Odilo Globocnik was the SS and Police Leader in Lublin from 1939 to 1943 and the operational commander of Operation Reinhard, the killing programme that murdered around 1.7 million Polish Jews at Bełżec, Sobibór and Treblinka between March 1942 and October 1943. He committed suicide on 31 May 1945 in British custody at Paternion in Carinthia, biting down on a cyanide capsule he had concealed in his teeth, hours after his arrest. He was 41.
The Lublin command
Globocnik was made SS and Police Leader for the Lublin district in November 1939, on Himmler’s personal authorisation. The Lublin district was the eastern part of the German-administered Generalgouvernement of occupied Poland, near the demarcation line with the Soviet zone. From the Lublin headquarters Globocnik built up the SS apparatus that would conduct the killing of Polish Jewry in the territory east of the Vistula. He was given a substantial degree of operational autonomy by Himmler, who treated him as a personal protégé.
Operation Reinhard
Globocnik was given operational command of Operation Reinhard in late 1941, on Himmler’s authorisation. The operation was named in memory of Reinhard Heydrich after his assassination in June 1942 but had been planned and partly initiated before then. Globocnik’s task was to murder the Jewish population of the Generalgouvernement, around two million people. He commissioned the construction of three dedicated extermination camps: Bełżec opened in March 1942, Sobibór in May 1942, Treblinka in July 1942. He recruited and trained the German SS staff (around ninety men in total across the three camps) and arranged the supply of around 800 Trawniki men, Soviet POWs converted into camp guards. He coordinated with Eichmann’s office on the deportation schedules from each city in the Generalgouvernement.
Operation Reinhard ran from March 1942 to October 1943 and killed around 1.7 million people, almost all Jews. It is the largest single killing programme of the Holocaust by death toll, larger even than Auschwitz. Globocnik commanded it throughout. He visited each of the three camps repeatedly during the killing period. He filed regular progress reports to Himmler. His final report, dated 5 January 1944, is the bureaucratic summary of an operation that murdered nearly two million people in eighteen months.
The looted property
The Operation Reinhard programme generated enormous quantities of confiscated Jewish property. Cash, jewellery, gold dental work, clothing, suitcases. The property was sorted at Lublin and processed for transfer to the Reich. Globocnik supervised the operation. The accounting was kept by his subordinates and survived in captured files. The recovered records show that around 178 million Reichsmarks of Jewish property were processed through Operation Reinhard. The figure is the cleanest available measure of the scale of the killings, since the property had been the personal possessions of around 1.7 million murdered people.
The Hubert Globocnik report
Globocnik wrote a final report on Operation Reinhard to Himmler in January 1944. The report is one of the most extraordinary perpetrator documents of the Holocaust. He listed the camps. He listed the personnel. He listed the financial accounts. He requested decorations for his men for what he called their difficult and exhausting work. He acknowledged that the operation had been completed and that the camps had been dismantled. The report survived in captured German files. It is one of the central pieces of documentary evidence on Operation Reinhard, written by the man who ran it.
Trieste and Yugoslavia
Globocnik was reassigned in October 1943, with Operation Reinhard largely complete, to the Adriatic Coastal Zone, the German-occupied northeastern Italian territory and adjacent Slovenian and Croatian areas. From Trieste he commanded anti-partisan operations against the Yugoslav and Italian resistance and continued the deportation of Jews from northern Italy and the surrounding areas. The Risiera di San Sabba, the only Italian camp with a crematorium, was operated under his command. Around 5,000 prisoners were murdered there. Globocnik recruited around eighty of his Operation Reinhard veterans, including Christian Wirth and Franz Stangl, to the Adriatic operation.
The capture and the cyanide
Globocnik was captured by British forces near his home village of Paternion in Carinthia, in southern Austria, on 31 May 1945. He had been hiding in a mountain hut. The British arrest party identified him quickly. He was driven to a British headquarters for interrogation. Within hours of his arrest he bit down on a cyanide capsule he had concealed in his teeth. He died within minutes. The British buried him in an unmarked grave near Weissensee in Carinthia. He was 41.
What he was
Globocnik was the operational killer who ran the largest killing programme in the Holocaust by death count. He was Himmler’s preferred field commander for the eastern operations because he combined extreme racial enthusiasm with administrative competence and personal corruption. He was, by the standards of senior SS officers, also unusually venal: substantial quantities of the Operation Reinhard property went into his personal accounts and his personal villa. The Holocaust did not lack for men prepared to do this work. Globocnik did it at the largest single scale of any individual perpetrator. The 1.7 million Jews of Operation Reinhard were murdered on his orders, in camps he had commissioned, by men he had recruited, under a programme he commanded for eighteen months.
See also
Sources
- Joseph Poprzeczny, Hitler’s Man in the East: Odilo Globocnik, McFarland, 2004
- Yitzhak Arad, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka: The Operation Reinhard Death Camps, Indiana University Press, 1987
- Globocnik final report on Operation Reinhard, 5 January 1944
- USHMM: Odilo Globocnik