Odilo Globocnik, Hitler's man in the East

580 Pages·2004·4.1 MB·English

by  Globocnik

To my mother, Helena Krepinska-Poprzeczna, and my half sister, Zofia
Krepinska-Rurka, both of Skierbieszow, 17 kilometers northeast of Zamosc.
They were victims of the Globocnik and von Mohrenschildt–initiated Zamosc
Lands ethnic cleansing action of 1942–43 that saw the launching of Generalplan
Ost upon Polish lands by Hitler and Himmler, the Third Reich’s most ardent
Eastern Dreamers.
Odilo Globocnik, Hitler’s Man in the
East
JOSEPH POPRZECZNY
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE
e-ISBN: 978-0-7864-8146-0

©2004 Joseph Poprzeczny. All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
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the publisher.

Cover photographs: (top) Odilo Globocnik, second from right in Lublin’s Old
Town Quarter, 1943 (Yad Veshem Film and Photo Archive); (bottom) Odilo
Globocnik (US Embassy Office Berlin, Berlin Document Center)
McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
Acknowledgments
Work on this study received crucial assistance from several historians,
researchers and experts, and Irmgard Rickheim, who was engaged to Odilo
Globocnik from mid–1941 until late 1942; she provided personal information, as
well as previously unpublished photographs. Also helpful were Michael
Tregenza of London, and lately of Lublin, who has conducted groundbreaking
research and published many new findings on Globocnik’s central role as head
of Aktion Reinhardt, including pioneering work on aspects of Globocnik’s
Belzec killing center; Professor Maurice Williams of Okanagan University
College, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, an internationally recognized
expert on Austrian National Socialism, its far-reaching impact on Slovenia, and
Globocnik’s longtime and important Nazi Party associate Dr. Friedrich Rainer;
Erwin Lerner, New York playwright with productions off-Broadway, whose
international contacts and researches on Globocnik have resulted in his acquiring
a large array of previously unknown sources, including especially Georg
Wippern’s two postwar court statements; Siegfried Pucher, the author of
Globocnik’s only biography by the year 2003, which is in German and arose
from Pucher’s academic thesis, who provided information and advice in addition
to that biography; Dr. Alfred Elste of Villach, Austria, for providing a copy of a
Globocnik-signed wartime album that set out the blueprint for the Germanization
(Eindeutschung) of Poland’s Zamosc Lands (Zamojszczyzna), a pivotal World
War II document showing precisely how the first steps in the Germanization of
this region were to be undertaken; Dr. Berndt Rieger, formerly of Wolfsberg,
Austria, and lately of Bamberg, Germany, especially for his assistance in
providing his findings on the largely forgotten but crucially important
Carinthian, Reinhold von Mohrenschildt, and this SS man’s Baltic ancestry; Ales
Brecelj of Trieste, who discovered early original sources on Globocnik and the
Globocnik family in Trieste and made these and other findings freely available;
Helmut Wabnig and Dirk Lorek, for translating Siegfried Pucher’s thesis;
Professor Larry V. Thompson of the U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis,
Maryland, and Dr. Peter R. Black, senior historian, Center for Advanced
Holocaust Studies, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., who
both provided early English-language versions of their biographical essays on
Friedrich-Wilhelm Kruger and Odilo Globocnik, respectively, that were to be
published in German; Michael T. Allen of the Georgia Institute of Technology,
who drew my attention to several crucial issues, including clandestine moves
against Globocnik in Berlin, and who provided copies of an early chapter from a
manuscript for my use; Stephen Tyas of London, who located several previously
unknown documents that had been recently declassified on Globocnik and his
Lublin years and held by the Public Records Office, Kew; Robin O’Neil, whose
work on the Jewish Holocaust in Eastern Galicia necessarily considered
Globocnik’s murderous activities, in great depth (he also provided a copy of
Globocnik’s 1941 New Year’s card); the late Brigadier Guy Wheeler of
Somerset, who provided a detailed account of Globocnik’s capture and death;
Marian Pawlowski of Sobieszyn, for historical and other details about this
village; Arthur Radley of Holland Park Avenue, London, for providing a copy of
Alexander Ramsay’s handwritten report of his capture and identification of
Globocnik; Simon Withers of Holland Park Avenue, London, for promptly
acquiring several important sources; Peter de Lotz, London bookseller and
expert military bibliographer, and Gitta Sereny, for alerting me to Michael
Tregenza’s existence and whereabouts; Dr. Leon Popek of Lublin, for his
assistance in acquiring several key documents held in the Lublin National
Archives; cartographer Michael Pepperday of the University of Western
Australia for his maps, compiled at such short notice; Martin Saxon, for his
assistance in checking so many aspects of the final manuscript; Tom Rovis-
Hermann for his expert assistance, especially in preparing the Rickheim
photographs; Greg and Annalise Derfel, for their assistance in translating and
explaining documents in Globocnik’s SS file; Marek Zimowski for his patience,
precision, and care in translating Stanislaw Piotrowski’s important but largely
forgotten 1949 study of the thieving aspects of Globocnik’s administration of
Aktion Reinhardt; and last but certainly not least, my wife, Carolyn, who was
there and helped every step of the way both as a researcher and wise and
insightful adviser.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I. Ancestry and Early Life
II. A Carinthian Becomes a Viennese Pro-Hitler Activist
III. The Anschluss: March–April 1938
IV. Gauleiter of Vienna: 28 May 1938 to 30 January 1939
V. Lublin District’s SS-und Polizeiführer: 9 November 1939 to 17
September 1943
VI. The First Solution
VII. Globocnik Moves to “Re-Germanize” Lublin District
VIII. Globocnik’s New Order
IX. Lublin as a Germanic Eastern Outpost
X. Globocnik’s Lublin District “Gulag Archipelago”
XI. The Fate of Four Globocnik Victims
XII. Globocnik and Georg Wippern Ravage Jews’ Homes and Businesses
XIII. Globocnik and Wippern Exposed as Plunderers of the Dead
XIV. Globocnik’s Controversial Lublin Love Affair
XV. Himmler and Globus: A Double-Cross?
XVI. The Lublin District’s Demographic Upheavals, 1939–1944
XVII. Globocnik in Lublin: A General Assessment
XVIII. Back in Trieste: September 1943 to April 1945
XIX. Globocnik’s Last Journey: May 1945
XX. Globocnik’s Capture and Death
Notes
Works Cited
List of Names and Terms
Introduction
“He [Hitler] is surrounded not by friends but by accomplices, depraved
and vicious creatures or blind and brutal instruments.”
—Otto Strasser (1940)
Adolf Hitler’s and Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s most vicious wartime
accomplice, SS-Brigadeführer (Brigadier-General) Odilo Globocnik, although
dying in the spring of 1945, was a genocidal killer who is virtually forgotten,
including, strangely, by most Israelis and Poles. And this despite having been
one of the most bestial murderers of Jews and Poles that the 20th century was to
produce. He was intricately involved in the planning and administration of the
mass killing of at least 1.5 million and perhaps as many as two million people in
three specially constructed but out-of-the-way killing centers—Treblinka,
Sobibor, and Belzec—erected in occupied Poland to exterminate Jews.
Globocnik and Rudolf Höss, commandant of that other “terminal station,” the
huge Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center and concentration camp in Poland’s
Upper Silesia, can rightly be named as having been among the first industrial-
style mass killers in human history. Yet it is difficult to find much written about
Globocnik, most especially in the English-speaking world, and even less about
his ancestry, his early life and later political career, and most important of all, his
nearly four years in the southeastern Polish provincial city of Lublin, where he
was the central figure in the 20th century’s major genocide, the Holocaust. He
was also on the road to becoming the preeminent demographic or ethnic cleanser
in history, not just of the 20th century, having refined plans to expel into
Western Siberia over 100 million Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusans and
Balts. Globocnik’s nearly four years as head of the Himmler-controlled SS and
the police in Lublin far exceeded in bloody magnitude the much written about
and horrifying Reign of Terror that Arras lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre
(1758–94), and his bloodthirsty Jacobins inflicted upon late 18th century Paris
and Revolutionary France.
Globocnik was not merely a tyrant. Like his bloodthirsty ideological mentor and
superior, the German Reich’s Führer, Adolf Hitler, he betrayed his fatherland,
Austria, and went on to command a number of criminal agencies in occupied
Poland and later in northern Italy that employed large numbers of Austrians,
thereby even further blackening his country’s, as well as Germany’s, name.
Hand in hand with his German and Austrian staffers and many hundreds of
Ukrainians who were involved as auxiliaries in the genocide of the Jews as well
as in the ethnic cleansing of Poles living in the occupation region Berlin had
designated Lublin District, beginning with that district’s historic Zamosc Lands,
they together wreaked bloody havoc. Globocnik was able to cooperate with the
Ukrainian Nationalists because they were allied with Berlin and were seeking to
create, with German assistance, a purely Ukrainian ethnic enclave that included
Poland’s historic Zamosc Lands. This racially pure enclave was seen as the
beginning of a Greater Ukraine that would emerge after Hitler’s conquest of
Stalin’s huge Red Army of Workers and Peasants. The significance of the
Zamosc Lands was therefore that these two Axis allies, German Nazis and their
Ukrainian ideological confreres, who were loyal to the wartime Poland-based
Fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, both saw this segment of
Globocnik’s district as the first block in their bids to create an expanded Greater
Reich and a fascist-style Greater Ukraine respectively. 1
Globocnik had earlier conspired with Hitler to destroy Austria’s independence,
thereby helping to take Hitler closer to his primary political goal of territorially
unifying all the Germanic peoples of Central Europe, the so-called Anschluss.
That goal, however, was to be only the precursor to Hitler’s primary wartime
aim of acquiring, by military conquest, extensive tracts across all of Eastern
Europe so that these conquered lands could be settled by Germanic people. The
Slavs—Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusans, and Czechs—and most Balts
were to have been forcibly expelled into Western Siberia following the defeat of
the Red Army. Globocnik was also to have had a preeminent role in this
subsequent or wartime Hitlerite aim as an ethnic cleanser of all the inhabitants of
Poland and Western or European Russia, including Ukraine. He therefore
conspired with Himmler, who conspired with Hitler, in all of the Third Reich’s
major demographic resettlement programs, as well as with the later
internationally well-known Adolf Eichmann, in Hitler’s top-secret program of
killing all European Jews, codenamed Aktion Reinhardt. Just 10 months after
Reinhardt was secretly commenced, on Himmler’s orders, Globocnik launched
on 28 November 1942, across Poland’s Zamosc Lands, Hitler’s other and far
more ambitious demographic program, the now largely forgotten top-secret
Generalplan Ost, which, as its first stage, envisaged the deportation of up to 21
million ethnic Poles into Western Siberia.