Odilo Globocnik was one of the most fanatical Austrian Nazis and became a key figure in the implementation of the Final Solution. Born on April 21, 1904, in Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary, he came from an Austrian-Croat family of low-ranking officials.
Globocnik trained as a builder and worked in the 1920s as a technician and construction supervisor. He joined the Nazi Party in Austria in 1931 and took part in illegal activities for the party, which led to several prison terms.
On March 12, 1938, German troops crossed the border into Austria and invaded the country without firing a shot. They were met not with armed resistance but with chairs and flowers, as thousands of Austrians turned out to greet Adolf Hitler on his way first to Linz and then to Vienna.
Terrified Jews, leftists, and other opponents of the Nazi regime raced toward the country's borders, hoping to reach them before they closed. Most became trapped in a rapidly Nazifying Austria.
In the weeks that followed, pogrom-like violence spread across the country. Austrian Nazis and others beat, attacked, and humiliated Jews, forcing them to scrub streets and public toilets and to perform humiliating exercises. Many decided to try to leave Austria, and lines formed at consulates across Vienna.
Globocnik's path to power had been building for years. In January 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany and fully intended to bring about an Austro-German union. Behind the scenes, the Nazi leadership began planning territorial expansion and a European war almost as soon as it took power.
Beginning in May 1933, the Austrian Nazis waged a propaganda and terror campaign encouraged and funded by Germany. Their goal was to undermine the regime of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss by making it look incompetent. They staged disruptive protests, brawled with political opponents and police, and set off explosives and tear gas bombs in public places and Jewish homes and businesses.
One bomb was thrown on June 12, 1933, in Vienna into a jewelry shop owned by Norbert Futterweit, who was of Jewish descent. Futterweit was killed instantly, and several people were badly injured in the store and on the street. Several historians believe Globocnik was behind the attack.
Futterweit's murder was one of the attacks that led to the banning of the Austrian Nazi Party and its affiliates on June 19, 1933. Although the Nazi movement became illegal in Austria, Austrian Nazis continued to operate underground.
In August 1933, Globocnik was arrested for the first time for trying to contact imprisoned Nazis at Klagenfurt. Between 1933 and 1935 he was arrested four times but served just over a year in jail, because Heinrich Himmler, the German head of the SS, repeatedly intervened on his behalf.
Himmler liked Globocnik, familiarly calling him "Globus," and recognized the value of this ruthless Austrian. His fanatical devotion to the Nazi cause paid off, and he quickly climbed the party apparatus in his native Austria. In 1936 he was appointed provincial Nazi chief of the Carinthia region.
At that time Globocnik was ridiculed by other Nazis for his Slavic surname, since the Nazis classified Slavs as subhumans. Senior Nazis such as Himmler defended him, saying he was of Aryan origin and that his surname was the result of Slavicization.
In the spring of 1938, Hitler annexed Austria into the German Reich. The Anschluss took place over three days, between March 11 and 13, 1938. On May 24 of the same year, Globocnik was promoted to regional Nazi Party leader of Vienna.
Globocnik then launched a crusade against the church. The Nazis confiscated property, closed Catholic organizations, and sent many priests to Dachau. Anger at the treatment of the church in Austria grew quickly.
In October 1938, the first act of overt mass resistance to the new regime took place. Thousands rallied at mass in Vienna chanting "Christ is our Führer" before being dispersed by police. After cardinals denounced Nazi persecution of the church, Nazi mobs ransacked a cardinal's residence.
The power went to Globocnik's head. He became involved in foreign currency speculation and used an astonishing number of dirty tricks, particularly in financial matters. He was also described as a sexual deviant who used his power to force girls from the Austrian upper classes into sexual orgies.
For these reasons, in 1939 he was stripped of his party honors. A major factor behind his downfall was Hermann Göring, who had pushed for Globocnik's dismissal from his high party offices.
Himmler then transferred Globocnik to the Waffen SS, the military branch of the SS, with which he took part in the invasion of Poland. The Polish campaign, which marked the beginning of World War II, began on September 1, 1939, after a false accusation that Poles had attacked a German radio station.
After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppressed the Poles, whom they considered racially inferior. In the weeks following the attack, German SS, police, and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.
In the fall of 1941, Nazi Germany began to implement a plan code-named Operation Reinhardt to systematically murder almost two million Jews living in the German-administered territory of occupied Poland known as the General Government.
Because Himmler chose Globocnik as the central figure for Operation Reinhardt, he pardoned him and on November 9, 1939, appointed him SS and police leader for the Lublin District. After his initially disappointing party career, Globocnik now had a second chance in the ranks of the SS and police, and in return he promised Himmler he would kill a million Jews.
Meanwhile, Globocnik's men had begun mass executions of Jews. In October 1941, a Captain Kleinschmidt and 15 men, each with their own truck, took about 450 Jews to an abandoned airfield roughly 25 miles from Lublin. The Jews were forced to dig a ditch some six cubic meters in size and line it with straw.
What followed is beyond the grasp of imagination. After finishing the ditches, 10 of the victims took off their clothes and were given corrugated paper shirts reaching halfway down the thighs. The victims were ordered 10 at a time to lie down in the ditches, alternately head to foot.
Then Globocnik's men threw hand grenades into the ditches, and heads, arms, and legs quickly filled the air. The troops shot anyone still moving after the explosions. They then spread lime over the remains, and a new layer of straw was spread on top of the lime. Three or four layers of bodies, 10 in each layer, were placed in such a grave.
During the executions, the other victims had to watch and await their turn. Women were kicked in the stomach and breasts, and children were smashed against rocks.
It is believed that Globocnik may have originated the industrialized extermination camp concept and suggested it to Himmler. At a two-hour meeting with Himmler on October 13, 1941, Globocnik received verbal approval to start construction work on the Belzec extermination camp, the first such camp in the General Government.
The construction of three more camps — Sobibor, Majdanek, and Treblinka — followed in 1942. When given the order to create these camps, Globocnik told his men that the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler had just given them a new task, and that he was grateful they could be sure Himmler's wishes would be fulfilled immediately.
Globocnik proposed exterminating the Jews in assembly-line fashion in concentration camps using gas chambers. The gassing facilities he established in Belzec soon after his October 13 meeting with Himmler were designed by T4 program personnel assigned to him, and they used carbon monoxide as the T4 program had done.
His men killed thousands of Polish and Russian Jews every hour. After a few months in operation, he gave the order to build new gas chambers that could take in 2,000 people at a time. It is estimated that 600,000 Jews were murdered in Belzec alone.
This was not enough for Globocnik, who complained that deportations were insufficient and that his death camps had even greater killing power. At some point he had a confrontation with Rudolf Höss, the commander of Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was a slave labor camp, whereas the camps Globocnik oversaw were death camps, places where Jews were taken only to be killed. Höss and Globocnik fought publicly before their superiors over who killed the most people, accusing each other of being ineffective and untidy. Höss tried to get his rival to use Zyklon B, the gas used in the Auschwitz chambers, but Globocnik still preferred carbon monoxide.
From 1942 to 1943, Globocnik also oversaw the beginning of the General Plan Ost, the master plan for the East devised by Nazi leaders in 1941 and 1942 to resettle Eastern Europe with Germans and move other so-called inferior groups within the Nazi domain.
The territories involved included occupied Poland, the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, Belarus, and parts of Russia and Ukraine. About 45 million people lived in those areas in the early 1940s, including five to six million Jews.
The Nazis devised an elaborate racial classification system to decide who would be enslaved, expelled, murdered, or resettled. Some 31 million inhabitants, mostly of Slavic origin, were to be declared racially undesirable and expelled to western Siberia. The Jews were to be annihilated, euphemistically referred to as "total removal." The rest of the local population would be enslaved, Germanized, or killed. After the area was cleared, 10 million Germans and ethnic Germans were to be moved in.
During the German occupation of Poland, the SS set up a number of industrial enterprises in the General Government manned exclusively by Jewish labor. In Lublin, Globocnik was the overseer and main director of these enterprises, which made large profits for the SS and for a few senior SS dignitaries, including himself.
From the slaughter of 1.7 million Jews in the Operation Reinhardt killing centers and related mass shootings, Globocnik became immensely rich. The property of the victims, ranging from houses and valuables to the gold in their teeth, was seized by the SS.
In a report Globocnik sent to Himmler on January 5, 1944, he enumerated the money, gold, and other valuables stolen from the Jews during Operation Reinhardt. Converted into Reichsmarks, Globocnik arrived at a total of 178 million Reichsmarks, then equal to 71 million US dollars. For himself, approximately 12.5 million Reichsmarks, then equal to 5 million US dollars.
Globocnik carried out Himmler's orders with brutal efficiency. By November 1943, Operation Reinhardt had been completed and the three death camps directly under his control were liquidated.
On April 19, 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began after German troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants to forced labor camps in the Lublin District. The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance, inflicting casualties on well-armed and well-equipped SS and police units in the first days of the operation.
They continued to resist deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks. It was the largest uprising by Jews during World War II and the first significant urban revolt against the German occupation in Europe.
In the end, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground, burning and demolishing that part of Warsaw block by block to smoke out their prey. Jürgen Stroop, who led the suppression of the uprising, ended the operation on May 16 and announced in his daily report to Berlin that the former Jewish quarter of Warsaw was no more.
The SS and police deported approximately 42,000 Warsaw Ghetto survivors captured during the uprising to the forced labor camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and to the Majdanek concentration camp. At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto, burned alive or killed by smoke inhalation. Another 7,000 were sent to the Treblinka killing center.
Globocnik took part in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto. He was also put in charge of liquidating the Bialystok Ghetto, which stood out for its strong resistance to the German occupation.
During the August 1943 deportations, when all hope for survival within the ghetto was abandoned, the Bialystok ghetto underground staged an uprising against the Germans in an unsuccessful attempt to break out and join partisans in the nearby forests. Armed Jews attacked German forces near the ghetto fence along Smolna Street.
The fighting in the northeastern section of the ghetto lasted five days. Hundreds of Jews died in the battle, and 71 Jewish fighters were killed after being discovered in a bunker and captured by the Germans. More than 100 Jews managed to escape the ghetto and join partisan groups in the Bialystok area.
From August 16 to 20, 1943, the Germans fought against a group of about 300 to 500 insurgents armed with 25 rifles, 100 pistols, and homemade Molotov cocktails and grenades. Globocnik sent in a tank.
Despite the insurgency, the planned deportations to concentration and extermination camps went ahead. On August 17, 1943, without delay, approximately 10,000 Jews were led to the Holocaust trains and sent to Treblinka, Majdanek, and Auschwitz. A transport of 1,200 children was sent to Theresienstadt concentration camp and later to Auschwitz, where they were murdered.
It is estimated that out of almost 60,000 Jews who lived in Bialystok before World War II, only several hundred survived the Holocaust.
During his time in German-occupied Poland, Globocnik became increasingly addicted to alcohol and allegedly drank up to three liters of vodka a day while performing his duties. He was still drinking, which increased his aggressiveness not only toward Jews but also toward fellow SS officers.
Himmler's brother-in-law Richard Wendler, the civil governor in the Lublin District, used his personal relationship with Himmler to urge him to do something about Globocnik. Wendler thanked Himmler for clearing the air regarding the SS and police leader in Lublin and asked him to transfer Globocnik to a new field of activity as quickly as possible and remove him from the area.
At that time Globocnik was already complicit in the extermination of 1.7 million Jews, as well as a smaller number of non-Jews, in the death camps under his control.
Globocnik, together with a large number of experienced killers, then moved to Trieste, where he was promoted to higher SS and police leader of the Adriatic region. At the Risiera di San Sabba concentration camp in northern Italy near Trieste, on October 9, 1943, Globocnik had a hand in killing 2,000 Jews and political prisoners.
Ivan Marchenko, a notorious guard at the Treblinka extermination camp known as "Ivan the Terrible," participated in the killings at this camp. Italian Jews, partisans, and other political dissidents were interrogated, tortured, and murdered on the orders of Globocnik and his men.
After the 1943 downfall of Benito Mussolini and the German takeover of Italy, many prisoners of the Risiera di San Sabba were transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
On May 31, 1945, three weeks after the war in Europe ended, the 41-year-old Odilo Globocnik was captured by the British Army near Weissensee in Austrian Carinthia. He would never face justice for his crimes.
The same day he was captured, Globocnik committed suicide by swallowing a capsule of cyanide. His body was taken to be buried in a local churchyard, but the priest reportedly refused to have the body of such a man rest in consecrated ground.
A grave was dug outside the churchyard next to an outer wall, and the body was buried without ceremony. There were no tears shed.