military administration under Carl Heinrich von Stülpnagel, as
it gave Oberg ultimate authority over all police agencies in the
country. His major tasks were combating the French resistance and
organizing the deportation of Jews to the death camps. After the
Allied invasion of Normandy and liberation of Paris, Oberg fled
the country and took command of the Weichsel Army under the
direct orders of Himmler in December 1944. U.S. Military Police
arrested Oberg in a Tyrolean village in June 1945, and he was sub-
sequently sentenced to death by two different courts, one in Wup-
pertal, the other in Paris following his extradition in October 1946.
In 1958, as part of a general Allied policy regarding war criminals,
his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment and later reduced
to 20 years. His pardon in 1965 by President Charles de Gaulle al-
lowed his return to Flensburg, where he died on 3 June.OBERLÄNDER, THEODOR (1905–1998). An Abwehr officer
during World War II and a controversial member of the postwar
government of Konrad Adenauer, Theodor Oberländer was born
in Meiningen (Thuringia) on 1 May 1905. As a student of agricul-
ture and economics in Hamburg and Berlin, he adamantly rejected
the Versailles Treaty and was active in several nationalist youth
groups. By 1930, he had obtained a second doctoral degree at the
University of Königsberg and embarked on an 18-month world
tour to obtain firsthand knowledge of foreign agricultural methods.
Interested above all in Germany’s eastern neighbors, he returned to
Königsberg to direct an institute for East European economics. His
growing reputation led to a professorship in Danzig (now Gdansk,
Poland). Although Oberländer had joined the Nazi Party in 1933
to help advance his career, a major conflict developed with Erich
Koch, the East Prussian Gauleiter (district leader), and led to the
loss of his academic positions. Unwilling to support Hitler’s radi-
cal aims in Eastern Europe—and drawing on his well-cultivated
connections—he found refuge in Wilhelm Canaris’s Abwehr
in 1937 and also managed to obtain a professorship at the Ernst
Moritz Arndt University in Greifswald. Oberländer enthusiasti-
cally greeted the return of the Sudeten Germans through the Mu-
nich Agreement and took part in numerous military exercises on
the Czech-German border as a reserve lieutenant.
OBERLÄNDER, THEODOR • 325