That July, he was rearrested following an attempted coup, but escaped police custody and fled to Nazi Germany, where he joined the Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) and then the Allgemeine SS.

Meyszner's time in Belgrade was characterised by friction and competition with German military, economic and foreign affairs officials, and by his visceral hatred and distrust of Serbs.

[5][6] A few days after the outbreak of World War I, Meyszner married Pia Gostischa from Marburg an der Drau (Maribor); the couple eventually had one daughter and one son.

[2] In December 1919,[6] Meyszner was placed in charge of the border gendarmerie at the Styrian town of Judenburg, on the frontier with the newly created Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Yugoslavia),[5] and was involved in fighting there.

[8] That year, he had become involved with the German-nationalist sporting association Deutsch-Völkischen Turnvereins and was made a leader in the right-wing paramilitary Steirischen Heimatschutz (Styrian Home Guard).

While commanding a gendarmerie detachment sent to oversee the unification of Burgenland with Austria in August 1921, Meyszner was shot in the leg by local Hungarians rebelling against the transfer.

[5][10] According to the German historian Martin Moll, Meyszner's governmental responsibilities meant that he was unable to take an active part in the abortive coup d'état led by the Home Guard Landesleiter Pfrimer in 1931 but while claiming he knew nothing of the putsch beforehand, he openly stated in the Landtag that he approved of it.

[6][13] In contrast, the historian Ruth Birn writes that Meyszner was a major participant in the putsch and was arrested, brought to trial, and acquitted, along with Pfrimer and Kammerhofer.

[14] Meyszner continued his Home Guard activities and together with Rauter supported Kammerhofer's push for closer links with the Austrian Nazi Party,[12][14] holding several meetings with Hitler's delegate in Austria, Theodor Habicht.

The fact that Meyszner had completely adopted Nazi ideology was demonstrated by his anti-Jewish diatribe in the Landtag in April 1933,[12] which reinforced his speeches advancing the anti-semitic policy of the Home Guard under Kammerhofer.

[21][24] Soon after he had taken office Meyszner clashed with Kaltenbrunner, requiring the intervention of the Chief of the Orpo, SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei Kurt Daluege.

[26] After war broke out, Meyszner was appointed to more senior positions, beginning in early 1940 when he was named a representative of the Higher SS and Police Leader (German: Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, HSSPF) for Fulda-Werra, SS-Obergruppenführer Josias Waldeck-Pyrmont.

[27] In mid-January 1942, he was recalled to Germany and, despite his low rank, attended a conference of senior SS leaders at Hegewald, Himmler's field headquarters near Hitler's Wolf's Lair in East Prussia.

The conference discussed the use of forced labour, the coming Final Solution and Generalplan Ost, a plan for the colonisation of Central and Eastern Europe by ethnic Germans.

The German military administration supervised a Serbian puppet regime known as the Government of National Salvation, led by the former Yugoslav Minister of War, Milan Nedić.

One of his priorities was to improve coordination of policies towards the Volksdeutsche (or Germans of Yugoslavia), concentrated in the Banat region, as the decision had been made in late 1941 to subject them to conscription in order to raise a Waffen-SS division.

[37] These had been commanded by SS-Standartenführer (SS-Colonel) Wilhelm Fuchs, who had overseen the shooting of many Serbian and Jewish males and others, mainly by Wehrmacht units, between August 1941 and the end of that year.

[41] One of the units controlled by Meyszner was the Auxiliary Police Troop, recruited from Russian Volksdeutsche from the occupied territory but also from Croatia, Bulgaria, Greece and Romania and trained by the Orpo.

Meyszner's duties also extended to any matter related to the "strengthening" of the German minority in Serbia, which included authority over the security forces of the puppet regime and collection of revenue and the consolidation and utilisation of existing Volksdeutsche volunteer units in the Waffen-SS.

[49] In April, Turner wrote in a self-congratulatory tone to Himmler's personal staff officer, SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Wolff, stating that he had already had all the available Jewish men killed and all the women and children placed in the Sajmište concentration camp.

[50] Holocaust historian Christopher Browning considers this claim suspect, stating that Turner's reports about Jewish affairs were often inaccurate and self-serving in an attempt to ingratiate himself with Hitler and shore up his position.

Meyszner believed the only way to maintain peace and security was the use of brutal police methods; Turner wanted to empower the Nedić regime and then replace the military administration with a civil one, akin to the Reichskommissariat Niederlande, with himself as Reichskommissar (governor).

[58] Meyszner fundamentally opposed any attempts by Turner to expand the remit of the Serbian puppet regime, including the creation of sporting organisations and the re-opening of the University of Belgrade, asserting that it could not be in Germany's interests to "breed hostile Slavic intelligence".

[60] The depths to which Turner and Meyszner's personal vendetta plunged is demonstrated by the fact that they could not even agree on how to use the funds stolen from Serbian Jews killed as part of the Final Solution in 1941 and the first half of 1942.

[34] In early September 1942, Meyszner filed an official report with Himmler alleging that Turner had breached section 90 of the German Penal Code by betraying state secrets.

[27] In January 1943, Nedić proposed a basic law for Serbia, in effect a constitution creating an authoritarian corporative state similar to that long advocated by Dimitrije Ljotić and his pre-war fascist Yugoslav National Movement.

[76] In April 1943, Bader wrote to Löhr complaining bitterly about Meyszner allocating 300 Soviet prisoners of war to the Russian Factory Protection Group without consulting him and the fact that he had not been advised of desertions from the Serbian Volunteer Corps.

[77] At Meyszner's insistence, on 5 August the Bader gave an order which stated that male family members of resistance fighters could either be fined, be shipped to Germany as forced labour or be executed in reprisals.

[82] Special Envoy Hermann Neubacher arrived in Belgrade armed with orders from Hitler, directing him to undertake a range of tasks aimed at unifying the fight against communist forces in south-east Europe.

[78] The following month, SS-Standartenführer Paul Blobel's Kommando 1005 arrived in Belgrade to dig up and burn the bodies of the Jewish women and children killed by Meyszner's Gestapo.