On
this date, 31 May 1945, one of the leaders of Operation Reinhard, Odilo
Globocnik, committed suicide by biting on a cyanide capsule. I will post
information about this Nazi War Criminal from Wikipedia and other links.
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Globocnik in 1938 at the rank of SS-Standartenführer
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Nickname(s)
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Globus
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Born
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21 April 1904
Trieste, Austria-Hungary (now Italy) |
Died
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31 May 1945 (aged 41)
Paternion, Austria |
Allegiance
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Nazi Germany
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Service/branch
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Schutzstaffel
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Rank
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Gruppenführer
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Battles/wars
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World War II
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Odilo Lotario Globocnik or Odilo Lothar Ludwig Globocnik (21 April 1904 –
31 May 1945) was a prominent Austrian Nazi and later an SS leader. As associate
of Adolf Eichmann, he had a leading role in Operation Reinhard, which saw the
murder of over one million mostly Polish Jews during the Holocaust in Nazi
extermination camps Majdanek, Treblinka, Sobibór, and Belzec. Historian Michael
Allen described him as "the vilest individual in the vilest organization
ever known".
Early
life
Odilo
Globočnik was born on 21 April 1904, into a Germanised Slavic family in the
Imperial Free City of Trieste, then the
capital of the Austrian Littoral
administrative region of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire (now in Italy). He was the second
child of Franz Globočnik (also known as Globotschnig), a cavalry lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian
Army who came from a German-speaking Slovene family from the Upper Carniolan
town of Tržič (German: Neumarktl; now in Slovenia).
His father was unable to accumulate the money needed to get an officer's
marriage permission and had to leave the service. As was the practice at this
time, he was given a job in the Imperial and Royal Mail. His mother Anna, née
Petschinka, was born in a mixed Czech-Banat Swabian family in Vršac (then Kingdom
of Hungary, now in Serbia). In 1914, the family left Trieste
for Cseklész, where Franz Globočnik was
recalled to active duty after the outbreak of World War I.
The
same year, Odilo Globočnik joined the army, via a military school. The war
ended his military education prematurely. Odilo and his family moved to Klagenfurt
in Carinthia. There, he joined, as a teenager, the pro-Austrian volunteer
militia fighting the Slovene volunteers and later the Yugoslav Army during the Carinthian
War (1918–1919). In 1920, he worked as an underground propagandist
for the Austrian cause during the Carinthian Plebiscite.
He
later enrolled at the Hohere Staatsgewerbeschule (a higher vocational school
for mechanical engineering), where he passed his Matura (the Austrian
equivalent of the German Abitur) and graduated with honors. He performed jobs,
such as carrying suitcases at the train station, in order to help support the
family financially.
Globočnik
first appeared in politics in 1922, when he became a prominent member of
pre-Nazi Carinthian paramilitary organizations and was seen wearing a swastika.
At the time, he was a building tradesman, introduced to this while engaged to
Grete Michner. Her father, Emil Michner, talked to the director of KÄEWAG, a
hydropower plant, and secured Globočnik a job as a technician and construction
supervisor.
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Gauleiter of Vienna,
1938
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Nazi career
In
August 1933, Globocnik was arrested for the first time, for attempting to
contact imprisoned Nazis in Klagenfurt. This was also the same year that he
became a member of the Austrian SS. He was arrested because of his public
support for the National Socialist German
Workers' Party (NSDAP, commonly known as the Nazi Party), as he had become
a member of the Nazi party three years earlier, in 1930 while in Carinthia.
Although he was arrested four times between 1933 and 1935, he spent little over
a year in jail. This was due to Heinrich Himmler’s intervention, after two years of
arguments between Globocnik and the authorities.
His
first documented activity for the NSDAP occurred in 1931, when his name
appeared in documents relating to the spreading of propaganda for the party. By
this point he had more or less abandoned his career as a building tradesman,
and attached himself very closely to the NSDAP. One of his tasks for the NSDAP
was to construct a courier and intelligence service, which channeled funds from
the German Reich into Austria. Globocnik was inducted into the SS on 1
September 1934 with the number 292,776.
In
June 1933, in Vienna, a bomb was thrown at the shop of Jewish jeweler Norbert
Futterweit, killing him. This was one of the first murders in Austria
attributable to the Nazis, and a number of historians believe that Globocnik
was involved in the attack.
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. He became a
Deputy Gauleiter
for the whole of the country in 1933 at the age of 29, and was a key player in
the usurpation
of the Austrian government by the National Socialists.
The
Anschluss
saw the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany in early 1938. Globocnik was
rewarded for his diligence, being appointed Gauleiter of Vienna on 24 May
1938 by Adolf
Hitler.
While
Gauleiter of Vienna, Globocnik spread anti-Semitic
propaganda:
In his early tenure as Gauleiter, Globocnik espoused Nazi anti-Jewish philosophy: "I will not recoil from radical interventions for the solution of Jewish questions." Later that same year he opened Vienna's first anti-Semitic political exhibition, which was attended by 10,000 visitors on the first day. Prominent at the exhibition and received enthusiastically by the public was the film, "The Eternal Jew".
Austria
was overwhelmingly Catholic, but Globocnik was fanatically anti-Catholic. Early
gestures of accommodation to the new government by Cardinal
Innitzer did not assuage the Austrian Nazi radicals, foremost among them
the young Gauleiter Globocnik". He 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 October 1938 saw the first act of overt mass resistance to the
new regime, when a rally of thousands left Mass in Vienna chanting "Christ
is our Führer", before being dispersed by police. A Nazi mob ransacked
Cardinal Innitzer's residence, after he denounced Nazi persecution of the
Church.
As
corrupt as he was fanatical, Gauleiter Globocnik was relieved of his post and
stripped of his party honours in 1939, when it was discovered that he was
involved in illegal foreign currency speculation. As punishment, Himmler
transferred Globocnik to the Waffen SS, in the rank of corporal, where he served with
SS Standarte Germania during the Polish campaign.
Himmler
liked Globocnik and recognized the value of the ruthless Austrian. In late
1939, Globocnik was pardoned, promoted to SS-Brigadeführer, and assigned to Lublin
province.
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Action T4 bus for gassing
from Hartheim Euthanasia Centre
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SS in General Government
i.e. occupied Poland
On
9 November 1939, Himmler appointed Globocnik SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of
the General Government. After a disappointing party career, Globocnik now had a
second chance in the ranks of the SS and the police.
In
the years that followed Globocnik was responsible for:
- Liquidating the Warsaw Ghetto, which contained about 500,000 Jews, the largest Jewish community in Europe and the second largest in the world after New York.
- Liquidating the Bialystok Ghetto, which stood out for its strong resistance to German occupation.
- Resettling a large number of Poles under the premise of ethnic cleansing.
- Implementation and supervision of the Lublin reservation, to which 95,000 Jews were deported, with its adjacent network of forced labour camps in the Lublin district. He was also in charge of over 45,000 Jewish labourers.
On
16 February 1940, Globocnik declared:
“The evacuated Jews should feed themselves and be supported by their countrymen, as these Jews have enough [food]. If this does not succeed, one should let them starve.”
Death
camps
In
Germany
There are indications 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 the Belzec extermination camp, the first such
camp in the General Government. Shortly beforehand, in
September 1941, Globocnik had been visited by Phillip
Bouhler and Victor Brack, the top officials in the Fuhrer Chancellery
responsible for the Action T4 "euthanasia" program, which had
been using gas chambers disguised as shower rooms to execute many of its
victims. On or about 1 October 1941, Globocnik had written a memorandum to
Himmler containing proposals for actions against the Jews "of a security
policy nature," and the 13 October meeting was held to discuss this
memorandum and related subjects. A colleague's contemporaneous letter reflects
Globocnik's state of mind at the time of the 13 October meeting: Globocnik then
considered it necessary to undertake a "cleansing of the entire [General
Government] of Jews and Poles" and was "full of good and far-reaching
plans" to accomplish this. There are even indications that Globocnik may
have begun a crude experimental gassing facility in the woods near Belzec
shortly before his mid-October meeting with Himmler. Globocnik at the 13
October 1941 meeting proposed exterminating the Jews in assembly-line fashion
in a concentration camp utilizing gas chambers. On 14 October 1941 – the day
after he had met with Globocnik – Himmler held a five-hour meeting with
Reinhard Heydrich to discuss "executions", following which there was
a proliferation of other extermination camp gassing sites. Days later, Himmler
forbade all further Jewish emigration from Reich territory "in view of the
forthcoming 'Final Solution' of the Jewish question."
The
gassing facilities that Globocnik established at Belzec soon after his 13
October meeting with Himmler used carbon monoxide, as the T4 program had done,
and were designed by T4 program veterans assigned to Globocnik. Before it
became an extermination camp, Belzec had been part of Himmler's and Globocnik's
Burggraben project. The construction of three more
camps, Sobibor and Maidanek in the
Lublin district, and Treblinka at Małkinia Górna, followed in 1942. Globocnik was
complicit in the extermination of more than 1.5 million Polish, Czech, Dutch, French,
Russian, Slovak, German, Portuguese, Turkish, Spanish and Austrian Jews as well
as a smaller number of non-Jews in the death camps which he organized and
supervised.
He
exploited Jews and non-Jews as slave labourers in his own forced labour camps,
and was responsible for seizing the properties and valuables of murdered inmates
while in charge of Operation Reinhard. Although other arms of the Nazi
state were also involved in the overall management of the greater concentration
camp system, Globocnik had control over the Aktion Reinhard camps, and
any orders that he received came directly from Himmler. From 1942–1943 he also
oversaw the beginning of the Generalplan
Ost, the plan to expel Poles from their lands and
resettle those territories with German settlers (see Zamość Uprising).
Establishing extermination camp
in Trieste
Appointed
Higher SS and Police Leader of the Operation Zone of the Adriatic
Littoral in the German-occupied portion of Italy, he converted
an old rice mill at the outskirts of Trieste, his
hometown, to the detention center complete with a crematorium, known as Risiera di San Sabba (In Slovene:
Rižarna), where thousands of Italian
Jews, Partisans, and other political dissidents would be interrogated,
tortured, and murdered after the 1943 downfall of Benito
Mussolini. Having looted some of the stolen assets from the labor camps, he
also took with him a number of his staff from Operation Reinhard, including Christian Wirth,
Franz
Stangl and Franz Reichleitner.
Combating local Partisans
In
Slovene Littoral, Slovene Partisans were fought both by Germans and by Littoral
Home Guard which was also under Globocnik's direct command and provided Germans
with lists of locations of Liberation Front of the Slovene Nation hideouts and
suspicious individuals (described as "propagandist", "husband is
a Communist").
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| Odilo Globocnik |
Retreat and death
With
the advance of Allied troops, Globocnik retreated into Austrian Carinthia and
finally went into hiding high in the mountains in an alpine hut near Weissensee,
still in company of his closest staff members. Globocnik was tracked down and
captured by a British armoured cavalry unit, the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, at
the Möslacher Alm, overlooking the Weissensee on 31 May 1945. Globocnik was
taken to Paternion to be interrogated, and at around 11:30 hours committed
suicide by biting on a cyanide capsule. At least two contemporary photographs
show Globocnik's body shortly after his death, and there are several reliable
reports, including the Regimental Diary and Field Reports of the 4th Queen's
Own Hussars, detailing the circumstances of his capture and suicide.
Captured
with him were seven men, including Georg
Michalsen, Friedrich Rainer,
Ernst Lerch, Hermann Höfle, Karl
Hellesberger, Hugo
Herzog and Friedrich
Plöb.
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.
Urban
legends
Prior
to the 1980s, there was debate over the circumstances of Globocnik's survival –
some had speculated that his death in either early May or June 1945 was at the
hands of either partisans or a Jewish revenge squad.
A
false version of Globocnik's fate has circulated indicating that he was turned
over to U.S. intelligence by the British. This is based on an "official US
document signed by US CIC S/A Operations Officer Andrew L. Venters, dated 27
October 1948, more than three years AFTER his supposed death".
However this document was exposed as a forgery in the 1980s by the
investigative writer and historian, Gitta Sereny; she gives all details in a
long article in the Observer newspaper.
In popular culture
Globocnik
features as a major character in the alternate
history Fatherland
by Robert Harris.
In the novel, which revolves around the notion
that Germany had been victorious in World War II, Globocnik (commonly referred
to by his nickname "Globus") has risen to become a feared leader
within the Gestapo. Globocnik is the main villain in the story. John Shrapnel plays him in the TV movie of the
novel.
There
is also a minor character in Harry Turtledove's novel In the
Presence of Mine Enemies with the name Odilo Globocnik. However,
the chronology of the story, set around the year 2010 in an alternate history
of Nazi Germany, means that this character cannot be the same person as the
real Globocnik. Turtledove's character is described as being in his fifties,
and thus would have been born sometime in the 1950s. The historical Globocnik,
born in 1904, would have been over one hundred years old at the time in which
the novel is set. It is unknown whether the Globocnik described in the novel is
related to the real Globocnik.
Globocnik
appears as an affable yet threatening and suspicious bureaucrat in Jonathan Littell's novel The
Kindly Ones.
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