Background
Arthur Nebe was born on 13 November 1894, the son of an elementary school teacher.
Arthur Nebe was born on 13 November 1894, the son of an elementary school teacher.
After volunteering for military service during World War I. Nebe joined the criminal police and reached the rank of Police Commissioner in 1924. A professional policeman and the author of an authoritative treatise on criminology, Nebe entered the NSDAP and the SS in July 1931. A few months later he also joined the SA. Even before the Nazis seized power Nebe was their liaison man in the Berlin criminal police, with close links to the SS group led by Kurt Daluege, who in April 1933 recommended him as Chief Executive of the State Police. The former Chief of the Berlin CID under Weimar, Nebe was now given the task of reorganizing the criminal police in the Third Reich. As head of the KRIPO and a top Gestapo official, Nebe played an important part in the establishment of the totalitarian police system. In September 1939 he was put in charge of Amt V (the fifth branch) of the Reich Main Security Office, which was responsible for the criminal police. Promoted to the rank of SS-Gruppenfuhrer, Nebe was later given command of Einsatzgruppe B between June and November 1941, an extermination group whose headquarters were in Minsk (Belarus) and which also covered the area of the Moscow front.
During this period of five months, Nebe was credited with the ‘modest' number of 46,000 executions. During Himmler’s visit to Minsk in July 1941, Nebe was instructed to find new methods of mass killing. (After the war an amateur film showing a gas chamber worked by the exhaust gas of a lorry was found in his former Berlin flat.) It has been suggested, however, that Nebe was not himself personally responsible for the massacres of Jews in his area and that he already then was working with the Resistance circle led by Colonel Oster. Nebe’s alleged disgust at mass murder is somewhat weakened by a letter he wrote on 28 June 1944 recommending the use of so-called ‘half-breed asociáis1 (i.e. gypsies) from Auschwitz for human guinea-pig experiments such as drinking sea water. Despite his very questionable record, Nebe was apparently involved in the July 1944 plot against Hitler. Though not under suspicion, he chose to go into hiding on an island in the Wannsee and was betrayed by a rejected mistress.
According to official records, Nebe was executed in Berlin on 21 March 1945. On the other hand, in September 1956, he was sighted in Turin, Italy, and later reported to be with the SS commmando leader Otto Skorzeny in Ireland in the winter of 1960.
He was gone by the time members of a Jewish vengeance squad, sent to take him, had arrived on the scene.