Odilo Globocnik first came to the attention of SS bossman Heinrich Himmler because of his relentless antisemitism and his willingness to murder the Jews of Vienna on a freelance basis even before such practices were sanctioned by German law. Consequently, in 1939 Himmler promoted Globocnik and moved him to occupied Poland. In 1941 Himmler directed Globocnik to oversee one of the most enormous instances of genocide in the history of the world: Aktion Reinhardt.

This was a big step up for Globus, as Odilo was affectionately known to his buddies in the Schutzstaffel, “the vilest organization ever known.”¹ In localized modern terms, it’s like being moved from the suburban backwater of Inglewood to the big-time bright-lights-big-city cosmopolis of Hollywood! Globus took to his new surroundings like Samson to the Philistines, and, by late 1943 when he wound up operations, more than 2,000,000 Jews were dead. The organizational aspects of this accomplishment were overwhelmingly intricate, so Globus felt understandably proud of his masterful work and wanted to crow about it.

However, Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and Globocnik’s boss, had begun to notice that the rest of the world, and even a significant number of German citizens, weren’t too happy about the systematic deportation and gassing of human beings on this scale. As historian Bettina Stangneth has it:

The Nazis might have kept telling themselves that the extermination of the Jews was the only means for their survival, but they lacked sufficient faith in this view to share it with the rest of the world. The Nazi police state was born of the fear that not even its own population would understand its campaign of murder. Himmler guessed early on that this “glorious chapter of our history” could never be written, and he prevented Odilo Globocnik from sinking a memorial plaque into the earth for the heroes of Operation Reinhard…In summer 1942 [Himmler] ordered his commanders to find a way to avoid digging any more mass graves and to clear up the old ones. Any form of publicity would be harmful.²

Meanwhile, back on the home front, on December 11, 2014, the Joint Security Committee of the Hollywood Entertainment District BID and the Sunset-Vine BID held its monthly meeting.

And of course, so-called BID Executive Security Director Steve Seyler gave his report, as always. We’ve written about these reports before, and not in the most glowing tones. Seyler habitually mocks his subjects with demeaning epithets and pokes fun at their inability to afford prestigious liquor. He jokes about the fact that homeless people have to shit in the public streets³ because the BIDs, in their infinite compassion, have somehow not managed in almost twenty years of operation to arrange for sufficient public restrooms in the parts of Hollywood they occupy. He even writes subliterate tin-earred poetry about his victims.

Well, that’s all gone in his December 2014 report. Amazingly, this report, the first one published after MK.org began exposing Seyler’s disgusting antics, contains no photographs, no nicknames, no poetry, no idiocy extrinsic to the mission of the BID patrols. Of course, the baked-in idiocy of the whole project is still present. There’d be nothing left if they eliminated that. On the whole, though, Steve has finally written a report with at least a patina, a veneer, an ephemeral appearance, of professionalism.

It’s possible that putting an end to his buffoonery will preserve the viability of the BIDs’ mission to eliminate homeless people from the soon-to-be-ethnically-cleansed streets of Hollywood. Perhaps this new professionalism will shield the wicked projects of Steve and his Reichsführerung at the HPOA from destruction-by-sunlight. Perhaps it will, although, as we’ve seen, this tactic hasn’t been so successful for similar organizations in the past.

1. To walk with the devil : Slovene collaboration and Axis occupation, 1941-1945. Gregor Joseph Kranjc. University of Toronto Press, 2013, p.124. It’s not clear whose phrase this is. Kranjc attributes it to Michael Allen, but a search of the book it’s cited to, The business of genocide : the SS, slave labor, and the concentration camps, turns up empty.
2. Eichmann before Jerusalem : the unexamined life of a mass murderer. Bettina Stangneth. Alfred A. Knopf, 2014, p.34.
3. See Seyler’s October 2014 report to the JSC, p.13.

Image of public relations genius Odilo “Globus” Globocnik is from the Bundesarchiv via Wikimedia. They claim it’s released under the CC BY-SA 3.0 DE but we actually don’t believe them. We say it’s the spoils of war and we say the hell with it…come at us, Volksgenossen! It’s the same deal with the image of Himmler, except the link to that is here.