industry and Trade, holding this position until 1935. Renteln soon became known as the prime defender of the middle class in Nazi Germany. Von Renteln was also a member of the German Labor Front, being a staff leader. In 1940, he was appointed the Hauptamtsleiter of the Trade and Artisanship Section of the NSDAP Reich Leadership and was also the head of the Supreme Court of the Reich Labor Front.

In 1941, he was appointed the Generalkommissar of Lithuania, where he took increasingly harsh measures against the Jewish population. On August 26, 1941, he ordered that all telephones and lines were to be stripped, postal service be cut off, and bridges to the Kovno ghetto be surrounded with barbed wire fenses to prevent people from jumping off. This order also forbid the Jews of the Kovno ghetto to use doors, window frames, or houses for fuel. In 1943, he was implicated in the clearing of the Vilna ghetto, deporting 20,000 Jews to concentration or death camps. He was also implicated in plundering.

After the war, he was allegedly captured by the Russians, tried, and hanged for his crimes in 1946.

For decades, historians believed that von Renteln was executed by Soviet authorities in 1946. However, new evidence uncovered in Spain in 2025 has shown this was incorrect. Archival and cemetery records revealed that von Renteln lived in Madrid under the false identity of “Karl Jacobson,” where he died of lung cancer on October 24, 1960, in the Clínica de la Concepción. He was buried in the Cementerio Civil de Madrid, his tombstone marked with his real name and the title “Dr.” In 1993, his wife, Anna Erna Friede Auguste von Renteln, was interred in the same grave. A falsified death certificate listed him as a Lithuanian citizen born in 1889, apparently to obscure his identity. These findings indicate that von Renteln lived under the protection of Francoist Spain, which harbored numerous Nazi fugitives after the war.

Sources: What-Means.Com. This article is availiable under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
Ana María Pascual, “The discovery of a Nazi criminal’s grave in Madrid rewrites his history: he lived under Francoism with a false identity,” Público, (September 6, 2025). [Spanish]

Photo: Unknown / Not disclosed, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.