Paul Blobel. Part two. Commander of Sonderaktion 1005. Destruction of the corpses.

Paul Blobel was born in Potsdam on 13 August 1894, the first son of master carpenter Wilhelm Blobel and his wife Anna, née Tralst;. In 1899, the family moved to Remscheidt where he attended elementary school and a vocational training school where he stayed until 1912. He then completed an apprenticeship as a bricklayer and carpenter in 1912 and 1913 whilst attending a trade school in Wuppertal. He worked as a carpenter until the outbreak of the First World War.
On 10 August 1914 he joined the army as a war volunteer at the recruit depot of the reserve battalion of Pioneer Regiment No. 24 (Cologne). On 27 November 1914 he was at the front line.
.On 9 May 1918 he was taken to field hospital number 368, whether wounded or sick, the record does not say. On 28 November 1918 he was discharged from the military.
After being demobbed, Blobel found it difficult to get work and lived in Remscheid. He went back to the trade school for the construction industry in Barmen again. In 1921 he found work and for the next three years worked for various companies in the Solingen area. In 1924, he began to work as a self-employed architect. He became unemployed again in 1928 and following the 1929 crash had a longer period of unemployment from 1930 – 1933 when he lived off benefits. During this time, he joined the National Socialist party. Blobel became a member of the NSDAP on 1 December 1931 with the membership number 844662. He joined the SS in January 1932 with membership number is 29100. He was also a member of the Reichskolonialbund, Luftschutzbund, NSV and for a time was a member of the Reichsbund of the visual arts. He advanced as far as Scharfuehrer in the general SS, roughly equivalent of lieutenant and to Standartenfuehrer in the SD which is roughly equivalent of Colonel.
In 1933 he found office work in the city administration, although at his trial he claimed he was earning only a pittance. In 1935 he was doing some free lance work in the offices of the Dusseldorf SD when he came in contact with a National Socialist official who either suggested that he could get a better job by using his party contacts or Blobel seeing how well the other person was doing, decided to pull some party weight. Whatever the plan, it worked out well for him. In June 1935, he was employed by the SD security service in Dusseldorf. His job there was in intelligence gathering and administration. He must have been good at it as in May 1941 he was ordered to the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin and thus began his ten year journey of horror that would lead him to the execution chamber in Landsberg prison.
At his trial, Blobel stated that he was appointed head of Einsatzkommando 4a in June 1941, and in that month he went to the police border training facility at Pretzsch in Middle Saxony. This was the murder meeting of the heads of the Einsatzkommando just before the invasion of the Soviet Union. Einsatzkommando 4a was part of Einsatzgruppe C, the latter was under the command of Dr. dr Otto Rasch, the two doctors before his name indicating his qualifications. The area of operations assigned to Bobel’s Einsatzkommando was in the area of the 6th Army, which was commanded by Field Marshal von Reichenau.
Blobel participated in a number of mass killings during this time which were documented in situation reports sent to Berlin and later documented in both the International Military Tribunal and in the Einsatzgruppen trial. The mass killings started almost immediately. From 27 – 29 June 1941 Blobel killed what was termed as ‘300 Jews and 317 communists in the region of Sokal and Łuck in the part of Poland which had been occupied by the Soviet Union in September 1939 and then captured by Nazi Germany. Around 29 July 2,531 people were killed near Zhitomir and in July or August 1941 in Fastow, south west of Kyiv: "all Jews between the ages of 12 and 60". At his trial, Blobel confessed that in August or September 1941 an execution took place at Korosten, around 80km north of Zhitomir in which about 700 to 1000 men were shot and in which Dr. dr RASH was also present. Documents also show that this Einsatzkommando killed in September or October 1941 on the road between Wirna ( Вірна ) and Dederow ( Дедеров ): “32 Gypsies ”, at Kyiv on 29 – 30 September 1941 33,771 Jews, on 8 October 1941 in Jagotin : "125 Jews", on 16 October 1941 1,800 people in Lubny and on 23 November 1941 in Poltava : "1,538 Jews"
A summary report stated that between 22 June and 12 October in its area of operations more than 51,000 people had been killed.