60: Otto Ohlendorf In the Witness Box
On January 3, 1946, in Courtroom 600 of the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, 38-year-old Otto Ohlendorf sat in the witness box before the International Military Tribunal. An economist and senior SS official, Ohlendorf was questioned by American prosecutor John Harlan Amen about the activities of Einsatzgruppe D, the mobile SS killing unit he had commanded on the Eastern Front. Ohlendorf did not deny the killings. Instead, he described them with the detached precision of an administrator. He testified that between June 1941 and June 1942, the units under his command had reported killing approximately 90,000 people, including men, women, and children. The victims were overwhelmingly Jews. Ohlendorf was highly educated. He had studied law and economics at the universities of Leipzig and Göttingen and subsequently worked as an economist and researcher. In 1939, at approximately 32 years of age, he became head of Amt III of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA), the SS department responsible...