Background
Otto Ohlendorf was born in Hoheneggelsen on 4 February 1907, the son of a peasant.
Otto Ohlendorf was born in Hoheneggelsen on 4 February 1907, the son of a peasant.
Educated at a humanistic Gymnasium in Hildesheim, he later studied law at the Universities of Leipzig and Göttingen, graduating in July 1933.
In October 1933 he became assistant to Professor Jessen at the Institute of World Economy at the University of Kiel. He specialized in the study of National Socialism and Italian fascism - he was subsequently the only top SS leader to be familiar with the syndicalist elements and organizational structure of fascist Italy. In January 1935 Ohlendorf became departmental head at the Institute of Applied Economic Science before entering the SD and working under Professor Reinhard Höhn in the following year. Parallel to his promising academic career, the intelligent, idealistic Ohlendorf had been active in the National Socialist Students’ League in Kiel and Göttingen as well as teaching at the Party school in Berlin in 1935. He had been one of the first members of the newly constituted NSDAP back in 1925 (when he was only eighteen), entering the SS a year later and also fulfilling various SA duties in his home district. The highly educated lawyer and economist was promoted to Major in the SD in 1938 and the following year became head of Amt III of the RSHA, a position he retained until the end of World War II.
Ohlendorfs security services provided intelligence information of a unique kind in the Third Reich, prying into the lives and thoughts of ordinary citizens in Nazi Germany and acting as a secret and relatively candid recorder of ‘public opinion’ for the benefit of the leadership. Although Ohlendorfs research workers were secret police agents, his activities were much disliked by Himmler.
When Himmler organized his special extermination units for service in the USSR, Major General Ohlendorfs bureaucratic career was interrupted; from June 1941 to June 1942 he was made Commander of Einsatzgruppe D which operated at the extreme southern end of the eastern front.
Having completed his stint as an organizer of mass murders, Ohlendorf returned quietly to the Reich Ministry of Economics, where in November 1943 he became the manager of a committee on export trade and a delegate to the Central Planning Board. Promoted to SS Lieutenant-General in November 1944, Ohlendorf still retained his post as head of Amt III in the RSHA. He even figured as a ‘liberal member in Himmler’s entourage, suggesting at the end of the war that the Reichsfuhrer-SS surrender himself to the Allies in order to vindicate the SS against the ‘calumnies’ of its enemies. Himmler’s right-hand man, Walter Schellenberg, seriously proposed Ohlendorf as the member of a cabinet list which would be presentable to the Allies. His judges at Nuremberg took a very different view ot the attractive, youthful-looking secret service chief, describing him as a Jekyll and Hyde character, some of whose acts defied belief.
Sentenced to death in April 1948, he spent three and a half years in detention before being hanged, along with three other Einsatzgruppe commanders, in Landsberg prison on 8 June 1951.
Attached to the Eleventh Army, the academically trained bloodhound and his units in the Ukraine were responsible for the execution of 90,(MX) men, women and children, mostly Jews. In contrast to some other group commanders, Ohlendorf ordered that several of his men should shoot the victims at the same time ‘to avoid direct personal responsibility’, since, as he claimed later at Nuremberg, it was psychologically, an immense burden to bear' for the executioners. As for the mass murder of Jews in Nikolaiev, Kherson, in Podolia and the Crimea which his units carried out, Ohlendorf later defended it from the dock as a historically necessary task to secure lebensraum for the German Reich in the East. Recalling precedents such as the murder of gypsies in the Thirty Years’ War and even the Biblical Israelites’ extirpation of their enemies(!), Ohlendorf asserted that history would regard his firing squads as no worse than the ‘press-button killers’ who dropped the atom bomb on Japan.
Quotes from others about the person
Himmler characterized the Ohlendorf as ‘an unbearable Prussian, without humour, defeatist and anti¬militarist and a professional debunker’.