Odilo Globocnik | The Man Behind Operation Reinhard | Who Killed 1.5 Million Jews\-ZZ

Betternian, Austria.

The 31st of May 1945.

A small castle [music] has been turned into a British army post.

In the courtyard, a prisoner is pacing.

He [music] is calm, almost bored.

He has told his interrogators he is a frightened merchant from Clagenffort.

He has nearly convinced them.

Then a British officer, fluent in German, suddenly shouts a name across the yard.

Gladnik.

The prisoner’s step does not falter, but his head moves just slightly, just once.

That fractional movement [music] is the moment one of the most lethal men of the entire Second World War gives himself away.

A few minutes later, he is walking toward the lockup, escorted [music] by a sergeant.

Without warning, he collapses on the stone between the castle yard and the cell block.

He has been holding [music] a cyanide capsule under his tongue from the moment of his arrest.

He has refused [music] all food and water for hours waiting for this.

By 11:25 [music] in the morning, Odilo Globnik is dead.

The man who organized the murder [music] of roughly 1 and a half million Jews in occupied Poland will never sit in a courtroom, never be questioned, never be sentenced.

This is the story of how he was allowed to get there in the first place.

Most people who have heard of the Holocaust have heard of Awitz.

Far fewer have heard of Bah or Soibore or Trebinka.

Those three small primitive camps killed [music] more Jews faster than any other Nazi operation in history.

The code name [music] for that killing was Operation Reinhard.

And the man Heinrich Himmler personally chose to run it was an obscure twice disgraced Austrian named Odilo [music] Globoknik.

To understand him is to understand something the school version of this history rarely shows.

That genocide on this scale did not require a mastermind.

It required a manager.

A loyal, corrupt, ambitious manager who failed his way upward until failure cost a million and a half lives.

That is what this video is about.

History uncut.

The stories they buried.

The truth [music] they couldn’t erase.

Odilo Luthar Ludwig [music] Globonic was born in Trieste in 1904.

At the time, Trieste was a port city in the Austrohungarian Empire.

His father was a Slovine descended cavalry officer in the Imperial Army.

His surname was Slavic.

Hold on to that detail.

It will matter later.

The empire collapsed.

The family moved to Clagenffort in the Austrian region of Corinthia.

As a teenager, Blobotnik fought in pro- Austrian paramilitary units against Slovine and Yugoslav forces in the violent border conflicts of 1918 to 1920.

That is where his politics were forged, not in books, in street fighting on contested ground against the very Slavic peoples his own surname tied him to.

He trained as a building technician.

He worked at [music] a railway station and in 1931 he joined the Austrian Nazi party.

This was illegal in Austria for most of that decade.

He was [music] arrested four times between 1933 and 1935 and served more than a year in jail.

He bombed.

He ran couriers.

He funneled Reich money into the underground party.

Several historians believe he was involved in the June 1933 Vienna bombing that [music] killed a Jewish juror named Norbert Futterweight.

That link is suspected, not proven, but it tells you the kind of work he [music] was doing.

Then came the Anelos.

In March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria.

Lobnik, the street level Austrian fanatic, was suddenly inside the regime he had been fighting for.

The reward came fast.

On the 22nd of May 1938, [music] Adolf Hitler personally appointed him golleader of Vienna.

He was 34 years old.

He had access [music] to one of the great capitals of Europe and to its large ancient Jewish community.

He used it.

He opened Vienna’s [music] first major anti-semitic exhibition.

He attacked the Catholic Church.

He declared in his own words, “I will not recoil from [music] radical interventions for the solution of Jewish questions.

” And then less than a year later, his career collapsed.

On the 30th of January, 1939, he was stripped of every position and every honor.

The reason was not anti-semitism.

The reason was money.

illegal foreign currency speculation.

The Nazi regime, which was about to murder millions, threw him out for personal corruption.

He was demoted to a junior NCO rank in the Waffan SS and sent to serve in Poland as effectively a non-commissioned officer.

That should have been the end of the story.

It was not because one man in Berlin still believed in him.

Hinrich Hemler.

The Rice Fura SS had a personal nickname for Global.

He called him Globul.

Remember that nickname? It is going to come back.

In November 1939, just months after Globalnik’s public disgrace, Himmler pardoned him and gave him a second chance.

A second chance in the language of the SS meant a posting.

The posting was Lublin.

Lublin was a district in the newly created Genog [music] Guammo, the slice of occupied Poland the Nazis had carved out as a colonial laboratory.

[music] It contained ghettos.

It contained Polish forced labor and it contained one of the densest concentrations of Jewish life in all of Europe.

Globulnik was named SS and police leader of Lublin.

He was 35 years old.

He answered in practice to no one but Himmler.

Listen to what he [music] said in February 1940 in his own voice about the Jews under his control.

Quote, “The evacuated Jews [music] should feed themselves and be supported by their countrymen as these Jews have enough.

If this does [music] not succeed, one should let them starve.

” End quote.

This was the man Berlin trusted with a Jewish population larger than most countries.

Over the next two years, Bloboknik built something quietly, methodically.

He set up a network of forced labor camps.

He built an SS power base.

[music] He cultivated his own personnel, including a chief of staff named Ernst Lurch and a deportation officer named Herman Hotla.

Remember Hotflow’s name.

He becomes important.

By the summer of 1941, Germany had invaded the Soviet Union.

SS killing squads were shooting Jews in pits behind the front line.

The killing [music] was constant, but it was also unmanageable.

It was loud.

It was visible.

It was psychologically corroding to the shooters themselves.

The regime needed a different method.

And on the 13th of October 1941, Odilo Globachnik walked into Hinrich Himmler’s office for a 2-hour meeting.

We do not have a transcript of what was said, but historians who have reconstructed the surrounding documents, including Christopher Browning, Peter Longerich, and Saul Freelander, all agree on something striking.

Blebopnik did not walk into that meeting as a passive subordinate waiting for orders.

He walked in with a proposal.

He had visited the men running a T4, the program murdering disabled Germans with carbon monoxide gas and sealed rooms disguised [music] as showers.

He had seen the method and he appears to have proposed adapting it, industrializing it, building fixed [music] installations in occupied Poland, where Jews would be brought in by train, [music] gassed, and disposed of in an unbroken assembly line.

2 days later, on the 15th of October 1941, Himmler formally [music] tasked him with implementing what would become Operation Reinhard.

This is the moment the school version of the Holocaust skips over.

WC is the meeting most people have heard of.

Wani was in January 1942, but by January 1942, Loboknik had already been building Bulk for 3 months.

The death camps were not invented in a conference room.

They were invented in a backwater SS office in Lublin by a man Berlin had recently fired for stealing currency.

That is what the evidence shows.

In the autumn of 1941, ground was broken at Bay, then at Soibbor, then at Trebinka.

Blebachnik did not design the camps himself.

He brought in a man named Christian Worth, a hardened veteran of the T4 killing program and put him in charge of construction and method.

Worth had already gassed disabled patients in Germany.

Now he would scale the technique to entire populations.

Remember Worth too.

He has not finished his work yet.

The personnel [music] of Operation Reinhardt came almost entirely from T4.

Every single commandant of every Reinhardt killing center had [music] passed through the euthanasia program first.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, this was not a coincidence.

[music] It was a pipeline.

The same men, the same training, [music] the same gas scaled from hundreds to millions.

In March 1942, the gassings began [music] at Be.

In May, Subore opened.

In July, Trebinka.

And this is where the numbers [music] become difficult to hold in the mind.

Yak was operational for only about 9 months.

According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, [music] at least 434,58 people were murdered there.

That precise figure does not [music] come from a survivor or a post-war reconstruction.

It comes from a coded German radio message sent [music] on the 11th of January 1943 by Globulnik’s own [music] deportation chief Herman Hutfu intercepted and decrypted by the British.

The murderers [music] were tallying their own work and the tally survived.

So bore at least [music] 167,000 dead.

Trebinka.

Approximately 925,000 dead, most of them in just over a year.

Three small camps, roughly 1 and a half million Jews murdered.

The vast majority within 21 months, a speed that [music] exceeded even Awitz.

The victims came from the ghettos, from Warsaw, from Lublin, from Kkow, from Radome, from Bayal Wushto.

They were told they were being resettled.

They were told to bring [music] a suitcase.

They were told there would be work.

A USHMM record preserves the story [music] of a 3 and a halfyear-old boy named Heno Cornfeld from a small town called Kbusawa.

He had been born in late 1938.

He played a game in the streets with the other children, imitating the local German police commander, pointing a wooden rifle and saying, “If you are a Jew, you are dead.

” This is the site of On the 7th of July 1942, Enoch, his mother Lieba, and his father Moyes were deported to Bes and ghast.

He was 3 and a2 years old.

[music] He is one face in 434,58.

There are 1,499,999 more.

While the trains ran, Globnik did something else.

He counted.

He counted clothing.

He counted crueling.

He counted gold teeth pulled from the corpses, [music] melted into bars, and shipped to Berlin.

In his own final report to Himmler in January 1944, preserved as Nuremberg [music] document 4024 to4 PS.

He listed seized Jewish property at roughly 178 million Reichs marks.

He also ran a [music] company called Ostindustri which used Jewish prisoners as slave labor in his own private SS economy before they were killed.

He was murdering an entire [music] people and he was billing for it.

In the summer of 1943, prisoners at Trebinka revolted.

Then prisoners [music] at Soibbor revolted.

The uprisings did not stop the [music] killing, but they accelerated the closure of the camps.

By October [music] 1943, BM Soibore and Trebinka had all been dismantled.

The barracks [music] were torn down.

Trees were planted.

At two of the sites, the SS built fake farms and installed Ukrainian auxiliary guards to [music] live there and pretend to be peasants.

They were trying to erase the evidence.

But before the operation closed, Himmler ordered one more action.

He feared that the Jewish forced [music] laborers still in Lublin district camps might revolt next.

So on the 3rd and 4th of November 1943 in an operation [music] cynically cenamedest harvest festival, more than 2,000 SS and police shooters arrived at Majik Trroniki and Ponyatawa.

Over 2 days they shot approximately 42,000 [music] Jews into pits.

Loudspeakers played dance music to drown out the gunfire.

Loknik reported [music] the conclusion of Operation Reinhardt to Himmler on the 4th of November 1943.

Himmler replied with what amounted to a [music] thank you note.

He expressed his gratitude and appreciation for the great and unique services Blobaltnik had rendered [music] the German people.

A great and unique service.

That was the official language for what had just happened.

And here is where most people assume the Blnik story ends.

It does not.

In September 1943, he had been given a new posting hire SS and police leader of the operational zone Adriatic Literal headquartered [music] in Trieste.

Triest his hometown, the city where he had been born [music] in 1904.

He returned there in 1943, not as a son of the place, but as its master.

And he did not come alone.

He brought Christian Worth with him.

He brought France Stangle, the commonant of Soibbor and Trebinka.

He brought France Relightener, who had commanded Soibbor after Stangle.

He brought roughly 90 specialists of what was now called Einats Commando Reinhard.

The death camp crew transferred intact in Trieste.

They [music] found a disused rice mill on the edge of the city, the Riera Dan Sabah.

They converted it into a detention center, a torture site, and the only Nazi camp on Italian soil to operate a crematorium.

Italian Jews, Slovenian partisans, political prisoners.

They went into San Saba and many did not come out.

This is the part of the story that gets buried.

The operation called Reinhard was officially closed in November 1943, but the people who had run it were never disbanded.

information.

The killing apparatus migrated immediately.

The architect of the gas chambers was killed [screaming] by Yugoslav partisans [music] in May 1944 on a road near Trieste.

Some of the others slipped quietly into postwar Europe.

By the spring of 1945, with the Red Army crossing into Austria and Italy collapsing, Globachnik fled north.

He went up into the Corinthian mountains he had known as a teenager.

He took the closest of his staff with him.

They hid in a wooden hut on a high alpine pasture called the Mutzlacer Alm above a lake called the Weiss Sea.

It is here the British army caught up with him.

The end is documented in unusually fine detail because of one British officer, Lieutenant W.

Kedley of the fourth Queen’s own Hous was stationed at Paternian in the D Valley at the end of May 1945.

He was the only officer in his unit who spoke fluent German.

He left a signed statement now preserved in the UK National Archives at Q file full 371796969.

Most of what we know about Globodnik’s final hours comes from that document.

Headedley’s unit had been arresting suspected SSmen.

They were holding them in a village lock up on minimum rations of water.

On the night of the 30th of May, during a party in the officer’s mess, one of those prisoners broke and offered to talk.

He told them where Globutnik was hiding.

The Muslacker um a hut on the mountain.

The men inside kept watch from above the hut during the day.

They could only be taken at night.

A patrol was assembled in the dark.

They climbed the mountain.

Shortly before 4:00 in the morning on the 31st of May, they surrounded the hut.

The doors were locked.

They forced them.

They pulled out roughly 10 people, seven men, three women.

One of the men was Friedrich Rener, the gore lighter of Corinthia, identifiable by a dueling scar on his cheek.

Inside the hut, on the floor of one of the rooms, the soldiers found an empty metal file, a cyanide capsule used.

Someone had already taken theirs.

They could not yet tell who.

The prisoners were brought down the mountain to Paternian.

The informer identified each one by name, with one exception.

One man insisted he was a poor merchant from Claggenffort.

He was so calm, so coolly cooperative that he almost walked free.

He paced in the castle yard, escorted by the regimental provost sergeant, waiting for his story to be verified.

The informer kept insisting.

He said the man in the courtyard was Blubolnik.

That is when Major Ramsay and Lieutenant Headley set the trap.

Ramsay would shout the name.

Hedley would watch.

The shout came.

Globulnik in Hedley’s own written words.

Quote.

Globotnik’s step never faltered, but his head moved fractionally.

End quote.

That was the giveaway.

The man who had organized the deaths of one and a half million human beings was undone by a head movement of perhaps an inch.

Headley confronted him.

Globopnik was ordered into the lockup.

He took a few steps and collapsed.

The regimental medical officer arrived within minutes.

He gave two injections in the arm and one in the heart.

None of it worked.

Hedley later wrote that Blowachnik had been holding the cyanide capsule under his tongue since the moment of his arrest.

He had refused every drink, every piece of food for hours so as not to dislodge it.

He died on the ground at about 11:25 in the morning.

After his death, the other prisoners admitted who they were.

Ernst Lurch, Herman Hutf, Gayorg, Mikkelson, Carl Hellsburgger.

They identified the corpse as their former commanding officer.

Photographs were taken.

They survive.

You can see Globe Bachnik on the ground with Hofley and Michelin standing near the body.

It is one of the few images of the architects of Operation Reinhard together.

Finally arrested, finally photographed, finally caught.

And one of them is dead.

A grave was dug.

According to the standard biography by Joseph Poeshny, the local Catholic priest reportedly refused to allow the body inside the churchyard.

So the regimental police buried him just outside the wall.

No ceremony, unconsecrated ground.

That is where he lies.

And here is the part the record can no longer fix because Globachnik killed himself.

He never testified.

He never named names.

He never produced documents under oath.

The detailed accounting of operation Reinhardt had to be reconstructed in pieces through trials of his subordinates years later.

Fran Stangle was tried in Dusseldorf in 1970 and given life imprisonment.

The Trebinka trial ran from 1964.

The sobore trial ran from 1965.

The hotful telegram that single intercepted radio message containing bifurge death toll was not made public by British intelligence until the year 2000.

For more than half a century, even some of the basic numbers were locked in archives.

In 1948, a document surfaced inside US intelligence files claiming Globachnik was alive and in American custody.

It was signed by an officer called Andrew L.

Venttors.

It became the seed of a survival legend.

Decades later, the journalist and historian Jitta Sereni investigated and exposed the document as a forgery.

Globopnik did die at Pnian.

There is no serious doubt about that.

But the fact that a forgery could circulate for years tells you something.

Even when the truth is well documented, the lie travels.

So what was Zodilo Globnik? He was not in any conventional sense a brilliant man.

He was not even a successful Nazi by his party’s own standards.

He had been arrested by the Austrian state.

He had been fired by Hitler’s Vienna.

He had been demoted by his own SS.

Other Nazis mocked his Slavic surname.

Himmler had to personally vouch for his Aryan credentials.

And yet he was given Lublin.

He was given Operation Reinhard.

He was given the lives of a Jewish population larger than the entire population of many European countries.

And he organized their deaths with the bureaucratic efficiency of a man running a regional logistics firm.

He did not invent anti-semitism.

He did not invent the camps from nothing.

He did not personally pull the trigger or open the gas valves.

He directed.

He counted.

He reported.

He sent the gold to Berlin and numbered crates and the corpses into the pits behind the trees.

The historian Michael Allen once described him as the vilest individual in the vilest organization ever known.

That judgment is harsh and it is contested because there were many candidates for that title.

But it points at something real.

Globnik shows how thin the line is between a corrupt provincial bureaucrat and an architect of genocide.

Sometimes the line is only an order, a patron, and a posting.

He died on a stone floor in an Austrian village before he could answer a single question.

The 1.

5 million he sent to Bey Sobo and Trebinka cannot answer either.

What remains is the paperwork, the telegram from Hashla, the report numbered 4024 PS, the statement signed by a young British lieutenant in 1964, and the question that hangs over all of it.

If a man like this could be given that power, what does it say about how genocide actually happens, not in shouted speeches, but in office memos, second chances, and quiet appointments to obscure districts no one in Berlin wanted to think about? History Uncut tells these stories because the official version often skips the most important part.

Operation Reinhardt killed faster than any other Nazi operation in the war.

The man who ran it has been a footnote for too long.

If you want to keep listening to the stories that don’t make it into the standard textbooks, the perpetrators who escaped [music] trial, the survivors who refused silence, the documents that took decades to surface.

Stay [music] with us.

There are more of these to come.

History uncut.

The stories they buried, the truth they couldn’t erase.