conceived Operation bernhard, the plan to flood England with
counterfeit bank notes.
For disobeying one of Heydrich’s orders, Naujocks was dismissed
from the SD in 1941 and transferred to the Waffen-SS. After being
wounded on the eastern front, Naujocks served as an economic ad-
ministrator to the German occupation troops in Belgium. His main
responsibility, however, was the elimination of members of resis-
tance movements there and in Denmark. In November 1944, he sur-
rendered to the U.S. Army and was placed in a camp for war crimi-
nals. Fearful that the information he had provided Allied authorities
would not give him immunity from prosecution, Naujocks escaped
from custody before a trial could take place. No further action was
brought against him, and he settled in Hamburg as a businessman. He
also sold his exploits to the press as “the man who started World War
II.” Naujocks died on 4 April 1960.NEBE, ARTHUR (1894–1945). An SS lieutenant general who headed
the criminal police but supported the anti-Nazi resistance, Arthur
Nebe was born on 13 November 1894, the son of schoolteacher. Fol-
lowing volunteer combat duty during World War I, he abandoned his
study of medicine and economics and joined the Prussian criminal
police in 1920. Besides rising to the rank of police commissioner,
he also wrote a major treatise on criminology. Nebe’s disillusion-
ment with the laxity of the Weimar Republic led to his joining the
SS and the Nazi Party in 1931. Following Adolf Hitler’s accession to
power, Hermann Göring appointed him to the Gestapo, and in 1937
he was instructed to reorganize the criminal police system of the
Third Reich. With the creation of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt in
September 1939, Nebe became head of Amt V, the criminal police
division. At Hitler’s request, he directed a special commission that
investigated the attempted assassination of the Führer in the Munich
Bürgerbräukeller on November 9, concluding (contrary to the wishes
of Reinhard Heydrich and Heinrich Himmler) that Georg Elser
was the sole perpetrator.
Nebe’s wartime service included command of one of the Ein-
satzgruppen between June and late October 1941. Based in Minsk
and covering the area of the Moscow front, this extermination bat-
talion was responsible for 46,000 deaths, although evidence exists
NEBE, ARTHUR • 317