Anna Veronica Pobbe

EHRI-Fellow (2023)

Trials of Nazi criminals involved in the economic exploitation of Jewish communities

The research project Pobbe is planning to undertake during the EHRI fellowship term is the starting point of some new research paths based, first of all, on some questions still unanswered from Pobbe previous works. The Aktion Reinhard was the Aktion with the highest death rates among the many deportation operations organized by the Nazis (Stone, 2019). The Aktion begun right after the death of Reinhard Heydrich, who was killed by some partisans. During the operation three death-camps were involved in the killing operations: Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec. Kulmhof, the first death camp to be built, was involved in the AR only partially: it welcomed few transports, mainly of children, coming from the Czech territories (Trial of Adolf Eichmann,1961). At the top of the hierarchy related to the AR there was Odilo Globocnik, a first-hand Nazi born in Trieste. Pobbe came across the Globocnik’s case at the end of her research devoted to Litzmannstadt. Globocnik tried, in fact, to reinvest the profits of the AR in some projects, like Osti, the SS industrial dream (Schulte, 2001). When, during the middle of 1943, Himmler tried to take control over the Litzmannstadt Ghetto, Globocnik proposed to change the ghetto into a
labor camp controlled by the Osti project. This “conversion” never happened, but what was interesting was the reinvestment process that Globocnik tried to do. The reinvestment was related to the money and goods, that the Nazis were able to take from the deportees in the various phases of the AR. Most of those profits were then transferred into a Sonderkonto, named “R”. The practice of using peculiar bank accounts in order to control and collect the money, that were took from the deportees, were often used by the Nazis, as the case of the Sonderkonto 12300 for the deportations of the Warthegau has shown (Klein, 2009).

Anna Veronica Pobbe is historian and Adjunct Professor of Contemporary History at University of Milan. She received a PhD in European Cultures (major in History) from the University of Trento in 2020. She was postdoc fellow at the German Historical Institute in Rome in 2022. Her main fields of research interest include the economic exploitation of Jews in the polish occupied territories, postwar trials controversies and more recently the involvement of the Holy See in the postwar trials matters. Pobbe published her first book on 2023, which was taken from her PhD-thesis (based on the Hans Biebow biography). She received several fundings and prizes, like the Irma Rozemberg Prize from the University of Wien.