Infamous Men of the Holocaust Trivia Quiz

Answer: Heinrich Himmler

Himmler was Head of the SS (1929-1945). In 1936 he also became Head of the German Police (Chef der Deutschen Polizei) and later also the Minister of the Interior. He supervised all of the internal and external security forces, which included the Gestapo. With the assistance of Heydrich and others he expanded his personal empire in Nazi Germany to the point where it constituted a large and influential terror lobby.

Answer: Hermann Goering

Hermann Goering was born on January 12th, 1893 at the Marienbad sanatorium in Rosenheim, Bavaria. (He was, incidentally, one of the few top Nazis born into a Protestant family; most of the Nazi leaders had a Roman Catholic upbringing). He was for a time in charge of Jewish affairs but had to hand this over to Heydrich and Himmler in July 1941.

Answer: Reinhard Heydrich

Heydrich, who was head of the Security Service (the Reichssicherheitshauptamt or RSHA) until his assassination, was one of the key driving forces behind the Holocaust. After he took over responsibility for "the Jewish Question" in July 1941 Nazi Germany moved rapidly towards the systematic extermination of the Jews under its control. One his first moves to put a stop to all Jewish emigration from area under Nazi rule. (Until August 1941 it was still sometimes possible for Jews to emigrate, for example, via Lisbon to the US).

Answer: Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels was one of the men who swayed the public opinion against the Jews and did his utmost to incite hatred against them. It was Goebbels who organized the Night of Broken Glass in November 1938.

Answer: Joseph Mengele

Mengele performed the most terrible surgeries (without anaesthetic) on prisoners. He took a particular interest in identical twins.

Answer: Adolf Eichmann

For a long time it was said that Adolf Eichmann spoke fluent Yiddish and Hebrew and had studied Judaism and Jewish culture so that he move inconspicuously among Jews and manipulate them to leave their homes peacefully. These stories, which were reported in some Jewish journals published in exile, have been shown to be false, though he had some knowledge of Jewish customs. The stories were very largely put out by Eichmann himself, apparently in the hope of enhancing his reputation an "expert" on Jewish affairs.

Eichmann was a key driving force in the Holocaust, responsible in particular for organizing deportations to concentration camps and extermination camps. He fled to Argentina shortly after World War II. He was seized by Mossad agents in Buenos Aires in 1960, transported covertly to Israel, tried, sentenced to death, and hanged in 1962.

Answer: Odilo Globocnik

For most of the period from late 1939 to 1943 Globocnik was nominally "only" Chief of Police in the Lublin District of Nazi-occupied Poland. He was rabidly antisemitic and played a key role in liquidating the Warsaw, Bialystok and Lublin ghettos. He was also instrumental in creating the first extermination camp - at Belzec. He later set up Sobibor and other camps.

In 1943, after the fall and kidnapping of Mussolini, he was transferred to Italy to deport the Italian Jews to Auschwitz and kill anti-Fascist Croatian partisans.

Shortly after his arrest in 1945 Odilo Globocnik committed suicide by crushing a cyanide capsule that he had hidden in his mouth.

Answer: Ernst Kaltenbrunner

Kaltenbrunner succeeded Heydrich in this post in January 1943, following the latter's assassination a few months earlier. He was chief of security in the Reich. He was the highest ranking SS man to be tried, convicted and hanged as a result of the Nuremberg Tribunal.

Answer: Josef Kramer

He had previously held a senior post at Auschwitz and was transferred to Belsen. He was tried in September-November 1945 in Lüneburg, convicted of war crimes and hanged together with eleven other Belsen guards on 13 Ddecember 1945. The Belsen Trial was the first war crimes trial conducted by the Allies in western Europe and was given extensive media coverage. For the first time, the general public in the West learned about the internal workings of Nazi concentration camps and extermination camps, 'selections' and so on.

Even at the time of his death, Kramer claimed to have no remorse and that he had simply been 'following orders'.

Answer: Paul Blobel

This man was sentenced to death in the U.S. for the slaughter of nearly 15,000 innocent people.