Background
Richard Glucks was born on 22 April 1889.
Richard Glucks was born on 22 April 1889.
After serving in World War I as an artillery officer, Glucks became a businessman in Düsseldorf. An early recruit to the NSDAP, he worked after 1936 under Theodor Eicke, the first Inspector of Concentration Camps.
Rising to the rank of SS-Brigadeführer and in charge of Eicke’s staff at Oranienburg - headquarters of the concentration camp inspectorate - Glucks succeeded his former boss shortly after the outbreak of World War II.
His official title until March 1942 was Der Reichsführer SS - Inspekteur der Konzentrationslager. It was Glucks who in February 1940 chose the site of Auschwitz as a concentration camp for Poles to be confined in ‘political detention’; later it was transformed into the foremost extermination centre for European Jewry. One of the shadowiest figures in the ‘Final Solution', Gluecks was head of Amtsgruppe D in the SS Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Economic and Administrative Head Office) under Lieutenant-General Pohl .
As head of the concentration camp inspectorate, a subdivision of Pohl’s empire, he was the direct superior of Rudolf Hoess and other death camp commandants in occupied Poland. All written and oral extermination orders were transmitted by Heinrich Himmler through Pohl and Gluecks to be passed on to the various concentration camp commanders. Glucks not only exercised full control over the medical services at Auschwitz and other camps, being responsible for the SS doctors who made the selections for extermination, but he also decided together with Himmler and Pohl how many Jewish deportees should be liquidated and how many spared for hard labour. In November 1943 he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer and made a Lieutenant-General of the Waffen-SS.
At the end of the war Glucks appeared to have vanished, but it was later claimed that he had committed suicide at Flensburg Naval Hospital on 10 May 1945, where he was undergoing treatment for shock following an Allied bombing raid. It is also possible that he was the victim of a small band of Jewish avengers roaming through Germany at the end of the war who sought to track down and execute mass murderers.