Execution of Otto Ohlendorf
- Brutal Nazi Commander of Einsatzgruppen Nazi Death Squads -Holocaust

28 July 2022

Category: High Ranking Nazi Representatives

Otto Ohlendorf was born on the 4th of February 1907. Otto Ohlendorf joined the Nazi Party in 1925 and in 1926. In 1936, three years after Hitler and the Nazi Party came into power, Otto Ohlendorf joined the SD which was the intelligence agency of the Nazi Party and was considered a sister organization with the Gestapo which was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Shortly after, Heinrich Himmler established a new agency - Reich Security Main Office - which formalized the relationship between the intelligence service – the SD - and the Security Police, which consisted of Gestapo and the Kripo, which was a Criminal Police.

On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union. The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Eastern Front and Reinhard Heydrich appointed Ohlendorf the commander of the Einsatzgruppe D. Ohlendorf’s Einsatzgruppe D was attached directly to the 11th Army and operated in southern Ukraine and Crimea. His unit consisted of about 500 men and was supplemented by Romanians and Ukrainians.

Commander of Einsatzgruppe D

Their objective was to kill the Jews and Gypsies, as well as the Soviet political commissars. Some of the men, whom Ohlendorf did not consider emotionally suitable for executing these tasks, were excluded and sent home. Einsatzgruppe D of which Ohlendorf was a commander, was in particular responsible for the massacre at Simferopol between the 9th and 13th of December 1941, where at least 14,000 people, mostly Jews, were killed.

In the year between June 1941 and June 1942 the Einsatzkommando D under Ohlendorf’s command reported ninety thousand people liquidated, most of them Jewish men, women and children. After the death of Reinhard Heydrich in June 1942, Otto Ohlendorf returned to the Reich Ministry of economic affairs and became a deputy director general. Otto Ohlendorf was arrested in May 1945 together with his chief Heinrich Himmler. He was then finally to face justice and pay for his crimes. On the 10th of April 1948 the tribunal found Otto Ohlendorf guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity and membership in criminal organizations and sentenced him to death by hanging. Ohlendorf was 44 years old when he was executed on the 7th of June 1951. Until his very end he claimed he had acted properly and had done nothing wrong.

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