Background
Karl Oberg was born in Hamburg on 27 January 1897, the son of a Professor of Medicine.
Karl Oberg was born in Hamburg on 27 January 1897, the son of a Professor of Medicine.
He enlisted in the army in August 1914, fighting as a Lieutenant on the western front in September 1916 and receiving the Iron Cross.
After the war he was involved in suppressing a mutiny and participated in the Kapp putsch in Berlin. In January 1921 he was business manager of the Escherich Organization in Flensburg and then liaison man between various Reichswehr formations, the government and local patriotic leagues in Schleswig. In 1926 he returned to Hamburg as the representative for a wholesale paper merchant and two years later took a job with a wholesale tropical fruit firm. As a result of the world economic crisis the firm was liquidated within a few' months and Oberg remained unemployed until the end of 1930.
He then bought a tobacco kiosk in Hamburg with the help of a small family loan. In 1932 Hevdrich took him into the SD where he became one of his closest collaborators, following him to Munich and then Berlin, to found the main office of the Security Service. Oberg’s promotion was rapid. SS Captain in March 1934, SS Major in July 1934, Oberg was promoted to SS Colonel in 1935 and acted as Heydrich's right-hand man in the SD, respected for his ‘decency', his bureaucratic meticulousness and discipline.
Differences between the two men, partly caused by age differences (Oberg was seven years older than his arrogant superior), led Oberg to return to the SS where he took command of the Twenty-second SS Regiment in Mecklenburg and was subsequently head of the SS Abschnitt IVA in Hanover until December 1938.
In January 1939 Oberg was appointed Police President at Zwickau in Saxony and then in September 1941 became SS and Police Leader in Radom, where he took part in the extermination of Jews and the hunt for Polish workers. Promoted to SS Major General in April 1942, the tall, stockily built, bespectacled North German was sent to Paris on 7 May 1942 as Himmler's personal representative to take command of the SS and SD in occupied France.
After the Allied invasion of Normandy and the liberation of Paris, Oberg and his men retreated and he returned to Germany in December 1944 where he was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Weichsel Army under direct orders from Himmler.
At the end of the war Oberg went into hiding in a Tyrolean village but was arrested by American military police in June 1945. Sentenced to death by a court in Germany, he was extradited to France on 10 October 1946.
On 22 February 1954 Oberg and SS Colonel Helmuth Knochen appeared before a Paris military tribunal sitting in the Cherche-Midi prison. Although Oberg had already been interrogated 386 times, his trial was again adjourned. On 9 October 1954 he was once again sentenced to death, but this was commuted to life imprisonment by a presidential pardon ratified on 10 April 1958. A further decree of 31 October 1959 reduced the sentence to twenty years’ forced labour from the date of the sentence. Oberg was finally pardoned by President Charles de Gaulle and repatriated to Germany in 1965, where he died on 3 June of the same year.
Oberg's appointment as Supreme Head of the SS and Police in French territory led to a radical change in the previous relationship between the military administration and the German police, which henceforth possessed executive powers and were responsible for the security of troops behind the lines.
Completely independent of General von Stuelpnagel, Oberg proved himself a disciplined Nazi, at the same time ensuring the obedience of French collaborationist and militia groups and making his Gestapo officers thoroughly feared and detested by the local population. Oberg was responsible for publishing the Jewish badge decree for occupied France shortly after his arrival and for various repressive measures undertaken against the French Resistance.