Nazi Party Leader, SS General, World War II War-Criminal. He played a key role in Hitler's 1938 annexation of Austria and was a leading perpetrator of the Holocaust. As Police Commander of occupied Poland's Lublin district from 1939 to 1943, Globocnik oversaw the murders of an estimated 2 million people, most of them Jews. Born in Trieste, Italy, he had some military education before moving to Austria to work as a construction foreman. From the early 1920s he was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazis, joining the party in 1930 and the SS in 1933; he was imprisoned several times for his political activities and was implicated in the 1933 murder of a prominent Jewish businessman. Appointed provincial Party Leader of Carinthia in 1936, Globocnik received instructions from Hitler to organize the Nazi movement in Austria's provinces, which he accomplished with frightening success. For his efforts he was named first Gauleiter of Vienna in May 1938. His stubborness made him many enemies in Berlin, principally Reich Marshall Hermann Goering, and his fondness for luxury prompted suspicions of embezzlement. In January 1939 Goering had him removed as Gauleiter for mishandling party funds. But he remained a useful tool of SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, who in November 1939 installed him in Lublin as SS and Police Leader, with the rank of Major General. In this capacity Globocnik set up a network of forced labor camps and launched the introductory phase of "Generalplan Ost", the Nazis' long-term scheme to open up Eastern Europe to German colonization by "resettling" nationals in the occupied territories. To this end he destroyed over 100 villages in the Zamosc region, combined with mass executions and deportations to Auschwitz. But he is most notorious as head (from October 1941) of Operation Reinhard, part of Hitler's savage dream of annihilating Europe's Jewish population. Acting on verbal commands from Himmler, Globocnik ordered the construction of three killing centers (Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) in or near Lublin, and assigned the task of supervising them to a top aide, the barely human Christian Wirth; these camps established methods of mass slaughter that would later be implemented at Auschwitz. In addition he was responsible for the final liquidation of the Warsaw and Bialystock ghettos. But the failure of "Generalplan Ost" due in part to Polish resistance, strained relations with other SS leaders in the country, and evidence that the General was helping himself to millions in loot from his victims, combined to drive him out of favor with the Nazi hierarchy. On November 3, 1943, after Globocnik refused to relinquish his personal command of 42,000 Jewish laborers in Lublin, Himmler sent Wirth to kill the prisoners; this heinous event, known as the "Harvest Festival Massacre", marked the cessation of Operation Reinhard and of Globocnik's power in Poland. His death camps were shut down and he was reassigned as SS and Police Leader of the Adriatic Coast. At the end of the war he fled into the mountains of Carinthia, where he was captured by British troops on May 31, 1945. He took poison before he could be interrogated. The British unceremoniously buried him in a pasture near a garbage dump in the village of Paternion, without a marker and with the turf replaced to conceal the site; according to the arresting officer, this was an appropriate end for "the worst man in the world". The grave location remains unconfirmed by historians. The fortune Globocnik siphoned off from the Reich has never been accounted for, causing unlikely speculation that his suicide was a hoax and that he bribed the British and US militaries into giving him freedom in the West.