The 1st of September 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland, and the German Army is followed by the
Einsatzgruppen which are Nazi mobile death squads sent to Poland to kill the civilians,
mostly the Polish intelligentsia such as teachers, priests, physicians,
and other prominent members of Polish society. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union
in June 1941, these paramilitary death squads working with units of the German armed forces and
local collaborators, will conduct mass shooting operations targeting mostly Jews, Romani, Soviet
officials, and other people with disabilities. From 1941 to 1945, while operating behind the
front line in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe, the Einsatzgruppen will murder around 2 million
innocent men, women and children accounting for one third of all Jewish Holocaust victims.
One of the main perpetrators of these atrocities is Paul Blobel.
Paul Blobel was born on the 13th of August 1894 in Potsdam then part of the German Empire.
He served as an apprentice with a mason and carpenter and between 1912 to 1913 Blobel studied
architecture at university. Before the outbreak of the First World War on the 28th of July 1914,
he worked as a carpenter. During the war Paul Blobel served as an engineer at the front and
by the end of the war he was a staff sergeant and was awarded the Iron Cross First Class.
The War ended on the 11th of November 1918 when the German leaders signed the
armistice in the Compiègne Forest in France. After the war, Blobel studied architecture
and in 1921 he got married. The marriage produced two sons.
In 1924 he set up his own business as an architect.
On the 24th of October 1929 the stock market crash marked the beginning of the
Great Depression in the United States which soon spread across the globe.
Due to deteriorating economic conditions in Germany, Blobel had no more orders and was
registered as unemployed for the next 4 years. The Great Depression also played a role in the
emergence of Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazi Party, which Blobel joined on the 1st of December
1931. In January 1932 he joined the SS. While the Great Depression and German
economic conditions were not solely responsible for bringing Hitler to power,
they helped to create an environment in which he gained support and on the 30th of January 1933
Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg.
From 1933 to spring 1935 Blobel worked as a simple clerk in the city administration
of Solingen where he also lived. In June 1935 he joined the SS Security Service SD which was
the intelligence agency of the Nazi Party and was considered a sister organization with the
Gestapo which was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Over the course of the Nazi era,
the SD took on an increasingly prominent role in Nazi anti-Jewish policies.
Blobel quickly made a career in SD becoming its section leader in Düsseldorf.
On the 9th – 10th of November 1938, the Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated
violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories.
The Nazi SA and German civilians not only ransacked Jewish homes, businesses, synagogues,
hospitals, and schools but the German SS and police sent almost 30,000 Jewish males
to concentration camps, primarily Dachau. This event came to be called Kristallnacht
or The Night of Broken Glass because of the shattered glass that littered the
streets after the vandalism and destruction of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues, and homes.
During the pogroms, Blobel coordinated the securing of materials from destroyed
synagogues in Solingen, Wuppertal and Remscheid.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland.
On the 27th of the same month, Heinrich Himmler established a new agency - Reich Security Main
Office - which formalized the relationship between the intelligence service – the SD - and the
Security Police, which consisted of the Gestapo and the KRIPO, which was a Criminal Police.
This new agency, led by Himmler’s deputy, Reinhard Heydrich, was an ideologically radical and brutal
institution responsible for coordinating and perpetrating many aspects of the Holocaust.
On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa,
the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen
were sent to the Eastern Front and Blobel became the commanding officer of the Sonderkommando 4A
which was assigned to the Einsatzgruppe C which was under the control of Otto Rasch.
Einsatzgruppe C was attached to the Army Group South at Kiev. Their objective was
to kill the Jews and Gypsies, as well as the Soviet political commissars.
In late summer 1941 Himmler assembled the leaders of the men of the Einsatzkommandos
and repeated to them the order to kill all the reported Jews and Romani as well as the
Soviet political commissars and pointed out that neither the leaders nor the men
who were taking part in the liquidation bore any personal responsibility for the execution
of this order. The responsibility was his and the Führer's alone.
Women and children were to be shot as well in order to not have any avengers remain.
On the 10th or 11th of August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln the Higher SS and
Police Leader of Southern Russia, ordered Blobel, on behalf of Adolf
Hitler, to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Bila Tserkva, Soviet Ukraine.
On the 22nd of August 1941, with the consent of Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau,
a commander of the Army Group South and an avowed Nazi, Blobel’s Sonderkommando
4a of Einsatzgruppe C and Ukrainian auxiliary policemen murdered betweeen 4,000 and 5,000 Jews.
Wehrmacht chaplains tried to prevent the killing 90 Jewish children, who were left
behind in an abandoned building, but they had to be executed separately a few days later.
Many children were hit four or five times before they died.
The heart wrenching wailing, made by the children as they died, was indescribable
On the 19th of September 1941, German forces entered the city of Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine.
Along with a large part of German-occupied Ukraine,
the city was incorporated into the Reichskommissariat Ukraine
which had been established on the 1st of September with Erich Koch as administrator.
Before the German invasion, some 160,000
Jews resided in Kyiv which was approximately 20 percent of the total population of the city.
Following the start of Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, approximately 100,000 Jews fled the
capital or were already serving in the Soviet military. By the time the Germans occupied Kyiv,
there were about 60,000 Jews remaining in the city. Most of those who remained were women,
children, the elderly, those who were ill or those who had been unable or unwilling to flee earlier.
During the first week of the German occupation of Kyiv, there were two major explosions. These
explosions not only destroyed the German headquarters and areas around the main
street of the city center but also killed a large number of German soldiers and officials.
Though the explosions were caused by mines left by retreating Soviet soldiers and officials,
the Germans used the sabotage as a pretext to murder those Jews who still remained in Kyiv.
On the 29th and 30th of September 1941, SS and German police units and their auxiliaries,
under the guidance of the members of Einsatzgruppe C, murdered a significant
number of the Jewish population who remained in Kyiv. This massacre which belongs to one
of many mass shootings perpetrated by the Nazi Germans beginning in 1941, occurred
at a ravine called Babi Yar or Babyn Yar which at the time, was located just outside the city.
On the 28th of September, the Jews were ordered to assemble the next morning for resettlement.
Although only a participation of approximately 5-6,000 Jews had been expected at first,
more than 30,000 Jews arrived who, until the very moment of their execution,
still believed that they would be resettled, thanks to an extremely clever organization.
They were made to march to the ravine. As they reached the site, they were forced to surrender
any valuables. They were then made to take off their clothes and move towards the edge of the
ravine in groups of ten. As they reached the edge, they were shot by Bobel’s Sonderkommando 4a.
German and Ukrainian police participated in the killing as well. At the end of the day,
the bodies were covered with a thin layer of dirt. According to reports sent to the
Einsatzgruppen headquarters in Berlin, 33,771 Jews were massacred during this two-day period
and it was one of the largest mass killings at a single location during World War II.
At least 29 survivors are known. One of them is Dina Pronicheva, who was one of
those ordered to march to the ravine, to be forced to undress and then to be shot.
In one of her written postwar testimonies Pronicheva described what she saw at Babi Yar:
“Each time I saw a new group of men, women, elderly people, and children being forced to
take off their clothes, all of them were being taken to an open pit where submachine-gunners
shot them. Then another group was brought…. With my own eyes I saw this horror. Although I was
not standing close to the pit, terrible cries of panic-stricken people and quiet children’s voices
calling “Mother, mother…” reached me”. Jumping before being shot and falling
on other bodies, Pronicheva survived by playing dead in a pile of corpses.
However, the killings at Babi Yar continued. Over the next few months, thousands more were murdered
there, including Jews, Gypsies, and Soviet prisoners of war. Those who attempted to hide
were turned over to the Germans by the Ukrainians. In all, some 100,000 people, Jews and non-Jews,
were killed at Babi Yar. By January 1942, Blobel’s Sonderkommando 4a had murdered around
60,000 people, including more than 30,000 Jews massacred during the two-day period at Babi Yar.
In January 1942, officially because of unspecified health problems that hid his alcoholism, Paul
Blobel was removed from the post of chief of the Sonderkommando 4A and was transferred to Berlin.
In June 1942 Blobel was assigned with a secret task to excavate and destroy evidence of Nazi
mass murder throughout the German-occupied east. The order was only given verbally as any
written correspondence had been prohibited. Blobel traveled to the occupied Eastern
Territories with his official cover being deputy of Heinrich Müller, Chief of the Gestapo.
This top-secret Nazi operation was called “Special Action 1005” and Sonderkommandos
made up of Jewish and Soviet prisoners of war were forced to unearth and burn the
bodies of Jews and other victims who had been shot or murdered earlier in the war.
The Sonderkommando prisoners were often put in chains to prevent them from escaping.
Special Action 1005 officially began at the Sobibor killing center and continued until 1944.
The project was carried out at other killing centers, including the other Operation Reinhard
camps Belzec and Treblinka, as well as at Chelmno. Auschwitz had onsite crematoria, so the services
of Sonderkommando 1005 were not needed there. The operation also returned to the scenes of
earlier Einsatzgruppen killings, including the scenes of major massacre sites, such as Babi Yar.
In July 1943, with the Red Army approaching Kyiv, Germans embarked on a cover-up operation
to conceal what had been happening in Babi Yar. Paul Blobel supervised this action.
For this operation, the Germans used prisoners who were being held at the Syrets concentration camp
located close to the Babi Yar ravine. The Syrets camp, established by the Germans in May 1942,
served to intern the Soviet prisoners of war, partisans, and Jews who had survived the mass
actions of late September 1941. To cover up the mass shootings
at Babi Yar, the Germans ordered 321 prisoners from Syrets to dig up the mass graves and burn
the remains of the victims. The bodies were exhumed,
burned and the ashes scattered over farmland in the vicinity. Blobel developed efficient
disposal techniques such as alternating layers of bodies with firewood on a frame of iron rails.
Eighteen inmates who escaped into hiding testified
about these crimes to the Soviet authorities in November 1943.
After the end of the war, Paul Blobel was then finally to face justice and pay for his crimes.
During the Einsatzgruppen trial which started on the 29th of September 1947,
Blobel was one of the main defendants. He was charged with crimes against humanity,
war crimes, and membership in a criminal organizations.
Specifically, he was accused of murdering 60,000 people under his responsibility
between June 1941 and January 1942. In his defense, Blobel argued that that the number
reported was too high and the Sonderkommando 4a under his leadership shot not 60,000 but
a maximum of 10,000 to 15,000 people. In addition, Blobel stated further that
all his shootings were done in accordance with International Law. He testified:
"Executions of agents, partisans, saboteurs, suspicious people,
indulging in espionage and sabotage, and those who were of a detrimental effect to the German Army,
were, in my opinion, completely in accordance with the Hague Convention."
To the question of whether he believed that the killing of 1,160 Jews in the retaliation
for the killing of 10 German soldiers was justified. His words follow:
"116 Jews for one German? I don't know. I am not a militarist, you see.
One can only judge it from one's own human ideas. If they are enemies and if they are equal enemies
the question would have to be discussed whether one to 116 is a justified ratio of retaliation."
On the 10th of April 1948 the tribunal found Paul Blobel guilty on all three
charges and sentenced him to death by hanging.
Blobel was 56 years old when he was executed on the 7th of June 1951.
His last words were “ Whatever I have done, I did as a soldier who obeyed orders. I have
committed no crime. I will be vindicated by God and history. God have mercy on those
who murder me. I die in the faith of my people. May the German people be aware of its enemies!”
There were no tears shed for Paul Blobel.
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