Otto Ohlendorf was a German SS-Gruppenführer and head of the
Inland-SD, a section of the SD. Ohlendorf was the commanding officer of
Einsatzgruppe D, which perpetrated mass murder in Moldova, south Ukraine, the
Crimea, and, during 1942, the north Caucasus. He was convicted of and
executed for war crimes committed during World War II.
Biography = Early life=
Born in Hoheneggelsen, the son of farm owners, he joined the Nazi Party in 1925
and the SS in 1926. Ohlendorf studied economics and law at the University of
Leipzig and the University of Göttingen, and by 1930 was already giving lectures
at several economic institutions. He studied at the University of Pavia,
where he gained his doctor's degree in jurisprudence; and as a career man he
had successfully worked himself up to a research directorship in the Kiel
Institute for the World Economy. By 1938 he was also Hauptgeschäftsführer in the
Reichsgruppe Handel, the German trade organization. While Ohlendorf had joined
the party in 1925, the SS in 1926, and the SD in 1936, he regarded his party
activities, and even his position as chief of SD-Inland, as a sideline of his
career. Actually, he devoted only four years to full-time activity in the RSHA,
for in 1943 he became a Ministerialdirektor and deputy to the
Staatssekretär in the Reichswirtschaftsministerium.
= Third Reich= In early 1936, he became an economic
consultant to the SD, attached to the SS with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer. In
May 1936, he was promoted to SS-Sturmbannführer and took a senior
post. In 1939, he was once again promoted to SS-Standartenführer and
appointed as head of Amt III Inland-SD, of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt, a
position he kept until 1946. In addition, from 1943 onwards, Ohlendorf
was appointed as deputy director general of the Reich Ministry of Economic
Affairs, and promoted once more in 1944 to Gruppenführer.
In June 1941, Reinhard Heydrich appointed Ohlendorf to be commander of
Einsatzgruppe D which operated in southern Ukraine and Crimea. Ohlendorf's
Einsatzgruppe was responsible for the 13 December 1941 massacre at Simferopol
where at least 14,300 people, mostly Jews, were killed. Over 90,000 murders
are attributed to Ohlendorf's command, who testified to this effect during his
trial at Nuremberg. At the end of 1943, Ohlendorf, in
addition to his other jobs, became deputy secretary of state in the
Reichsministerium für Wirtschaft. He coordinated plans to rebuild the German
economy after the war, a war he and others believed to be lost. Such
planning for the post-war time was strictly forbidden, on one side. On the
other side, Heinrich Himmler, who detested the state interventionist
regime of Albert Speer as "totally bolshevik" and was himself hoping for a
career in a militarily defeated Germany, protected the working group around
Ohlendorf and Ludwig Erhard and other experts, who planned how to introduce
the new German currency Deutsche Mark, among other things. Ohlendorf himself
spoke out for "active and courageous entrepreneurship", which was intended to
replace bureaucratic state planning of the economy after the war.
Because of Ohlendorf's work in this field, many petitions for leniency were
filed after he was sentenced to death by hanging. These, however, were turned
down by the Allies. = Nuremberg War Trials=
Ohlendorf took part in Himmler's flight from Flensburg and was arrested with him
near Lüneburg, where Himmler committed suicide.
During the trial against Einsatzgruppen leaders, Ohlendorf was the chief
defendant, and was also a key witness in the prosecution of many other indicted
war criminals. Ohlendorf's frank, apparently reliable testimony was
attributed to his distaste for the corruption that was rampant in Nazi
Germany and a stubborn commitment to duty. He expressed no remorse for his
actions, telling prosecutor Benjamin B. Ferencz at the trial that the Jews of
America would suffer for what the prosecutor had done, and seemed to have
been more concerned about the moral strain on those carrying out the murders
than those actually being murdered. Otto Ohlendorf was sentenced to death
and hanged at the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria shortly after midnight on 8 June
1951. In popular culture
Ohlendorf appears at length in Jonathan Littell's docudrama Les Bienveillantes.
He was played by Christopher James in the 2006 British television docudrama
Nuremberg: Nazis on Trial He was portrayed by Nigel Hawthorne in
the miniseries "Holocaust" Notes
eduprojectsnuremberg/Ohlentestimony.html References
Michael Brackmann: Der Tag X. - Im Juni 1948 kommt die D-Mark und verändert das
Land. Die Währungsreform ist von langer Hand vorbereitet und bis ins Detail
ausgetüftelt worden. In: Handelsblatt 23.25. June 2006. Der Tag X In English:
"The day X. - In June 1948 the Deutschmark is introduced and this
changes the country. The currency reform has been prepared for a long time and
had been subtly and punctiliously prepared in detail in advance." The
article claims a collaboration between Otto Ohlendorf and Ludwig Erhard and
other experts in preparing the post war economy with collusion and protection by
Heinrich Himmler.