A man who kept six children hidden in cellars is the grandson of a senior Nazi war criminal who established the Mauthausen concentration camp and hanged for war crimes.
Tom Landon, 54, spent 24 hours in police custody after officials found three boys and three girls aged between seven months and seven years in a cellar near the Czech border in Austria – after he used pepper spray to attack two officials who had come to question him about the living conditions of his family.
It was reported that social workers had been called to the property in Orbitz, just 60 miles north of Vienna after neighbours reported children crying.
Neighbours raised the alarm after hearing ‘crying’ from the cellar of the isolated building where Mr Landon lives with his wife, 40, and their three sons and three daughters, all aged under seven.
Officials found three boys and three girls aged between seven months and seven years in the cellar of the house, which had been recently bought by Landon.
Mr Landon’s family links to the Holocaust have since resurfaced as he is the grandson of Hitler henchman Ernst Kaltenbrunner.
Kaltenbrunner was the head of the Austrian SS and was the highest-ranking member of the SS to face trial at the Nuremberg trials.
He was found guilty and executed by hanging in October 1946.
Kaltenbrunner was childhood friends with Adolf Eichmann, the infamous SS officer who played a key role in implementing the Nazi’s ‘Final Solution’ which involved the systematic murder of millions of Jews.
Kaltenbrunner had five children, three with his wife Elisabeth Eder and two with his mistress Gisela Gräfin von Westarp.
Mr Landon has been associated with Kaltenbrunner a number of times and previously responded to this dark link, condemning his grandfather’s actions.
In 2012, Mr Landon told Austrian news website MeinBezirk.at: ‘I strongly condemned my grandfather’s actions, he was a criminal. No one took any notice of that.’
Mr Landon, who was an IT worker in North London before moving to Austria, is reported to be a Reichsburger, a revisionist group that believes Germany in its current form is not a sovereign state.
Mr Landon told the Daily Mail: ‘We chose not to register the children but they are all mine and now we will have to go to Vienna to take DNA tests to prove they are ours. If the authorities were so concerned why have they let the children come back to us?’
He added: ‘I bought these six properties for the children and I wanted us all to live together when they were older but now this plan has been ruined because the deputy mayor didn’t want us here.’
Mr Landon also confirmed to MailOnline he was the grandson of notorious Nazi war criminal Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who was leader of the feared SS in Austria and later head of police in wartime Germany.
Kaltenbrunner was a committed follower of Adolf Hitler to the bitter end, and was one of the main protagonists in the Holocaust.
He established the Mauthausen concentration camp, the first of its kind in Austria and where around 90,000 people were murdered.
According to historians, Kaltenbrunner was present at a 1940 meeting where Hitler and his fellow henchmen Josef Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler agreed all Jews incapable of heavy work should be gassed.
