Werner Best
Karl Rudolf Werner Best (10 July 1903 – 23 June 1989) was a German jurist, police chief, SS-Obergruppenführer, Nazi Party leader, and theoretician from Darmstadt. He was the first chief of Department 1 of the Gestapo, Nazi Germany's secret police, and initiated a registry of all Jews in Germany. As a deputy of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, he organized the World War II SS-Einsatzgruppen, paramilitary death squads that carried out mass-murder in Nazi-occupied territories. Best served in the German military occupation administration of France (1940–1942), and then became the civilian administrator of occupied Denmark (1942–1945). Convicted of war crimes in Denmark, Best was released in 1951. He escaped further prosecution in West Germany in 1972 due to ill health and died in 1989, aged 85. Early life Werner Best was born on 10 July 1903 in Darmstadt, Hesse, but his parents moved to Dortmund when he was nine before settling in Mainz, where he completed his education. His father was a postmaster who was killed in France at the outset of World War I. In his younger years, Best founded the German National Youth League and joined the National People's Party of Mainz. Between 1921 and 1925, he studied law at