Dr Martin Sandberger, born on 17 July 1911 in Berlin, Germany, supervised the mass murder of Estonia’s Jews and Roma in his capacity as Head of the German Security Police (Sipo) in Estonia in 1941–43.
Between 1929 and 1933, Sandberger studied law at Munich, Cologne, Freiburg, and Tübingen universities, passing his bar exam shortly after the Nazis came to power. In 1931, he became a member of the National Socialist German Student’s League [Nationalsozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund], a division of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and the Sturmabteilung (SA). In May 1935 he joined the ranks of the Schutzstaffel (SS) and soon began working in Department II/2 of the Security Service (SD). He started at the rank of SS-Sturmbannführer in 1938 and reached that of SS-Standartenführer in 1945. Over his career, he received five decorations. Sandberger was married with three children, the youngest of whom was born in the autumn of 1941.
In October 1939 Sandberger was appointed head of the Central Immigration Office [Einwandererzentralstelle], newly created by Heinrich Himmler (1900–1945) for the purpose of resettling ethnic Germans arriving from the countries of Eastern and Central Europe. To accommodate the Baltic Germans arriving in the Reichsgau Wartheland, he organised the deportation of 7,000 Poles, temporarily sending them to a concentration camp. In February 1940 he received a promotion and moved to the Personnel Department of the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin. Based on his previous experience, in April 1941 Sandberger received a short assignment involving deportation of the Slovenian intelligentsia from the Ljubljana region. Around that time, in preparation for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Head of the Reich Security Main Office Reinhard Heydrich (1904–1942) appointed Sandberger as leader of Sonderkommando 1a of Einsatzgruppe A assigned to Estonia.
Moving through Lithuania and Latvia in the last week of June and the first week of July 1941, Sonderkommando 1a carried out mass executions of Jews under his leadership. The unit reached Tallinn on 28 August 1941, and within the next month established permanent offices of the German Security Police in major Estonian cities and the part of Russia between Estonia and Leningrad. Numbering a mere 105 people, the German Sipo in Estonia could not effectively carry out the tasks assigned to it—including the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish/Gypsy Question’—in a country with over one million citizens. Consequently, Sandberger created a parallel structure, the Estonian Security Police, which employed twenty times as many people as its German counterpart. The Estonian auxiliary police, Omakaitse, which at its height employed 43,000 people, assisted the Estonian Security Police in its routine operations.
On 10 September 1941, Sandberger sanctioned the arrest of all Estonian Jews. The order obliged police prefectures to compile lists of Jews within ten days, distinguishing between males and female. Throughout September, Jews had routinely been dispatched to Tallinn Central Prison, on the basis of a general order prescribing indefinite internment in a concentration camp. By 6 October, the Estonian Security Police reported 440 executions, or slightly under one-half of the Jews who had not fled Estonia in the face of the German invasion. Provincial cities were proclaimed ‘judenrein’ as early as 12 October. Jewish women and children—about 500 to 550 individuals—were still alive by mid-autumn 1941. In the second and third-largest Estonian cities, Tartu and Pärnu, Jewish women and children were incarcerated locally, while those from Tallinn and the surrounding area were dispatched to nearby Harku Prison. According to the Einsatzgruppen report on executions carried out through 1 February 1942, the death toll for Estonia stood at 963. This figure tallies with the number of Jews murdered in each of the five largest police prefectures and smaller Estonian cities: Tallinn–666; Pärnu–137; Tartu–at least 50; Narva–32; Rakvere –22; rest–56. By the summer of 1942, the Estonian Security Police identified and put to death the last few Jewish women—typically persons from ‘mixed marriages’, that is, women with a non-Jewish husband.
Sandberger and the German Sipo were central also in the mass murder of Roma in Estonia, even though the decision-making involved several German agencies. On 27 October 1942, the Estonian Security Police reported the killing of 243 Estonian Roma to its German counterpart. In pursuance of Himmler’s so-called Auschwitz-Decree of 16 December 1942, Sandberger ordered the deportation of all Estonian Roma regardless their social status on 22 January 1943. After a sojourn in Tallinn Central Prison, 110 and 337 Roma were put to death on 10 February and 17 February 1943, respectively. At least two more, smaller, massacres had taken place by early March 1943. Eventually, out of a total Romani population of 906–915, a mere 75–125 had a chance to survive.
In September 1943, Sandberger went to Verona to help build an intelligence service in German-occupied Italy. Three months later, he returned to Reich Security Main Office headquarters in Berlin, taking charge of Department VI-A. He stayed in this position until the end of the war. On 25 May 1945, Sandberger surrendered to the American forces at Kitzbühel in Austria.
Sandberger was one of the 23 defendants in the 1947–48 Einsatzgruppen Trial. Along with 13 others, he was condemned to death on charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity. The full extent of Sandberger’s crimes did not come to the fore at Nuremberg, however. Sandberger concocted a story of deliberately sending Jewish women and children to relative safety outside of Estonia, while the mass murder of Roma barely featured at the Einsatzgruppen Trial. In 1951, while he was on death row in Landsberg prison, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and in 1958 he walked free thanks to an amnesty.
In the subsequent decades, Sandberger worked his way up in a private company as a tax lawyer. In the 1960s, West-German legal authorities summoned Sandberger to testify on several occasions, and in 1970 they opened a criminal investigation into his wartime activities. The mass murder of German and Czechoslovakian Jews at Kalevi-Liiva in Estonia in the autumn of 1942 proved the most serious charge against Sandberger. However, a loophole in legislation—according to which no individual could be sentenced anew for the crimes for which the US Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had already pronounced its judgement—meant that the case against him was dropped in 1972.
Sandberger spent the last years of his life in a retirement home in Stuttgart in southern Germany. He consistently declined requests for interviews from journalists and historians. Sandberger was the last surviving high-ranking Reich Security Main Office official when he died on 30 March 2010.
