Odilo Globocnik, an Austrian SS leader, played a major role in the Holocaust. Although his name isn't as infamous as Himmler or Eichmann, he still was an incremental part of the plot to eliminate the Jewish community from Europe entirely. He was the leader of Operation Reinhard, named for Heydrich (The Hangman), one of the most feared Nazi leaders of all time.
Odilo Globocnik got a simple start in life, born into a Slovene family in
Trieste in 1904. He attended school and then military school, which allowed him to prematurely join the army even though he was still getting his education. The war ended his education and the family went to Klagenfurt, where he enrolled at an engineering vocational school. In 1922, he became a part of the Carinthian paramilitary, a precursor to the Nazi Party. He worked normal jobs for many years, but was then arrested in 1933 in connection to contact with imprisoned Nazis.
At this time, Globocnik was admitted to the SS in Austria, and was arrested four different times for his association with the Nazi Party. However, due to the intervention of Himmler, he did little more than a year in jail total for his supposed crimes. He started helping to spread propaganda and then was tasked to develop an intelligence and courier service that would channel funds into Austria so that the Germans could take control of the country. He had a fanatical devotion to the Nazi Party, giving him the chance to climb the ladder swiftly and be rewarded for his efforts by Hitler himself.
Globocnik is personally held responsible for liquidating over 500,000 Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto, as well as the Bialystok Ghetto. He also resettled many Poles because of their ethnic background, and implemented the Lublin reservation that was used as a forced labor camp for the Jews that were detained in this area. According to some historians, Globocnik might have actually been the one to come up with the idea of extermination camps and industrialized murder, but there is no proof to back up these claims.
Regardless, Odilo Globocnik was a very powerful Nazi SS leader and responsible for the killing of many Jews and other inferiors as a part of the Holocaust. He was captured by the British forces in 1945 and taken for interrogation, but ingested cyanide to commit suicide before he could be questioned or charged with crimes.