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Paul Wilhelm Hermann Blobel (13 August 1894 – 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.
During World War I, Blobel enlisted in the Imperial German Army, becoming part of a pioneer battalion deployed on the Western Front, learning the use of Flamethrower, Minenwerfer, and incendiary explosives. 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, having received an Iron Cross first class.
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.
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.
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. Through this position, Blobel became a policeman of , initially only as an honorary title, but he eventually started going on patrols as an Auxiliary police. 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 , which came into use in the mass arrest of Jews following the 1938 Kristallnacht. early 1941, shortly before Operation Barbarossa, the Reich Security Main Office assigned Blobel as the leader of SS-Sonderkommando 4a of Einsatzkommando 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. 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.Ogorreck, Ralf (2010). Les Einsatzgruppen, Tallandier, p. 150,
On 10 or 11 August 1941, Friedrich Jeckeln ordered him, on behalf of Adolf Hitler, to exterminate the entire Jewish population.Ogorreck, Ralf, op. cit. p. 203. On 22 August 1941, the SS- Sonderkommando murdered Jewish women and children at Bila Tserkva with the consent of Field Marshal Walther von Reichenau, commander of the 6th Army. SS- Obersturmführer August Häfner testified at his own trial in the 1960s:
Blobel, in conjunction with Reichenau's and Friedrich Jeckeln's units, organised the Babi Yar massacre in late September 1941 in Kyiv,Christopher Browning: The Origins of the Final Solution: The Evolution of Nazi Jewish Policy, September 1939 – March 1942 (With contributions by Jürgen Matthäus), Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. pp. 291–292 where 33,771 Jews were murdered. In November 1941, Blobel received and activated the first gas vans at Poltava.
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, 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.
In October 1944 was assigned to Slovenian Styria to combat 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.
Blobel went on sick leave in December 1944, spending three months at a hospital in Maribor 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.
Sereny also mentions the story in her 1995 biography of Albert Speer:
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