Arthur Nebe became the head of the Nazi Kriminalpolizei (Criminal Police, or Kripo) and took command of Einsatzgruppe B from June to November of 1941 in the Soviet Union. He had a key role in the security and police apparatus of Nazi Germany and was a major Holocaust perpetrator.
He was born in Berlin in 1894, the son of a Berlin elementary school teacher. Nebe volunteered for service during World War I, served with distinction, and was wounded twice by gas. In 1920, Nebe joined the Berlin city police as a detective, was promoted in 1924 to police commissioner, and authored a criminology textbook.
Nebe joined the NSDAP and the SS in 1931, and then the SA. In April 1933, he became chief of the State Police and was tasked with reorganizing the criminal police in the Reich. In September 1939, he was promoted to SS-Gruppenführer and given command of Amt V of the RHSA (responsible for the criminal police), reporting directly to Reinhard Heydrich.
In 1939, Nebe loaned Christian Wirth, one of his police commissioners, to the Aktion T-4 campaign, the program of involuntary euthanasia of those with disabilities. In 1939, as SS head of the Kripo, he discussed actions against the Sinti and Roma, and later, he recommended sending Berlin’s Roma population to the East along with the Jews. In October 1939, Adolf Eichmann, acting on Nebe’s orders, put Roma on the transports with Jews to Nisko.
Across the period June to November 1941 Nebe commanded of Einsatzgruppe B, the extermination unit based in Minsk, and during this time, he was credited with 46,000 murders. In Nebe’s report of July 23, 1941, he argued that it was impractical to shoot Jews to rid the Reich of the Jewish problem because there were so many to be killed and not enough men to kill them. By August 1941, he realized that his Einsatzgruppe members found it a problem to kill the Jewish women and children included in the killing quota.
In August 1941, at Heinrich Himmler’s request, Nebe organized a mass shooting of 100 people in Minsk. Himmler attended the shooting, vomiting after what he saw. Himmler told Heydrich that he was concerned for the mental health of the SS men and tasked Nebe to find new methods of mass murder that were less distressing for those doing the killing. Nebe experimented by murdering Soviet mental patients with explosives near Minsk. After that, under his command, gas vans were created from converted trucks, and these were trialed on a small group of 32 people with disabilities, killing them by motor-vehicle exhaust at Mogilev in September 1941.
At the end of November 1941, Nebe returned to Berlin to resume his command of the Kripo. By now, he was convinced that Germany would lose the war. In 1942, Nebe contacted the German resistance and warned Hans Oster and Hans von Dohnańyi about their impending arrest by the Gestapo. Despite this, on June 28, 1944, an unrepentant Nebe wrote a letter recommending the use of Roma for human experiments, such as the drinking of seawater.
Arthur Nebe’s life and death after the attempted assassination of Adolf Hitler in the bomb plot of June 20, 1944, remains unclear. Exculpatory stories have been spun that over time, he developed serious doubts about the Nazi regime. One account even asserts that as early as 1941 to 1942, when Nebe was assigned to Einsatzgruppe B, he saved thousands of Russian civilians from execution by falsifying figures and claiming credit for slaughters that were never actually carried out. This notwithstanding, there is little doubt that Einsatzgruppe B was responsible for the 46,000 deaths between June and November 1941, when the unit was under Nebe’s command.
Nebe disappeared three days after the July 1944 bomb plot. His fate and whereabouts were then shrouded in mystery. One account states that he was betrayed by a rejected mistress, sentenced to death by the People’s Court (Volksgerichtshof), and hanged on March 2, 1945. He was, however, also rumored to have disappeared into Latin America after 1945. According to historian Robert Wistrich, Nebe pursued business activities in Hamburg until his death on April 4, 1960, without being brought to account for his wartime crimes. Sightings of Nebe were allegedly made in Turin, Italy, in September 1956 and in Ireland in the winter of 1960.