The 12th of March 1938. German troops cross the border with Austria and invade
the country without firing a single shot. They are not met with armed resistance,
but with cheers and flowers. While thousands of Austrians turn out to greet Adolf Hitler as he
travels first to Linz and then on to Vienna, terrified Jews, leftists and other opponents
of the Nazi Regime race towards the country’s borders, hoping to reach them before they are
closed but most would become trapped in a rapidly nazifying Austria. In the weeks that follow,
there is pogrom-like violence across the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat up,
attack, and humiliate the Jews. They force them to scrub the streets, clean public toilets and
perform humiliating exercises. Many decide to try to leave Austria and lines appear at
consulates across the city of Vienna. One of the most fanatical Austrian Nazis who will
become a key figure in the implementation of the Final Solution is Odilo Globocnik.
Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik, the son of an Austrian Croat family of low-ranking officials,
was born on the 21st of April 1904 in Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary. Globocnik was a
builder by profession and in 1920s he worked as a technician and construction supervisor.
In 1931, he joined the Nazi party in Austria, engaged in several
illegal activities for the Party and was imprisoned several times as a result.
In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany and he fully intended
to bring about an Austro-German union. However, Germany was not immediately
militarily and diplomatically ready to carry out Hitler’s foreign policy goals.
First, Hitler and other Nazi leaders focused on establishing a Nazi dictatorship. However,
behind the scenes the Nazi leadership began planning territorial expansion and a European
war almost as soon as they took power. Beginning in May 1933, the Austrian Nazis waged a propaganda
and terror campaign which was encouraged and funded by Germany. The Nazi goal was to undermine
the regime of the Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by making it look incompetent. They
staged disruptive protests and brawled with political opponents and the police. Austrian
Nazis set off explosives and tear gas bombs in public places and Jewish-owned businesses.
One of the bombs was thrown on June 12, 1933 in Vienna into a jewelry shop of Norbert Futterweit,
who was of Jewish descent. As a result of the bomb explosion Futterweit was instantly dead and there
were several people badly injured at the store and on the street. Several historians believe
that Globocnik was behind the attack. Futterweit’s murder was one of the attacks that led to the ban
of the Austrian Nazi Party and its affiliates on June 19, 1933. However, although the Nazi movement
became illegal in Austria, the Austrian Nazis continued to operate illegally within the country.
In August 1933, Globocnik was arrested for the first time, for his attempt to contact imprisoned
Nazis in Klagenfurt. Between 1933 and 1935 he was arrested 4 times but served just over a
year in jail because Heinrich Himmler, the German head of the SS, always intervened on his behalf.
Himmler liked Globocnik, familiarly called him ‘Globus’ and recognized
the value of this ruthless Austrian. His fanatical devotion to the Nazi
cause paid off for Globocnik, as he quickly climbed the ladder of the party apparatus in
his native Austria and in 1936 he was appointed provincial Nazi Chief of the Carinthia region.
At that time, Globocnik was ridiculed by other Nazis for his Slavic surname, as the Nazis
classified Slavs as sub-humans. However, senior Nazis such as Heinrich Himmler, defended him,
saying that he was of Aryan origin and that his surname was a result of Slavicization.
In the spring of 1938 Adolf Hitler annexed the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich.
The Anschluss, as it became known, took place over three days between the
11th and 13th of March 1938. On 24 May of the same year
Globocnik was promoted to the post of regional Nazi party leader of Vienna.
Globocnik then launched a crusade against the Church, and the Nazis confiscated property,
closed Catholic organisations and sent many priests to Dachau. Anger at the treatment of
the Church in Austria grew quickly, and in October 1938 the first act of overt mass resistance to the
new regime took place. A rally of thousands left Mass in Vienna chanting "Christ is our Führer",
before being dispersed by police. After Cardinal Theodor Innitzer denounced
Nazi persecution of the Church, a Nazi mob ransacked his residence.
The power went too much to Globocnik’s head and he got involved in foreign currency speculation
using an astonishing number of dirty tricks, particularly in financial matters.
Odilo Globocnik was also a sexual deviant who used his power to force
girls from the Austrian upper classes to sexual orgies. Because of these reasons,
in 1939 he was stripped of his party honors. A major factor behind his downfall
was Hermann Göring who had made efforts to have Globocnik dismissed from his high party office.
Himmler then transferred Globocnik to the Waffen-SS, which was the military
branch of the SS, with which he took part in the invasion of Poland. The Polish Campaign,
which marked the beginning of the Second World War, began on the 1st of September 1939, after a
false accusation that the Poles attacked a German radio station. After defeating the Polish army,
the Germans ruthlessly suppressed the Poles whom they considered to be racially inferior and,
in the weeks, following the German attack on Poland, German SS, police, and military
units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility,
clergy, and intelligentsia. In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany began to implement
a plan codenamed “Operation Reinhard” to systematically murder almost two million
Jews living in the German-administered territory of occupied Poland, called the General Government.
Because Heinrich Himmler chose Globocnik as the central figure in ‘’Operation Reinhard’,
he pardoned him and on 9 November 1939 appointed Globocnik to the post of SS and Police Leader
for the Lublin district. After his initially disappointing party career, Odilo Globocnik
now had a second chance in the ranks of the SS and the police and for his generosity,
he promised Himmler he would kill a million Jews. In the meantime, Globocnik's men had begun mass
executions of Jews. In October 1941, a Captain Kleinschmidt, and fifteen men, each with their
own truck, took a total of about 450 Jews to an abandoned airfield located approximately
25 miles from Lublin. The Jews were forced to dig a ditch some "six cubic meters in size, and line
it with straw. What followed is beyond the grasp of the imagination: After finishing the ditches,
ten of the victims took off their clothes and were given corrugated-paper shirts reaching halfway
down the thighs. The victims were ordered, ten at a time, to lie down in the ditches,
alternately head to foot. Then Globocnik's men threw hand grenades into the ditches, and heads,
arms, and legs quickly filled the air. The troops shot anyone still moving after the explosion. Then
they spread lime over the remains, and a new layer of straw was spread on top of the lime.
Three or four layers of bodies, ten in each layer, were placed in such
a grave. During the executions the other victims had to watch and await their turn.
Women were kicked in the stomach and breasts, children smashed against rocks.
It is believed that Globocnik may have been the originator of the
extermination camp industrialized murder concept and the one who suggested it to
Himmler. At a two-hour meeting with Himmler on 13 October 1941,
Globocnik received verbal approval to start construction work on Belzec extermination camp,
the first such camp in the General Government. The construction of three more camps, Sobibor,
Maidanek and Treblinka followed in 1942. When he was given the order to create these camps,
he spoke to his men saying: “The Reichsführer of the SS Heinrich Himmler has just given us a
new task. I am so grateful that you can be sure that his wishes will be fulfilled immediately.”
Globocnik proposed exterminating the Jews in assembly-line fashion in concentration camp
using gas chambers. The gassing facilities that Globocnik established at Belzec soon
after his 13 October meeting with Himmler were designed by T4 program personnel assigned to him.
They used carbon monoxide, as the T4 program had done. His men killed thousands of Polish
and Russian Jews every hour. After a few months in operation, he gave the order to
make new gas chambers in which 2000 people could be entered each time. It is estimated
that 600,000 Jews were murdered in Belzec alone. This was, however, not enough to Globocnik and he
complained that deportations were insufficient, and his death camps have even greater killing
power. At some point he had a confrontation with Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was a slave labor camp, whereas the camps Globocnik oversaw were death camps,
places where Jews were taken only to be killed. Höss and Globocnik fought publicly before their
superiors to take credit for who killed the most people. They accused each other of being
ineffective and untidy. Höss tried to get his rival to use Zyklon B, the gas with which they
killed the Jews in the Auschwitz chambers. But Globocnik still preferred carbon monoxide.
From 1942–1943 he also oversaw the beginning of the Generalplan Ost plan or Master Plan for the
East devised by Nazi leaders in 1941--1942 to resettle Eastern Europe with Germans,
and move about other "inferior" groups within the Nazis' domain.
The territories involved included the occupied areas of Poland, the Baltic states (Lithuania,
Latvia, and Estonia), Belorussia, and parts of Russia and the Ukraine. There were about
45 million people living in those areas in the early 1940s, including five to six million Jews.
The Nazis came up with an elaborate racial classification system by which
to decide who would be enslaved, expelled, murdered, or resettled.
Some 31 million of the territories' inhabitants, mostly of Slavic origin,
were to be declared "racially undesirable," and expelled to western Siberia. The Jews were
to be annihilated, euphemistically referred to as "total removal." The rest of the local
population would be enslaved, "Germanized," or killed. After the area was cleared out,
10 million Germans and people of German origin, called ethnic Germans, were to be moved in.
During the German occupation of Poland, the SS had set up in the General Government a number
of industrial enterprises exclusively manned by Jewish labor. In Lublin, Globocnik was the
overseer and main director of these enterprises, which made large profits for the SS and, of
course, for a few senior SS dignitaries including himself. From the slaughter of 1.7 million Jews in
the Operation Reinhard killing centers and related mass shootings, Globocnik became immensely rich.
The property of the victims ranging from their houses and valuables down to the gold
in their teeth was seized by the SS. In a report Globocnik sent to Himmler on January 5, 1944,
he gave an enumeration of the money, the gold and other valuables stolen from the Jews during
Operation Reinhard. Converted to Reichsmarks, Globocnik arrived at a total amount of 178
million Reichsmark, then equal to USD 71 million. Globocnik stole for himself approximately 12.5
million Reichsmark, then equal to USD 5 million. Globocnik carried out Himmler’s orders with brutal
efficiency and by November 1943 Operation Reinhard had been completed and the three death camps
directly under his control were liquidated. On the 19th of April 1943, the Warsaw ghetto
uprising began after the German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its
surviving inhabitants to the forced labor camps in Lublin district. The ghetto inhabitants offered
organized resistance in the first days of the operation, inflicting casualties on the well-armed
and well-equipped SS and police units. They continued to resist deportation as
individuals or in small groups for four weeks. It was the largest uprising by Jews during
World War II and the first significant urban revolt against the German occupation in Europe.
In the end however, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground. They burned
and demolished this part of Warsaw, block by block, in order to smoke out their prey.
The Germans ended the operation on the 16th of May when Jürgen Stroop,
who led the suppression of the uprising, announced in his daily report to Berlin that “The former
Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more.” The SS and police deported approximately
42,000 Warsaw ghetto survivors captured during the uprising to the forced-labor
camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and to the Majdanek concentration camp.
At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto as they were burnt alive or died
from smoke inhalation. The SS and police sent another 7,000 to the Treblinka killing center.
Odilo Globocnik took part in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto.
He was also put in charge of liquidating the Białystok Ghetto, which stood out for its
strong resistance to German occupation. During the August 1943 deportations, when all hope for
survival within the ghetto was abandoned, the Bialystok ghetto underground staged an uprising
against the Germans. In an unsuccessful attempt to break out of the ghetto and join partisans
in the nearby forests, armed Jews attacked German forces near the ghetto fence along Smolna Street.
The fighting in the northeastern section of the ghetto lasted for five days. Hundreds of
Jews died in this battle. Seventy-one Jewish fighters were killed after being discovered
in a bunker and captured by the Germans. More than a hundred Jews managed to escape
from the ghetto and join partisan groups in the Bialystok area. This uprising lasted from 16–20
August 1943. Against a group of about 300 to 500 insurgents armed with 25 rifles and 100
pistols as well as home-made Molotov cocktails for grenades, Odilo Globocnik sent a tank.
In spite of the insurgency, the planned deportations to concentration and
extermination camps went ahead on August 17, 1943, without any delay. Approximately 10,000
Jews were led to the Holocaust trains and sent to camps in Treblinka, Majdanek and Auschwitz.
A transport of 1,200 children were sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp and
later to Auschwitz, where they were murdered. It is estimated that out of almost 60,000 Jews
who lived in Białystok before World War II, only several hundred survived the Holocaust.
During his time in German-occupied Poland Globocnik became increasingly addicted to alcohol
and allegedly would drink up to 3 liters of vodka per day. While performing his duties he was still
drinking, which increased his aggressiveness not only towards Jews but also fellow SS officers.
Himmler's brother-in-law, Richard Wendler, the civil governor in Lublin District, had used his
personal relationship with Himmler to urge him do something about Globocnik and said to Himmler:
“Above all, I thank you for clearing the air regarding the SS-and Police Leader in Lublin
and trust you will transfer him somewhere else. This is the only noble and possible solution.
I must even ask you today, to transfer Gruppenführer Globocnik within the
shortest time to his new field of activity and remove him from here.”
At that time, Globocnik was already complicit in the extermination of 1.7 million Jews as
well as a smaller number of non-Jews in the death camps under his control.
Globocnik together with a large number of experienced killers then moved to Trieste
and he was promoted to the post of Higher SS and Police Leader of the Adriatic Region. At the San
Saba concentration camp in Northern Italy, near Trieste, on October 9, 1943, Globocnik had a hand
at killing 2,000 Jews and political prisoners. Ivan Marchenko, a notorious guard at the Treblinka
extermination camp known as Ivan the Terrible, participated in the killings at this camp. Italian
Jews, partisans and other political dissidents were interrogated, tortured and murdered under
the direction of Globocnik and his men after the 1943 downfall of Benito Mussolini and the German
takeover of the country. Many prisoners of Risiera di San Sabba were transported to the German Nazi
concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau. On May 31, 1945, three weeks after the war
in Europe ended, 41-year-old Odilo Globocnik was captured by the British army at Weissensee
in Austrian Carinthia. However, he would never face justice for his crimes. The
same day he was captured, Globocnik committed suicide by swallowing a capsule of cyanide.
His body was taken to be buried in a local churchyard, but the priest reportedly refused
to have 'the body of such a man' resting in consecrated ground. A grave was dug outside
the churchyard, next to an outer wall, and the body was buried without ceremony.
There were no tears shed for Odilo Globocnik.
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