The Most Evil Nazis You've Never Heard Of

It’s fair to say that one is spoilt for choice when evaluating the evilest members of the Nazi party, as no other organisation in history has managed to produce such a broad and expansive litany of loathsome individuals. So vast is its roster of rotten members in fact, that many abhorrent individuals who would be reviled as icons of evil if they came from a more moral society manage to remain annoyingly absent in the historical zeitgeist; their wicked deeds being completely overshadowed by the extreme evil of the crème de la crème of Nazi society. Today we shall be shining a light on a few of these lesser-known monsters, by bringing you the sordid stories of five of the most evil Nazis you have (probably) never heard of.

Paul Blobel

Let us begin with Paul Blobel. Born on the 13th of August 1894, in Potsdam, Germany. His early life was quite the mundane affair, initially pursuing a career in architecture before serving with the German Army in WWI. Post-war however, his life would take a dark turn, as he fell in with the Nazis.

Blobel joined both the party and the SS in 1931. There, he found his calling, as he shot through the ranks at lightning speed, eventually becoming a Colonel by 1941. He would hold a number of commands before the Nazi Empire came crumbling down, but the one that would really earn him his infamy was Sonderkommando 4a of the Einsatzgruppen, one of the Nazi paramilitary death squads that followed in the wake of the German Army as it conquered its way across Europe and… ‘dealt’ with the various groups Hitler’s deranged mind had decried as ‘undesirable.’

His most notorious operation leading the unit was one at Babi Yar just outside of Kyiv, Ukraine, where, over the course of two days in September 1941, he had Sonderkommando 4a execute 33,771 Jewish men, women, and children – one of the largest single massacres of the Holocaust. The victims were rounded up from the Jewish ghetto in Kyiv and brought to the Babi Yar ravine. Then, they were forced to hand over their valuables and strip before being lined up at the edge of the ravine, after which soldiers of Sonderkommando 4a gunned them down, and their bodies tumbled into the ravine below.

Aside from orchestrating mass murders such as these, Blobel also played a pivotal role in the Nazis’ attempts to conceal their crimes. For example, in June 1942, Heinrich Himmler appointed him to head Aktion 1005, a covert operation aimed at exhuming mass graves and burning the bodies found within. Not that he would be getting his hands dirty mind, oh no no, because rather than have his own men exhume the mass graves, he made use of Jewish slave labourers for that grim task.

These so called “corpse units” were forced to dig up mass graves from sun up till sun down every day, sometimes with no tool other than their own bare hands, at gun point. Then, when Blobel and his men suspected they had surpassed their usefulness, or knew too much, they themselves were then killed and disposed of by a new corpse unit.

After the war, Blobel was arrested and thrown into the dock at the Nuremberg Trials, specifically in the Einsatzgruppen Trial of 1947 through 1948. His defence strategy centred on the claim that he was merely following orders; a common defence that was used by many Nazi officials to try and dodge responsibility for their crimes. However, for Blobel, this defence proved to be woefully inadequate.

The prosecution was able to provide overwhelming evidence of his willing involvement in numerous war crimes and crimes against humanity, including detailed records of the operations he led, eyewitness testimonies, and his own admissions during pre-trial interrogations. As a result of this, he was found guilty, and he met his fate at the bottom end of a long rope in 1951 when he was hanged for his crimes.

Oskar Dirlewanger

For our next lesser-known Nazi, let us take a look at Oskar Dirlewanger. Born in Wurzburg, Germany, on the 26th of September 1895, his early life gave little indication of the evil that would later take hold of his mind. He served in the German Army during WWI, and then pursued a career in academia, earning a doctorate in political science. But as he was doing this, he also began getting involved in politics as a very early member of the Nazi Party, joining both the party itself and the SA in 1923.

Come WWII he had also joined the SS, where he had earned himself a reputation as a violent and sadistic alcoholic. Men of such… ‘character’ were exactly what the Nazis needed however, so he was given command of SS-Sonderkommando Dirlewanger, a penal unit that was made up of criminals of all kinds, but was mostly comprised of poachers and violent offenders. The aim of this unit was simple – to give the men pressed into it a chance to earn their absolution through the slaughter of Nazism’s enemies, be they civilian or military.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the unit became infamous for its barbaric actions, as the crimes it committed under Dirlewanger’s command were simply staggering both in their cruelty and in their scope. In Belarus for example, they were responsible for the mass killings of civilians, often conducting large-scale massacres in towns and villages. These massacres typically involved rounding up the entire population of a village, including women, children, and the elderly, and executing them en masse. The victims were often killed by gunshot, but reports also indicate the use of other methods of killing, including burning people alive or torture until dead.

In addition to killings, Dirlewanger’s unit was also notorious for burning down settlements and leaving nothing but ruins in their wake. Officially, these acts were intended to destroy logistical support for Soviet partisans and serve as a form of collective punishment against the civilian population. In reality however, strategy was not on Dirlewanger’s mind at all during these operations, he simply derived sadistic pleasure from seeing people suffer.

But all of that was just the tip of the iceberg when it came to Dirlewanger’s true capacity for evil, and it wouldn’t be until the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 that he would be at his worst. There, his unit conducted mass scale house-to-house raids, indiscriminately dragging out and executing residents, including women and children, without reservation or hesitation. It is unknown how many people were killed as a result of this, but historians are certain that the number runs well into the tens of thousands.

Dirlewanger’s unit also committed rape on a wholesale scale while in Warsaw, all with his full knowledge and blessing. These acts were often carried out publicly, and with such savagery, that even other members of the SS were taken aback by the extent of the brutality.

The motivation behind Dirlewanger’s actions can be traced to a combination of deep-seated psychopathy and a fervent belief in Nazi ideology. His personal history, including a conviction for a sexual offence before the war, proves he had a long-standing pattern of deviant behaviour, and then, the Nazi regime simply provided him with the perfect excuse to indulge all of his most depraved violent fantasies while pretending he was serving some ‘greater good.’

Come the end of the war, the time came for Dirlewanger to face the music, but for him, retribution would not come at the end of a rope, but through a savage beating, because while he was in custody in late 1945, he was beaten to death by his Polish prison guards… what a shame!

Odilo Globocnik

Next, we have Odilo Globocnik, a man who embodied the archetypal evil Nazi. Born on the 21st of April 1904, in Trieste, then part of Austria-Hungary, Globocnik was born just a smidge too late to serve in WWI, so instead he spent his early life bouncing around menial occupations while getting gradually more interested in politics. Then, having found the extreme right of the spectrum to his liking, he joined a Nazi aligned Carinthian paramilitary group in 1922. Then, for the next decade or so, he proceeded to drink the Nazi Kool-Aid by the gallon, which led to him finally joining the Party itself in 1931, and the SS in 1934.

Come the war, Globocnik had thoroughly proved his commitment to the Nazi cause to the powers that be, and so he was rewarded by being made the SS and Police Leader in the Lublin district of occupied Poland. In this capacity, he oversaw the implementation of some of the most brutal and inhumane aspects of Nazi policy, with a notable example being Aktion Reinhard.

This program, named after Reinhard Heydrich, was one of the most lethal phases of the Holocaust, as it saw the establishment of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka extermination camps – all under Globocnik’s careful eye. He ran them with ruthless efficiency, and ultimately, over two million Jews would be exterminated under his command. Unlike concentration camps such as Dachau or Bergen-Belsen, which sought to ‘productively’ work their inmates to death over time, the pure extermination camps Globocnik led cut out the middleman, and instead were tasked purely with the wholesale industrial slaughter of Nazi ‘undesirables’ – as many as possible, as fast as possible.

At Treblinka for example, incoming victims were deceived into thinking they were arriving at a transit camp to keep them docile, only to be pounced upon, stripped of their valuables, and forced to undress at gunpoint, after which they were immediately marched to the gas chambers to be killed. Those who refused or dallied, were dragged out from the crowd and shot without hesitation to… ‘encourage’ the other victims to shut up, hurry up, and play along. The camp did have a ‘living area,’ but this was naught but a holding pen for days when the camp’s murder apparatus found itself inoperable or over capacity.

And if victims even thought about trying to resist, God help them, because Globocnik would crack down on them with an immediate, heavy, and sadistic hand. No better is this exemplified than with the Treblinka Revolt of the 2nd of August 1943, an incident in which a number of Jewish prisoners confined to the ‘living area’ managed to liberate a cache of weapons from the SS armoury, and then proceeded to attempt to shoot their way to freedom, as well as burn as much of the camp down as they could for good measure. Globocnik responded to this by having his SS troops gun down the entire camp, with survivors being forced into the surviving buildings and set on fire.

But while the Extermination Camps were certainly the peak of Globocnik’s evil, they were far from the only wicked scheme he found himself involved in, as his career also saw him partake in the Liquidation of both the Warsaw and Białystok Ghettos, the establishment of the Lublin Reservation and its associated concentration camps, and the hunting and murder of Italian Jews following the fall of Mussolini’s government in 1943.

Globocnik survived the war, and in a desperate attempt to evade justice, he fled deep into the Austrian mountains. He was then captured by the British less than a month after Germany’s surrender, but unfortunately, before he could be brought to trial, he committed suicide and escaped being held accountable for his crimes.

Franz Stangl

Let us now look at Franz Stangl. Born on the 26th of March 1908, in Altmünster, Austria. He was a man who worked closely under Globocnik, eventually rising through the ranks to go from being a humble police officer, to the commandant of Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps. He joined both the Austrian Federal Police and the Nazi Party in 1931.

For a time, his politics and his work were separate things in his life, but that changed in 1935 when he moved to Germany to join the Kriminalpolizei (the Nazi FBI). From here, with his foot through the door of the Nazi political establishment, he shot up the ranks, eventually finding himself as the head of the Hartheim Euthanasia Centre after being personally appointed by Himmler himself in November 1940.

The Centre itself was one established for the T4 Program; a Nazi eugenics scheme initiated in 1939 under the guise of “mercy killings.” It aimed to exterminate individuals deemed “life unworthy of life,” including people with severe psychiatric, neurological, or physical disabilities, as well as those considered incurably sick. An estimated 300,000 people were killed by this program by way of gas and lethal injection, and Stangl, as the head of one of its Centres, contributed more than his fair share to this number.

Stangl did so well at the Centre that in April 1942, he earned himself a promotion that saw him shipped off to Poland to be the first commandant of Sobibor Extermination Camp. Curiously, Stangl largely kept his hands clean and left the bulk of the brutality to his lackies, with him only being accused of a single act of violence during his time leading the camp. Don’t let this fool you into thinking he wasn’t a total monster however, he knew exactly what he was doing, and while he may have kept his hands clean, he took just as much sadistic pleasure from his work as Dirlewanger did.

We know this because Shlomo Szmajzner, one of only 58 known survivors of the camp recalled him as a man who took “obvious pleasure in his work and his situation” and who always had an ear to ear grin plastered across his face. All in all, around 100,000 Jews were killed during Stangl’s tenure as commandant.

By September 1942 Stangl had earned himself such a reputation for competence, that Globocnik ordered him to take over as the Commandant of Treblinka, the previous leader of which had proven himself to be grossly incompetent and incapable of meeting his killing targets. At Treblinka he maintained the same enthusiasm for his work as he had at Sobibor. He immediately oversaw the construction of new, larger gas chambers to supplement the existing facilities.

These new gas chambers were up and running within a matter of weeks and were capable of killing 15,000 people a day. So pleased was he with the construction, that when they were finished, he quipped to his men that: “Finally, the Jewish city is ready.” He also maintained his same distance from the prisoners as he had previously, continuing to leave the application of brutality to his jackbooted goons.

At the end of the war, Stangl was detained by US forces, but managed to escape in 1948 before he could be put on trial, fleeing down through Italy, across the Mediterranean, and eventually into Brazil. His own hubris proved to be his downfall however, because while in Brazil, he made no attempt to hide his identity, and was eventually arrested by the Brazilian Police in 1967 and extradited back to West Germany to face justice for his actions. Unfortunately however, he collapsed and died of heart failure in 1971 before the case could be brought to court, and thus he escaped ever having to answer for his crimes.

Ilse Koch

Our final lesser-known Nazi, Ilse Koch, often referred to as the “The Beast of Buchenwald,” was born on the 22nd of September 1906, in Dresden, Germany. By all accounts her early life was most unremarkable, but that would all change following her marriage to Karl-Otto Koch in 1936, who would later become the Commandant of the Buchenwald and Majdanek Concentration Camps.

Ilse Koch’s name became synonymous with cruelty and sadism during her time at Buchenwald, where she was known for her barbaric and inhumane treatment of prisoners. She was particularly noted for her bizarre and gruesome habit of collecting items made from the tattooed skin of murdered inmates, and bear in mind, she never once collected a pay cheque for any of this. She only found herself at the camp via her husband, so for her, there could be no “I was just doing my job” Nuremberg Defence, she was just a sadistic monster, simple as.

Her life in the camp was marked by a perverse mix of luxury and brutality. As the wife of the Commandant, she lived a life of material comfort and privilege, and would often ride through the camp on horseback, flaunting her authority and her role in the prisoners’ suffering, but this was just the tip of the iceberg, because on her worst days, she would select prisoners with interesting tattoos, have them murdered, and make their skin into lampshades, book covers, and other items for her ever growing personal collection of macabre trinkets.

Beyond this, she also liked to partake in the sadistic abuse of prisoners, arbitrarily forcing them to endure beatings, humiliation, and psychological torture. There was no reason for this, not even the supposed keeping of order, she was simply just a wicked demon of a woman who enjoyed seeing people suffer.

Come the end of the war, she managed to escape justice for a time. Initially, she was arrested by US forces in 1945, but avoided conviction thanks to absolutely shoddy evidence gathering on the part of the American prosecutors. However, further investigation and subsequent trials finally saw her get what she deserved, and so, in 1947, she was convicted on charges of war crimes, narrowly avoiding the rope, and instead was sentenced to life imprisonment.

But while she might have escaped the hangman’s noose, she didn’t exactly have a fun time of it in prison. You see, as time went on, she became ever more psychotic and delusional – convinced that a Jewish conspiracy was underway to see her sent to her grave, and that it was only a matter of time before a mob of concentration camp survivors battered down her cell door and lynched her where she stood. Eventually, she decided to save the fictitious conspirators a job, and after improvising a noose out of a bedsheet, hung herself in 1967, writing in her suicide note that: “There is no other way. Death for me is a release.”

Key Takeaways

• Paul Blobel led the mass execution of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar and oversaw the exhumation and burning of mass graves.
• Oskar Dirlewanger commanded a penal unit known for brutal massacres and sadistic acts during the Warsaw Uprising.
• Odilo Globocnik managed the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, overseeing the deaths of over two million Jews.
• Franz Stangl directed the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, where he oversaw the construction of gas chambers.
• Ilse Koch, known as the ‘Beast of Buchenwald,’ was infamous for her sadistic treatment of prisoners and collecting items made from their skin.

Sources

• Original Side Projects video: The Most Evil Nazis You’ve Never Heard Of
• Hero image source by Wolfmann / openverse, by-sa.

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