Einsatzgruppe 1a commander Martin Sandberger. Part one of three : life to 1945
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On 30 March 2010 Nazi
On 30 March 2010 Nazi war criminal Martin Sandberger, commander of Einsatzgruppe 1a, died in a care home in Stuttgart aged 98. Sandberger was the last of the major criminals to die. And without a doubt he was a major criminal having the blood of tens of thousands of people on his hands. He died totally forgotten but he died at a time when interest in National Socialist crimes was at a height because of the publicity surrounding the trial of John Demmyanyuk. Demyanyuk was a nothing in the scheme of things, a lowly guard at the Sobibór death camp. Sandberger was a major decision maker in the killing of thousands of people as the commanding officer of Einsatzgruppe 1a.
Sandberger was born in Berlin-Charlottenburg on 17 August 1911. His father was a director in a chemical concern and the company had sent him to the capital from from Württemberg in south west Germany. He therefore came from a wealthy background which allowed him to study law at the universities of Munich , Cologne , Freiburg and Tübingen .
He was only twenty when he joined the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and the S.A., in 1931. He became the leader of the National Socialist group at his university. On 8 March 1933, the day of the general election in Germany, in what maybe seen as a typical student prank, he raised the swastika flag over the university. He did this with Erich Ehrlinger , whose career path is very similar to that of Sandberger, later commanding an SS Einsatzgruppe in the Baltic States and spending very little time in prison for it going on to live well into his nineties. But that is a story for another time.
Sandberger concluded his studies with a thesis on Social Insurance in the National Socialist State: Back to basics: Insurance or Care? He received the highest mark possible, the first time in nine years that it had been awarded.
He became a full time worker in the National Socialist students’ organisation. In 1936 he joined the SS.
The same year, the head of the students’ organisation, Gustav Adolf Scheel, recruited him for the security police, the SD, in Württemberg. Scheel was yet another war criminal that got away with very little punishment after the war, but once more this is a story for another time. Sandburger rose to the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer (Major) in 1938 .
Following the Molotov – Rippentrop pact of August 1939, Heinrich Himmler sought to bring ethnic Germans either back to Germany or to settle them in the occupied parts of Poland, displacing the Polish farmers to make way for them. This policy was called the Heim ins Reich (which could be translated as Home in the Reich, or even, Return to the Nation). On 13 October 1939, Sandberger was appointed to be the head of North East Immigration office which was located in the occupied Polish port city of Gdynia. From here he is moved to deporting Jews from the newly annexed town of Strasbourg.
After the invastion of the USSR, Sandberger was appointed to be the leader of Einsatzkommando 1a. The Einsatzkommando were mobile murder squads who would move from area to area killing those that the crazed conspiracy theories of the Third Reich deemed to be their enemies. Sandberger was to murder alongside another wealthy, educated lawyer from Tübingen Dr. Walter Stahlecker.
His report of 1 July 1941, just ten days after the invasion of the USSR, notes that 941 Jews had been killed.
The method of killing is to round the victims up and take them to an already prepared grave site and shoot them. Often this was with the help of locals, eager to loot the property of the victims.
When Riga was captured on 1 July 1941, the synagogues were destroyed and around 400 people murdered, some through incineration in the burning synagogues. At the same time, groups of racist thugs were set up to hunt down Jews and forment pogroms. Within three months around 6,000 of the 40,000 Jews of Riga were murdered.
Friedrich Anijalg, a guard in Jägala camp, testified after the war that "Dr. Sandberger was present at the shooting site" at the mass killing in Kalevi-Liiva, Estonia. There is no evidence to support this claim and it could well be that whereas Sandberger gave the orders to drive the victims to the murder site, he found an excuse to be somewhere else.
The pre war Jewish population of Estonia was only around 4,000 people. Of these, some 500 or so had been deported to the gulags following the Soviet occupation of 1940. However Jewish people had fled to Estonia or were deported there by the Nazis. These people were now to be killed. In October Sandberger said that all Jewish men in Estonia except for doctors and essential workers have been killed.
On 3 December 1941 Sandberger was appointed commander of the Security Police SiPo and Security Service SD in Estonia.
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