Paul Blobel
Ausweis issued to a senior Einsatzgruppen member.
Though my main theme of collecting is WW2 & Holocaust related passports and documents, I am also interested in specially issued identity documents as well, connected to the above-mentioned period and subject. Three years ago I was fortunate enough to secure a special ID issued to a known war-crimes perpetrator, making sure not to let this rare opportunity pass and add it into my personal archive of documents.
The document in this article is a German issued Ausweis, membership No. 452.103, from the city of Solingen, east of Dusseldorf. It was issued on November 17th 1939 by the “Volkswohlfahrt”, Nazi Germany’s welfare organization to infamous Holocaust war-criminal Paul Blobel, who at the time was aged 45. By this time he was already an active member of the SS (Schutzstaffel), and serving in the SD (Sicherheitsdienst) since 1934.
Paul Blobel was active in the extermination of the Jewish population in the areas under his control, when he was commander of Sonderkommando 4a, a smaller unit from Einsatzgruppen C active in the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Einsatzgruppen consisted of 4 main units: A, B, C & D). These units advanced east following the German army as it conquered land in the former USSR in early 1941. These extermination units would end up shooting an estimated 1,500,000 Jews into pits and dug up tank ditches.
He is remembered, putting it mildly, in committing the Babi Yar massacre of September 29-30 1941, where the Germans butchered Kiev’s Jewish population, numbering 33,771 victims, that included women, children, the elderly as well. It is considered as one of the largest single massacres of the war, followed by the Harvest Festival 2 days massacre from November 1943, over 40,000 Polish Jews being shot in the area of Lublin, then occupied Poland.
Paul Blobel would also be in charge of unit 1005, that was tasked in eradicating any evidence of the murdered Jews, by having Jewish forced-laborers dig-up the corpses and have them burned with the remaining bones crushed into dust and dispersed.
He would be hanged in 1951 after being found guilty of heinous war-crimes during the Einsatzgruppen trial from 1948.
Smaller image source: Wikipedia.
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