Paul Wilhelm Hermann Blobel[1] (13 August 1894 – 7 June 1951) was a German Sicherheitsdienst (SD) commander and convicted war criminal who played a leading role in the Holocaust. He organised the Babi Yar massacre, the largest massacre of the Second World War at Babi Yar ravine in September 1941, pioneered the use of the gas van, and, following re-assignment, developed the gas chambers for the extermination camps. From late 1942 onwards, he led Sonderaktion 1005, wherein millions of bodies were exhumed at sites across Eastern Europe in an effort to erase all evidence of the Holocaust and specifically of Operation Reinhard. After the war, Blobel was tried at the Einsatzgruppen trial and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1951.

Early life

Blobel was born in Potsdam into a Protestant family of small trade artisans, who moved to Remscheid in 1899. He graduated schooling there without Abitur and between 1908 and 1911, Blobel completed training as a carpenter and bricklayer. In 1913, he began attending Barmen's Kunstgewerbeschule (a precursor to the University of Wuppertal), studying architecture.[1]

During World War I, Blobel enlisted in the Imperial German Army, becoming part of a pioneer battalion deployed on the Western Front, learning the use of flamethrowers, Minenwerfer, and incendiary explosives.[1] By the time he was discharged in 1918 to the military command in Lennep, he had reached the rank of Vizefeldwebel or Unteroffizier and was highly decorated,[1][2] having received an Iron Cross first class.[3]

After the war, Blobel finished his studies and around 1920, he gained a position as construction manager in the Solingen office of Franz Perlewitz, with a focus on industrial and residential buildings. Blobel married in 1921 and in late 1922, he began studying at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Upon his graduation in 1925, Blobel became a freelance architect, building a house for his family in Solingen's Schaberg district the following year.[1][3]

During the Great Depression, Blobel, by then a father of two sons, stopped receiving commission work, and received welfare while registered as unemployed between 1930 and 1933, although he had temporary employment at Solingen's administrative office.[1][3]

SS career

Blobel joined the Sturmabteilung (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in May 1931. Despite stating during his later post-war trial that he joined the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) in October 1931, claiming that the SA at the time was "not political" but rather considered a "social club, whose goals [he] did not find contrary to the SPD",[1] records showed that he had in fact joined the Nazi Party on 1 October of the same year[4] and become a member of the Schutzstaffel (SS) by 1 December.[5] Additionally, he was already known to have ties with the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the Nazi Party's intelligence service, shortly after entering the SS, while the organisation was still in its early stages, contributing to his rapid promotions within the SD.[4]

In March 1932, Blobel became deputy SD district leader in the Solingen-Remscheid-Wuppertal triangle of Gau Düsseldorf. In August 1933, he was put in charge of the 20. SS-Standarte in western Gau Düsseldorf, an area equivalent to the modern-day Regierungsbezirk Düsseldorf. Through this position, Blobel became a policeman of Düsseldorf's Gestapo office [de], initially only as an honorary title, but he eventually started going on patrols as an auxiliary police officer. His SD personnel file highlighted Blobel's loyalty and zeal to Nazism, making mention of an incident in which Blobel sustained heavy cranial injuries after getting into a fight with "public enemies" during an ID check. In mid-1934, Blobel received leadership of sector V in the upper Düsseldorf-West area, and a promotion from Oberscharführer to Hauptsturmführer. He was responsible for data collection in the region on Jewish organisations for the regional Judenkartei [de], which came into use in the mass arrest of Jews following the 1938 November pogroms.[4]

Early war-time ID issued to Paul Blobel by the "Volkswohlfahrt", Nazi Germany's welfare organization

In early 1941, shortly before Operation Barbarossa,[4] the Reich Security Main Office assigned Blobel as the leader of SS-Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzgruppe C to take part in the invasion in Reichskommissariat Ukraine. Along with the Order Police battalions, the Einsatzgruppen were responsible for massacres of Jews behind the Wehrmacht lines in the Soviet Union.[5] The murder campaign included all political and racial undesirables. In August 1941, Blobel was put in charge of creating a Nazi ghetto in Zhytomyr to enclose around 3,000 Jews who were murdered a month later.[6]

Blobel in SS uniform

On 10 or 11 August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln ordered him, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, to exterminate the entire Jewish population.[7] On 22 August 1941, the SS-Sonderkommando murdered Jewish women and children at Bila Tserkva with the consent of Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, commander of the 6th Army. SS-Obersturmführer August Häfner testified at his own trial in the 1960s:[8]

Trial and conviction

Blobel is sentenced to death at the Einsatzgruppen trial, 10 April 1948.

Over 59,018 killings are attributable to Blobel, however he personally estimated to have killed 10,000–15,000 people.[2] He was later sentenced to death by the U.S. Nuremberg Military Tribunal in the Einsatzgruppen trial. He was hanged at Landsberg Prison shortly after midnight on 7 June 1951.[12]

Blobel just before his execution

In the media

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Bilstein, Jochen; Bramann, Wilhelm; Crecelius, Wilhelm; Föhse, Ulrich (1998). Hier wohnte Frau Antonie Giese: die Geschichte der Juden im Bergischen Land : Essays und Dokumente (in German). p. 92.
  2. 1 2 3 "Paul Blobel Affidavit". Holocaust Historical Society.
  3. 1 2 3 "Paul Blobel". Max-Leven-Zentrum.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Bilstein, Jochen; Bramann, Wilhelm; Crecelius, Wilhelm; Föhse, Ulrich (1998). Hier wohnte Frau Antonie Giese: die Geschichte der Juden im Bergischen Land : Essays und Dokumente (in German). p. 93.
  5. 1 2 Zentner, Christian Ed; Bedürftig, Friedemann Ed (1991). The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich. New York: Macmillan. p. 1150. ISBN 0-02-897502-2.
  6. ↑ Ogorreck, Ralf (2010). Les Einsatzgruppen, Tallandier, p. 150, ISBN 978-2-286-03062-9
  7. ↑ Ogorreck, Ralf, op. cit. p. 203.
  8. 1 2 3 4 Friedländer, Saul (2007). The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945. HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-019043-9.
  9. ↑ Christopher Browning: The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. pp. 291–292 ISBN 0-803-25979-4 OCLC 52838928
  10. ↑ 1941: Mass Murder The Holocaust Chronicle. p. 270
  11. ↑ Sereny, Gitta (1974). Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder (2005 paperback ed.). London: Pimlico. p. 97. ISBN 978-0-7126-7447-8. Sereny also mentions the story in her 1995 biography of Albert Speer: Sereny, Gitta (1996). Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth (1996 paperback ed.). London: Picador. p. 272. ISBN 978-0-330-34697-9.
  12. ↑ "Five death sentences were confirmed: the sentence against Oswald Pohl, as well as those passed against the leaders of the Mobile Killing Units, Paul Blobel, Werner Braune, Erich Naumann and Otto Ohrlendorf. ... In the early morning hours of 7 June, the Nazi criminals were hanged in the Landesburg prison courtyard." Norbert Frei, Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration. Columbia University Press, 2002. p. 165 and p. 173
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