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{{Short description|German SS officer and Holocaust perpetrator,  convicted war criminal (1894–1951)}}
{{Use dmy dates|date=November 2022}}
{{Infobox criminal
| name              = Paul Blobel
| birth_date        = {{birth date|1894|8|13|df=y}}
| death_date        = {{death date and age|1951|6|07|1894|8|13|df=y}}
| birth_place       = [[Potsdam]], [[Province of Brandenburg|Brandenburg]], [[Kingdom of Prussia|Prussia]], German Empire
| death_place       = [[Landsberg am Lech]], [[Bavaria]], [[West Germany]]
| image             = Paul-Blobel.jpg
| caption           = Blobel in 1947
| trial             = Einsatzgruppen Trial
| known_for         = {{plainlist|
*[[Bila Tserkva massacre]]
*[[Babi Yar|Babi Yar massacre]]
*[[Sonderaktion 1005]]}}
| conviction_penalty = [[Capital punishment by the United States military|Death]]
| conviction_status = [[Executed]]
| module            = {{Infobox military person |embed=yes
| embed_title = [[SS]] career
| allegiance = [[Nazi Germany]]
| branch = ''[[Schutzstaffel]]''
| rank = SS-''[[Standartenführer]]''
| unit = [[Einsatzgruppen|''Einsatzgruppe C'']]
| commands = [[Einsatzkommando|''Sonderkommando 4a'']]<br/>''[[Sonderaktion 1005]]''
}}
| conviction        = [[Crimes against humanity]]<br/>[[War crimes]]<br/>[[Schutzstaffel|Membership in a criminal organization]]
| death_cause       = [[Execution by hanging]]
| victims           = 60,000+
| beginyear         = June 1941
| endyear           = 1944
| country           = [[Poland]], [[Ukraine]], and [[Yugoslavia]]
| motive            = [[Nazism]]
}}
'''Paul Wilhelm Hermann Blobel'''<ref name=":0">{{Cite book |last=Bilstein |first=Jochen |title=Hier wohnte Frau Antonie Giese: die Geschichte der Juden im Bergischen Land : Essays und Dokumente |last2=Bramann |first2=Wilhelm |last3=Crecelius |first3=Wilhelm |last4=Föhse |first4=Ulrich |year=1998 |pages=92 |language=de}}</ref> (13 August 1894&nbsp;– 7 June 1951) was a German ''[[Sicherheitsdienst]]'' (SD) commander and convicted war criminal who played a leading role in [[the Holocaust]]. He organised the [[Babi Yar massacre]], the largest massacre of the [[Second World War]] at [[Babi Yar]] ravine in September 1941, pioneered the use of the [[gas van]], and, following re-assignment, developed the [[gas chambers]] for the extermination camps. From late 1942 onwards, he led [[Sonderaktion 1005]], wherein millions of bodies were exhumed at sites across Eastern Europe in an effort to erase all evidence of the Holocaust and specifically of [[Operation Reinhard]]. After the war, Blobel was tried at the [[Einsatzgruppen trial]] and sentenced to death. He was executed in 1951.

==Early life==
Blobel was born in [[Potsdam]] into a [[Protestantism in Germany|Protestant]] family of small trade [[Artisan|artisans]], who moved to [[Remscheid]] in 1899. He graduated schooling there without [[Abitur]] and between 1908 and 1911, Blobel completed training as a carpenter and bricklayer. In 1913, he began attending [[Barmen]]'s ''[[Kunstgewerbeschule]]'' (a precursor to the [[University of Wuppertal]]), studying [[architecture]].<ref name=":0" />

During [[World War I]], Blobel enlisted in the [[Imperial German Army]], becoming part of a pioneer battallion deployed on the [[Western Front (World War I)|Western Front]], learning the use of [[Flamethrower|flamethrowers]], ''[[Minenwerfer]]'', and incendiary explosives.<ref name=":0" /> By the time he was discharged in 1918 to the military command in [[Lennep]], he had reached the rank of ''[[Vizefeldwebel]]'' or ''[[Unteroffizier]]'' and was highly decorated,<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":3">{{Cite web |title=Paul Blobel Affidavit |url=https://www.holocausthistoricalsociety.org.uk/contents/einsatzgruppen/paulblobelaffidavit.html |access-date= |website=Holocaust Historical Society}}</ref> having received an [[Iron Cross#World War I|Iron Cross first class]].<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |title=Paul Blobel |url=https://nein.max-leven-zentrum.de/paul-blobel/ |website=Max-Leven-Zentrum}}</ref> 

After the war, Blobel finished his studies and around 1920, he gained a position as construction manager in the [[Solingen]] office of Franz Perlewitz, with a focus on industrial and residential buildings. Blobel married in 1921 and in late 1922, he began studying at [[Kunstakademie Düsseldorf]]. Upon his graduation in 1925, Blobel became a freelance architect, building a house for his family in Solingen's Schaberg district the following year.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />

During the [[Great Depression]], Blobel, by then a father of two sons, stopped receiving commission work, and received welfare while registered as unemployed between 1930 and 1933, although he had temporary employment at Solingen's administrative office.<ref name=":0" /><ref name=":1" />

== SS career ==
Blobel joined the [[Sturmabteilung]] (SA), the paramilitary wing of the Nazi Party in May 1931. Despite stating during his later post-war trial that he joined the [[Social Democratic Party of Germany]] (SPD) in October 1931, claiming that the SA at the time was "not political" but rather considered a "social club, whose goals [he] did not find contrary to the SPD",<ref name=":0" /> records showed that he had in fact joined the Nazi Party on 1 October of the same year<ref name=":2">{{Cite book |last=Bilstein |first=Jochen |title=Hier wohnte Frau Antonie Giese: die Geschichte der Juden im Bergischen Land : Essays und Dokumente |last2=Bramann |first2=Wilhelm |last3=Crecelius |first3=Wilhelm |last4=Föhse |first4=Ulrich |year=1998 |pages=93 |language=de}}</ref> and become a member of the ''[[Schutzstaffel]]'' (SS) by 1 December.<ref name="Zentner">{{cite book |author=Zentner, Christian ''Ed''|author2=Bedürftig, Friedemann ''Ed'' |title=[[The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich]] |publisher=Macmillan |location=New York |year=1991 |pages=1150 |isbn=0-02-897502-2 }}</ref> Additionally, he was already known to have ties with the ''[[Sicherheitsdienst]]'' (SD), the Nazi Party's intelligence service, shortly after entering the SS, while the organisation was still in its early stages, contributing to his rapid promotions within the SD.<ref name=":2" />

In March 1932, Blobel became deputy SD district leader in the Solingen-Remscheid-Wuppertal triangle of [[Gau Düsseldorf]]. In August 1933, he was put in charge of the 20. ''SS-Standarte'' in western Gau Düsseldorf, an area equivalent to the modern-day ''[[Regierungsbezirk]]'' [[Düsseldorf (region)|Düsseldorf]]. Through this position, Blobel became a policeman of {{Interlanguage link|Staatspolizeileitstelle Düsseldorf|lt=Düsseldorf's Gestapo office|de}}, initially only as an honorary title, but he eventually started going on patrols as an [[Auxiliary police|auxiliary police officer]]. His SD personnel file highlighted Blobel's loyalty and zeal to [[Nazism]], making mention of an incident in which Blobel sustained heavy cranial injuries after getting into a fight with "public enemies" during an ID check. In mid-1934, Blobel received leadership of sector V in the upper Düsseldorf-West area, and a promotion from ''[[Oberscharführer]]'' to ''[[Hauptsturmführer]]''. He was responsible for data collection in the region on Jewish organisations for the regional {{Interlanguage link|Judenkartei|de}}, which came into use in the [[Mass arrests after Kristallnacht|mass arrest of Jews]] following the 1938 [[Kristallnacht|November pogroms]].<ref name=":2" />[[File:Early war-time ID issued to Paul Blobel by the "Volkswohlfahrt", Nazi Germany's welfare organization.jpg|thumb|Early war-time ID issued to Paul Blobel by the "Volkswohlfahrt", Nazi Germany's welfare organization]]In early 1941, shortly before [[Operation Barbarossa]],<ref name=":2" /> the [[Reich Security Main Office]] assigned Blobel as the leader of ''[[Schutzstaffel#SS-Sonderkommandos|SS-Sonderkommando]]'' 4a of ''[[Einsatzkommando|Einsatzgruppe C]]'' to take part in the invasion in ''[[Reichskommissariat Ukraine]]''. Along with the [[Order Police battalions]], the ''Einsatzgruppen'' were responsible for massacres of Jews behind the ''[[Wehrmacht]]'' lines in the [[Soviet Union]].<ref name="Zentner" />  The murder campaign included all political and racial undesirables. In August 1941, Blobel was put in charge of creating a [[Nazi ghetto]] in [[Zhytomyr]] to enclose around 3,000 Jews who were murdered a month later.<ref>Ogorreck, Ralf (2010). ''Les Einsatzgruppen'', Tallandier, p. 150, {{ISBN|978-2-286-03062-9}}</ref>

[[File:Paul Blobel (SS~1940).jpg|thumb|upright=.8|Blobel in [[Schutzstaffel|SS]] uniform]]

On 10 or 11 August 1941, [[Friedrich Jeckeln]] ordered him, on behalf of [[Adolf Hitler]], to exterminate the entire Jewish population.<ref>Ogorreck, Ralf, op. cit. p. 203.</ref> On 22 August 1941, the SS-''Sonderkommando'' [[1941 Bila Tserkva massacre|murdered Jewish women and children at Bila Tserkva]] with the consent of Field Marshal [[Walther von Reichenau]], commander of the [[6th Army (Wehrmacht)|6th Army]]. SS-''Obersturmführer'' August Häfner testified at his own trial in the 1960s:<ref name="Friedländer"/>

{{quotation|The Wehrmacht had already dug a grave. The children were brought along in a tractor. The Ukrainians were standing around trembling. The children were taken down from the tractor. They were lined up along the top of the grave and shot so that they fell into it. The Ukrainians did not aim at any particular part of the body.&nbsp;... The wailing was indescribable.<ref name="Friedländer">{{cite book|author-link=Saul Friedländer|last=Friedländer |first=Saul |year=2007 |title=[[The Years of Extermination|The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939–1945]] |publisher=HarperCollins |isbn=978-0-06-019043-9 |url= <!-- https://books.google.com/books?id=7KaCGDUys50C -->}}</ref>{{rp|217}}}}

Blobel, in conjunction with Reichenau's and [[Friedrich Jeckeln]]'s units, organised the [[Babi Yar]] massacre in late September 1941 in [[Kyiv]],<ref>[[Christopher Browning]]: ''The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 &ndash; March 1942'' (With contributions by [[Jürgen Matthäus]]), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. pp. 291–292 {{ISBN|0-803-25979-4}} {{OCLC|52838928}}</ref> where 33,771 Jews were murdered.<ref name="HolocaustChronicle270" />  In November 1941, Blobel received and activated the first [[Nazi gas van|gas van]]s at [[Poltava]].<ref name="Friedländer"/>{{rp|234}}

Blobel was officially relieved of his command on 13 January 1942 for health reasons due to [[alcoholism]], although this was an elaborate cover. Whilst in the hospital, Blobel was visited by [[Reinhard Heydrich]] and tasked with a top secret Reich matter that was presumably suspended upon the fatal shooting of Heydrich in [[Prague]] by British-trained Czech partisans. During this time, according to [[Dieter Wisliceny]], Blobel developed the concept of the gas chambers for the extermination camps in Poland. In June 1942 Blobel was contacted by [[Heinrich Müller (Gestapo)|Heinrich Müller]], Chief of the Gestapo and secretly placed in charge of ''[[Sonderaktion 1005]]'' with his official cover being SD Chief of the City of [[Nuremberg]]. This secret task consisted of the destruction of the evidence of all Nazi atrocities in [[Eastern Europe]], beginning at [[Chelmno]] and continuing on to [[Sobibor Extermination Camp]], [[Auschwitz]], the camps in the [[Independent State of Croatia]], the [[Baltic States]], [[Serbia]] and eventually back to the site of the [[Babi Yar Massacre]] in Ukraine. This entailed exhumation of mass graves, then incinerating the bodies. Blobel developed efficient disposal techniques such as alternating layers of bodies with firewood on a frame of iron rails.<ref name="Friedländer"/>

In October 1944 was assigned to [[Styria (Slovenia)|Slovenian Styria]] to combat [[Yugoslav Partisans|Yugoslav partisans]] as part of ''[[Bandenbekämpfung]]''. [[Gitta Sereny]] related the conversation about Blobel she once had with one-time Chief of the Church Information Branch at the [[Reich Security Head Office]], [[Albert Hartl]].

{{quotation|Hartl had told me of a summer evening—that same hot summer in 1942—in Kyiv when he was invited to dine with the local Higher SS Police Chief and Brigadeführer, [[Max Thomas (SS general)|Max Thomas]]. A fellow guest, SS Colonel Paul Blobel, had driven him to the general's weekend dacha. "At one moment—it was just getting dark," said Hartl, "we were driving past a long ravine. I noticed strange movements of the earth. Clumps of earth rose into the air as if by their own propulsion—and there was smoke; it was like a low-toned volcano; as if there was burning lava just beneath the earth. Blobel laughed, made a gesture with his arm pointing back along the road and ahead, all along the ravine—the ravine of Babi Yar—and said, 'Here lie my thirty-thousand Jews.{{'"}}<ref name="Sereny" />}}Blobel went on sick leave in December 1944, spending three months at a hospital in [[Maribor|Marburg an der Drau]] until April 1945, when he was ordered to report to [[Ernst Kaltenbrunner]]'s office in Berlin for further commands. He was briefly stationed in [[Salzburg]] before being captured with his unit in [[Rastatt]] in May 1945.<ref name=":3" />

==Trial and conviction==
{{Main|Einsatzgruppen trial}}
[[File:PaulBlobel1948.jpg|thumb|Blobel is sentenced to death at the [[Einsatzgruppen trial]], 10 April 1948.]]
Over 59,018 killings are attributable to Blobel, however he personally estimated to have killed 10,000–15,000 people.<ref name=":3" /> He was later sentenced to death by the U.S. [[Nuremberg Military Tribunal]] in the [[Einsatzgruppen trial]]. He was hanged at [[Landsberg Prison]] shortly after midnight on 7 June 1951.<ref name="adenauer">"Five death sentences were confirmed: the sentence against Oswald Pohl, as well as those passed against the leaders of the Mobile Killing Units, Paul Blobel, Werner Braune, Erich Naumann and Otto Ohrlendorf.&nbsp;... In the early morning hours of 7 June, the Nazi criminals were hanged in the Landesburg prison courtyard." Norbert Frei, ''Adenauer's Germany and the Nazi Past: The Politics of Amnesty and Integration''. Columbia University Press, 2002. [https://archive.org/details/adenauersgermany00frei/page/370 <!-- quote="Paul Blobel". --> p. 165] and [https://archive.org/details/adenauersgermany00frei/page/370 <!-- quote="early hours of 7 June". --> p. 173]</ref>
[[File:Paul Blobel execution.jpg|thumb|Blobel just before his execution]]

==In the media==
* Blobel was portrayed by actor [[T. P. McKenna]] in the 1978 miniseries [[Holocaust (miniseries)|''Holocaust'']].
* Blobel is an historical character in [[Herman Wouk]]'s book ''[[War and Remembrance]]''. He was portrayed by actor [[Kenneth Colley]] in the [[War and Remembrance (miniseries)|television adaptation of the book]].

==References==
{{reflist
| refs =

<ref name="HolocaustChronicle270">
[http://www.holocaustchronicle.org/staticpages/270.html 1941: Mass Murder] The Holocaust Chronicle. p. 270
</ref>

<ref name="Sereny">
{{cite book
| last = Sereny
| first = Gitta
| author-link = Gitta Sereny
| year = 1974
| title = Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder
| edition = 2005 paperback
| publisher = Pimlico
| location = London
| isbn = 978-0-7126-7447-8
| page = [https://books.google.com/books?id=ntgT48CY1wwC&pg=PA97 97]
}} Sereny also mentions the story in her 1995 biography of Albert Speer:
{{cite book
| last = Sereny
| first = Gitta
| title = Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth
| year = 1996
| edition = 1996 paperback
| publisher = Picador
| location = London
| isbn = 978-0-330-34697-9
| page = [https://books.google.com/books?id=_Z3gKDdRgL8C&lpg=PP1&pg=PA272 272]
}}
</ref>
}}
==External links==
*{{Wikiquote-inline}}
{{Holocaust Ukraine}}
{{Holocaust Poland}}
{{Einsatzgruppen}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Blobel, Paul}}
[[Category:1894 births]]
[[Category:1951 deaths]]
[[Category:Babi Yar]]
[[Category:Einsatzgruppen personnel]]
[[Category:Executed German mass murderers]]
[[Category:Executed military leaders]]
[[Category:Executed people from Brandenburg]]
[[Category:Executions by the United States Nuremberg Military Tribunals]]
[[Category:German Army personnel of World War I]]
[[Category:German police officers convicted of crimes against humanity]]
[[Category:Holocaust perpetrators in Poland]]
[[Category:Holocaust perpetrators in Ukraine]]
[[Category:Holocaust perpetrators in Yugoslavia]]
[[Category:People from Potsdam]]
[[Category:Police officers executed for crimes against humanity]]
[[Category:Recipients of the Iron Cross (1914), 1st class]]
[[Category:SS-Standartenführer]]
[[Category:Sturmabteilung personnel]]
[[Category:Military personnel from Solingen]]
[[Category:20th-century German architects]]