Background
Odilo Globocnik was born in Trieste on 21 April 1904. He was a son of an Austrian Croat family of petty officials.
Odilo Globocnik was born in Trieste on 21 April 1904. He was a son of an Austrian Croat family of petty officials.
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 (1918–19). In 1920, he worked as an underground propagandist for the Austrian cause during the Carinthian Plebiscite.
He later enrolled at the Höhere Staatsgewerbeschule (a higher vocational school for mechanical engineering), where he passed his Matura (the Austrian equivalent of the German Abitur) and graduated with honours. He performed jobs, such as carrying suitcases at the railway station, in order to help support the family financially.
A builder by profession, he joined the Nazi Party in Carinthia (Austria) in 1930 and became a ‘radical' leader of its factory cells in the province. In 1933 Globocnik entered the SS and was appointed deputy district leader of the NSDAP in Austria. Imprisoned for over a year on account of political offences, Globocnik re-emerged as a key liaison man between Hitler and the Austrian National Socialists. Appointed provincial Nazi chief of Carinthia in 1936, he was promoted to Gauleiter of Vienna on 24 May 1938. Dismissed from his position for illegal speculation in foreign exchange on 30 January 1939 and replaced by Josef Burckel, Globocnik was pardoned by Himmler and appointed on 9 November 1939 as SS and Police Leader for the Lublin district in Poland. He was chosen by Himmler as the central figure in Operation Reinhard (named after Reinhard Heydrich), no doubt because of his scandalous past record and well-known virulent anti-semitism.
Put in charge of a special company of SS men not subordinate to any higher authority and responsible only to Himmler, Globocnik founded four death camps in Poland - Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek and Treblinka - and drew rich rewards from the slaughter of nearly three million Jews whose property, down to their spectacles and the gold from their teeth, was seized by the SS. As his situation reports show, Globocnik carried out Himmler’s orders with brutal efficiency and by November 1943 Operation Reinhard had been completed and the death camps under his control liquidated. It had consisted of four separate tasks: the extermination of Polish Jewry, the exploitation of manpower, the realization of the immovable property of liquidated Jews and the seizure of hidden valuables and movable property. According to Globocnik’s final accounting to Himmler, the overall value of the cash and valuables accruing to the Reich between 1 April and 15 December 1943 from Operation Reinhard came to 180 million Reichsmarks. For helping himself too liberally to some of this plunder, Globocnik was discharged to Trieste together with his SS commando, where he was made Higher SS and Police Leader for the Adriatic region.
At the end of the war, Globocnik succeeded in evading arrest by returning to his native country in the mountains south of Klagenfurt. He was eventually tracked down and. according to some accounts, arrested on 31 May 1945 by a British patrol at Weissensee, Carinthia, committing suicide by swallowing a cyanide capsule a few minutes after being apprehended. According to other versions, Globocnik was hunted down and killed either by partisans or by a Jewish vengeance squad in June 1945.
Globočnik first appeared in politics in 1922, when he became a prominent member of pre-Nazi Carinthian paramilitary organisations 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.
