Background
Oswald Pohl was born in Duisberg on 30 June 1892.
Oswald Pohl was born in Duisberg on 30 June 1892.
After serving in World War I, Pohl entered the NSDAP in 1922 and four years later was made an SA leader. A naval officer by profession, Pohl rose to the position of Senior Paymaster Captain. His organizational talents caught the eye of Heinrich Himmler and, on 1 February 1934, Pohl was made SS-Standartenfuhrer and Chief Administrative Officer in the Reich Main Security Office. In June 1939 he was appointed a Ministerial Director in the Reich Ministry of the Interior. In the same year he joined the ‘Circle of Friends of Heinrich Himmler' - a group of wealthy patrons drawn from the top echelons of industry, banking and insurance, who played a leading role in supplying Waffen-SS units with arms and uni¬forms during World War II, in return for certain practical advantages and honorary rank in the SS. Pohl himself reached the rank of SS-Ober- gruppenfiihrer and from 1942 to 1945 was a General of the Waffen-SS.
In 1942 he was appointed head of the SS-Wirtschaftsi-und Verwaltungshauptamt (or WVHA), which was the Economic and Administrative Main Office of the SS. Its sphere covered all works projects for concentration camp inmates as well as the camps inspectorate - altogether a gigantic concern designed to squeeze the maximum use out of captive labour for the profit of the SS. Pohl was thus put in charge of the ‘economic’ side of the Nazi extermination programme, as part of Himmler’s drive for greater efficiency and his desire to secure the financial independence of the SS. Pohl saw to it that all valuables seized from gassed Jewish inmates - includ¬ing clothing, human hair, tooth fillings, gold spectacles, diamonds, gold watches, silverware, bracelets, wedding rings and foreign currency, etc. - were sent back to Germany. Here the booty was melted down and sent in the form of ingots to a special SS account in the Reichsbank. Pohl went into hiding at the end of the war, disguised as a farmhand. Arrested in May 1946 he initially admitted that the existence of death camps had been no secret in Germany: ‘In the case of textile and valuables,’ he declared, ‘everyone down to the lowest clerk knew what went on in the concentration camps.’ Pohl was tried on 3 November 1947 by an American military tribunal and sentenced to death.
After spending three and a half years in the Landsberg death cells he was finally hanged as a war criminal on 8 June 1951.