Walter Stahlecker

Nazi party and regime Fascists and Nazis 1900–1942 ✕ Fatally wounded by Soviet partisans

SS officer who led Einsatzgruppe A in 1941, instigating the Kaunas pogrom and directing the murder of Baltic Jews

Born into a pastor’s family in Sternenfels, he took a doctorate in law at Tübingen. He joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1932, headed the Gestapo in Württemberg and then Breslau, and in 1938 became formal head of the Central Agency for Jewish Emigration in Vienna. Given command of Einsatzgruppe A in February 1941, he followed Army Group North into the Baltic states in June. He had Klimaitis start a pogrom in Kaunas and Arājs raise a unit in Riga, staging the killings as the “self-cleansing” of the local population. By the winter of 1941 he reported that Einsatzgruppe A had murdered some 249,420 Jews, and at the end of November he became commander of the Security Police and SD for Ostland. He was fatally wounded by Soviet partisans near Krasnogvardeysk, Russia, in March 1942.