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Volume IV · Page 510
| It is also to be noted that while emphasis throughout the trial has been on the subject of murder, the defendants are charged also in counts one and two with crimes against humanity and violations of laws or customs of war which include but are not limited to atrocities, enslavement, deportation, imprisonment, torture, and other inhumane acts committed against civilian populations. Thus, if and where a conclusion of guilt is reached, such conclusion is not based alone on the charge of murder but on all committed acts coming within the purview of crimes against humanity and war crimes. In each adjudication, without its being stated, the verdict is based upon the entire record. |
| DEFENDANT OTTO OHLENDORF |
| The evidence in this case could reveal not one but two Otto Ohlendorfs. There is the Ohlendorf represented as the student, lecturer, administrator, sociologist, scientific analyst, and humanitarian. This Ohlendorf was born on a farm, studied law and political science at the universities of Leipzig and Goettingen, practiced as a barrister at the courts of Alfeld Leine and Hildesheim, became deputy section chief in the Institute for World Economics in Kiel, then section chief at the Institute for Applied Economic Science in Berlin, and in 1936 became economic consultant in the SD. On behalf of this Ohlendorf, defense counsel has submitted several hundred pages of affidavits which speak of Ohlendorf's efforts to make the SD purely a fact–gathering organization, of his opposition to totalitarian and dictatorial tendencies in the cultural life of Germany, of his defense of the middle classes, and of his many clashes with Himmler, the SS Chief, and Mueller, the Chief of the Gestapo. One of these affidavits declares — |
"Ohlendorf did not see superior and inferior races in various peoples * * *. He considered race only as a symbolic notion. The individual nations to him were not superior or inferior, but different. The domination of one people with its principles of life over the other he considered, therefore, wrong and directed against the laws of life. For him, the goal to be desired was a system among peoples by which every nation could develop according to its own nature, potentialities, and abilities. Folk, in his view, also was not dependent on a state organization." |
| On the other hand, we have the description of an SS General Ohlendorf who led Einsatzgruppe D into the Crimea on a race-extermination expedition. That Otto Ohlendorf is described by that same Ohlendorf. If the humanitarian and the Einsatz leader are merged into one person, it could be assumed that we are here dealing with a character such as that described by Robert Louis Stevenson in his "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". As interesting as it |
