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 Otto Ohlendorf.
Otto Ohlendorf was born on the 4th of February 1907
in Hoheneggelsen, then part of the German Empire.
A cultured academic who had earned degrees in economics and law, Ohlendorf joined the
Nazi Party in 1925 and in 1926 he joined the SS thus becoming one of its first members.
In 1936, three years after Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power, Otto Ohlendorf joined
the 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 and Ohlendorf became an economic consultant of this elite
Nazi Party paramilitary organization that was under Heinrich Himmler’s control.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded
Poland. Shortly after, 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 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.
The Reich Security Main Office had 7 offices and Otto Ohlendorf was appointed the head of the
SD's Inland section. His role was to collect intelligence from his secret police agents
and scientifically examine social, cultural, and economic issues, assembling reports to his
superiors in the Nazi government. These reports consisted of routine public opinion surveys
which attempted to inform the state leadership about the current mood among the population.
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 Reinhard Heydrich appointed Ohlendorf the commander of the Einsatzgruppe D.
Heydrich appreciated young men like Ohlendorf, who were educated and had a strong ideological
commitment to National Socialism and many Einsatzgruppe leaders were highly educated men.
Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D was attached directly to the 11th Army and operated in southern Ukraine
and Crimea. His unit consisted of about 500 men and was supplemented by Romanians and Ukrainians.
Their objective was to kill the Jews and Gypsies, as well as the Soviet
political commissars. Some of the men, whom Ohlendorf did not
consider emotionally suitable for executing these tasks, were excluded and sent home.
According to Ohlendorf’s post-war testimony, 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.
Ohlendorf himself was present at the mass executions on his own initiative for the purpose
of inspection to determine whether or not his instructions regarding the manner of the execution
were actually carried out. The executions were carefully planned and conducted accordingly.
With the help of local collaborators, the Einsatzkommando attempted to collect all
the Jews in area by registering them. They were rounded up on the pretext that they
were to be resettled. This registration was performed by the Jews themselves
and after the registration the Jews were collected at one place.
Gold, silver and other valuables were confiscated at the time of the registration or the rounding
up and handed over to the Finance Ministry, either through the Reich Security Main Office
or directly. At the request of the army, watches were made available to the forces at the front.
Ohlendorf instructed his men not to take any of the victim's valuables.
The victims were then transported in trucks to the place of execution.
Ohlendorf’s idea was that only as many as could be executed immediately were transported
and the span of time from the moment in which the victims knew what was about to happen
to them until the time of their actual execution was kept as short as possible.
Immediately before the execution, the victims were also obliged to take off their outer garments.
In contrast to some of the other Einsatzgruppen commanders, Ohlendorf ordered that several of his
men should shoot the victims at the same time, thus avoiding ‘direct personal responsibility’
The victims were shot in standing or kneeling position by firing squads under command and
the bodies were buried in the antitank ditch or excavation. The commandos then filled the graves
to efface the signs of execution, and then labor units of the population leveled them.
At first the victims ‘clothing was given to the population,
but in the winter of 1941to 1942 it was collected and disposed of.
Otto Ohlendorf was against shooting the victims in the back of the neck because
as he later claimed “for both, the victims and for those who carried out the executions,
it was, psychologically, an immense burden to bear “. Executions carried out in this manner
could cause, according to Ohlendorf ‘s words “excitement and disobedience “ among the victims
and the kommandos would be forced to restore order by means of violence, such as beating.
Up until the spring of 1942, the executions of men, women and children
were carried out in a military manner, by firing squads under command.
In the spring of 1942 an order came from Himmler that in the future women and children
were to be killed only in gas vans. The reason was that the members of the killing kommandos,
mostly married men, should not be compelled to aim their guns at women and children.
The actual purpose of these vans could not be seen from the outside. The vans were loaded
with the victims on the pretext that they were to be transported to another locality. Instead,
they were driven to the place of burial, which was usually the same as that used for the mass
executions. The time needed for transportation was sufficient to insure the death of the people
inside the van. The vans looked like closed trucks and were constructed in a way that at the start of
the motor, engines pumped carbon monoxide into sealed passenger compartments causing death in
ten to fifteen minutes. Depending on the size of the van, about fifteen to twenty-five persons
could be killed simultaneously. However, members of the execution
squad preferred killing women and children by shooting as opposed to killing in the gas vans
because, as Ohlendorf later claimed “ the unloading of the corpses was an unnecessary
mental strain for the men because certain functions of the body had taken place leaving
the corpses lying in filth and the vans had been dirtied as well”. This was in a sharp contrast to
his later claim that the people killed in gas vans were not conscious of what was happening to them.
Later, when Ohlendorf was asked why the children had been massacred
he replied that the order was that the Jewish population should be totally exterminated and,
in the child, they saw the grown-up.
Einsatzgruppe D of which Ohlendorf was a commander, was in particular
responsible for the massacre at Simferopol between the 9th and 13th of December 1941,
where at least 14,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed.
In the year between June 1941 and June 1942 the Einsatzkommando D under Ohlendorf’s command
reported ninety thousand people liquidated, most of them Jewish men, women and children.
After the death of Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942, Otto Ohlendorf returned to the Reich Ministry of
economic affairs and became a deputy director general. Even when it was obvious that the war
was lost, Ohlendorf, a loyal Nazi, believed that some form of Nazism would ultimately survive,
and he could shape the postwar reconstruction of Germany but along "National Socialist lines".
However, he was wrong.
Otto Ohlendorf was arrested in May 1945 together with his chief Heinrich Himmler. Unlike Himmler
who committed suicide by biting into a hidden cyanide ampule on the 23rd of May 1945,
Ohlendorf was carefully interrogated for several weeks during which he
revealed the criminal nature of the German campaign in the East.
He was then finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. While in January 1946 he was called
as a witness by the prosecution during the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg,
during the subsequent Einsatzgruppen trial which started on the 29th of September 1947,
Otto Ohlendorf was the main defendant. He expressed no remorse for his actions and openly
and unabashedly admitted to his murderous crimes. To justify his actions he defended killing
innocent people as a necessary task to secure lebensraum
meaning “ living space “ for the German Reich in the East which Hitler believed that Germany
needed in order to harvest more food to allow the German population to grow at a faster rate.
Ohlendorf admitted to having scruples in regard to the execution of killing orders,
but he added that he had carried them out anyway because he found it inconceivable
that a subordinate leader should not carry out orders given by the leaders of the state.
Ohlendorf said that he had never questioned the legality of the orders
because he had sworn obedience to the people who had issued them.
He added that he had surrendered his moral conscience to the fact that he was a soldier,
and therefore a cog in a relatively low position of a great machine.
He asserted that history would regard his firing squads as no worse than
the ‘press-button killers’ who had dropped the atomic bombs on Japan.
Furthermore, Ohlendorf did not consider killing the innocent people
neither an atrocity nor a brutality because the murdered Jews were stood up,
lined up, and shot in true military fashion. He added that the bombing of
German cities by the Allies was at least as bad as the shooting of those Jews
When he was asked if his men appointed to execute
the killing orders had ever asked him to be relieved of such tasks,
he replied he could not remember any such case and added that even if they had done so,
the result would have been a court martial with a corresponding sentence which would be death.
Even though the Nazi commanding generals claimed that they knew nothing of the atrocities committed
by the Einsatzgruppen, Otto Ohlendorf confirmed that they had been similarly informed of the
orders for the liquidation of the Jews and Soviet functionaries. He added that without
such instructions to the army, the activities of the Einsatzgruppen would not have been possible
as they had been attached to a specific army group and had therefore moved with it.
On the 10th of April 1948 the tribunal found Otto Ohlendorf guilty of war crimes, crimes against
humanity and membership in criminal organizations and sentenced him to death by hanging.
Ohlendorf was 44 years old when he was executed on the 7th of June 1951.
Until his very end he claimed he had acted properly and had done nothing wrong.
There were no tears shed for Otto Ohlendorf.
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