SS Major General Otto Ohlendorf with SS Brigadier General Heinz Jost
Nuremberg, January 1948 (Image - Wikimedia, public domain)
He joined the Nazi Party in 1925 and the SS in 1926. In 1936 he joined the SD (Sicherheitsdienst), the intelligence agency of the SS which was a sister organization to the Gestapo. By 1939, he had obtained the rank of SS-Standartenführer (Colonel) and was appointed as head of the SD's information gathering service, Amt III, a department of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA).
In June 1941, Reinhard Heydrich appointed Ohlendorf to be commander of Einsatzgruppe D, which operated in southern Ukraine and Crimea. His group was attached to Field Marshall Erich von Manstein's Eleventh Army.
In 1943, Ohlendorf became deputy director general in the Reich Ministry of economic affairs and in November 1944, he was promoted to SS Gruppenführer.
Ohlendorf was subjected to torture at the Nuremberg Trials and in his affidavit of November 5th, 1945 he was "persuaded" to confess that 90,000 Jews had been killed under his command.
Affidavit of Otto Ohlendorf, Head of Einsatsgruppe D:
He also claimed that from the Spring of 1942, women and children had been executed in "gas vans," that the victims were all buried in trenches, and that he had personally been present at two mass shootings."When the German army advanced into Russia I was the commander of Einsatzgruppe D in the southern sector and during the year that it was under my command it liquidated about 90,000 men, women and children. The majority of those liquidated were Jews but there were also Communist officials amongst them."
Despite this "confession" Ohlendorf was not charged with any crime until 1948, when he was arraigned as a defendant in the Einsatzgruppen trial.
At the 1948 trial, he completely recanted his 1945 confession, claiming it had been extracted from him by force. In his recantation, Ohlendorf never mentioned killing children; declared that the Einsatzgruppen were merely engaged in fighting an anti-partisan war; that he knew nothing about gas vans; and reduced the number of executions under his command from 90,000 to 40,000.
Ohlendorf explained to the Tribunal that his units often had to prevent massacres of Jews organised by anti-Semitic Ukrainians behind the German front, and he denied that the Einsatzgruppen as a whole had inflicted even one quarter of the casualties claimed by the prosecution.
Einzatsgruppe D conducting executions in the Crimea.
The number killed was greatly exaggerated
He insisted that the illegal partisan warfare in Russia, which he had to combat, had taken a far higher toll of lives from the regular German army - an assertion confirmed by the Soviet Government, which boasted of 500,000 German troops killed by partisans. In fact, Franz Stahlecker, commander of Einsatzgruppe A in the Baltic region and White Russia, was himself killed by partisans in 1942.
The English jurist F. J. P. Veale, said of the Einsatzgruppe action groups: "There is no question that their orders were to combat terror by terror", and he found it strange that atrocities committed by the partisans in the struggle were regarded as blameless simply because they turned out to be on the winning side.
Ohlendorf took the same view, and in a bitter appeal written before his execution, he accused the Allies of hypocrisy in holding the Germans to account by conventional laws of warfare while fighting a savage Soviet enemy who did not respect those laws.
Furthermore, when Ohlendorf was asked by his lawyer Dr. Aschenauer if he knew of any grand extermination plans, Ohlendorf replied:
"I expressly assure you that I neither knew of such plans nor was I called on to cooperate in any way with such plans. Lieutenant General Bach-Zelewski testified during the big trial (before the International Military Tribunal) that the Reich Leader SS in a secret conference of all lieutenant generals made known that the goal was to exterminate thirty million Slavs. I repeat that I was neither given such an order nor was there even the slightest hint given to me that such plans or goals existed for the Russian campaign. That is not only true for the Slavs but this is also true for the Jews. I know that in the years of 1938, 1939 and 1940, no extermination plans existed, but on the contrary, with the aid of Heydrich and by cooperation with Jewish organizations, emigration programs from Germany and Austria were arranged; financial funds even were raised in order to help aid the poorer Jews to make this emigration possible."The presiding judge at the 1948 trial rejected Ohlendorf's recantation, and refused to consider it as evidence - effectively convicting Ohlendorf on the basis of the earlier "confession" which had been extracted under duress.
Ohlendorf was sentenced to death in April 1948 and spent three years in detention before being hanged at the Landsberg Prison in Bavaria on 8 June 1951.
Confessions Under Torture
On the 23rd January 1949, the British newspaper, the Sunday Pictorial, disclosed that one of the Nuremberg trial judges, Mr. Edward L. van Roden, had admitted that most of the German officers and leaders had been tortured. The Sunday Pictorial reported as Follows:
"The methods described were, posturing as priests to hear confessions and give absolution, torture with burning matches being driven under the victim's fingernails, the knocking out of teeth, the breaking of jaws, solitary confinement for months on end and near starvation.
"The statements that were admitted as evidence were obtained from men who had been kept in solitary confinement for up to five months. Then the investigators would put a black hood over the accused's head and then punch him in the face with brass knuckles, kick him and beat him with rubber hoses.
"All but two of the Germans, in the 139 cases that we investigated, had had their testicles kicked in beyond repair. This was standard operating procedure with our American investigators."The article in the Sunday Pictorial concluded:
"Strong men were reduced to broken wrecks ready to mumble any admission demanded by their prosecutors."References:
Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals, Volume IV, the Einsatzgruppen Case, October 1946 - April 1949
Advance to Barbarism, by F. J. P. Veale, published by C. C. Nelson Publishing Company, 1953
For Those Who Cannot Speak, by Michael McLaughlin, published by Historical Review Press, 1979
The Washington Daily News, January 9th, 1949
The Sunday Pictorial, 23rd January 1949
