Historian Christian Ingrao quips that for Ohlendorf, Nazism was a "quest for race" in the historical continuum, and even though he never stated it that way, his faith in Germandom was akin to that of his fellow SS intellectuals.

[6] Nonetheless, Ohlendorf was instrumental as a member of the SD in shaping Nazi economic doctrine, which became "increasingly virulent as the war progressed" as he attempted to mould the economy "in an ethnic context".

[12] It was Ohlendorf's responsibility as head of the SD-Inland to collect data and scientifically to examine social, cultural, and economic issues, assembling reports to his superiors in the Nazi government.

[18] Transfers from the RSHA to the Einsatzgruppen were in part due to personnel shortages but also to keep the initial killing-operations confined to those who already knew the details, such as Ohlendorf, Arthur Nebe, and Paul Blobel.

[24][c] Ohlendorf disliked the use of the oft-employed Genickschuß (shot to the back of the neck) and preferred to line up victims and fire at them from a greater distance so as to alleviate personal responsibility for individual murders.

[33] Due to the Wehrmacht's insistence that Ukraine's agricultural production was needed to sustain its military campaign, Ohlendorf was asked by the army during October 1941 to refrain from killing some of the Jewish farmers[e]—a request he honored—but one which earned him Himmler's contempt.

[35] From that month forward, the Einsatzgruppen had begun the process of systematically shooting not just men but women and children, a transition that historian Peter Longerich terms "the decisive step on the way towards a policy of racial annihilation".

[39] After the victims' deaths, Jewish Sonderkommandos were forced to unload the bodies, clean the excrement from inside the van's gas chamber, and once the clean-up was complete, were themselves immediately shot.

[43] His commitment to the Nazi cause kept him in Ukraine longer than any of his comrades, and while he may have disliked the political direction in which Germany was headed, he never registered complaints about murdering Jews.

[43] He did, however, express misgivings about the barbarity and sadism being meted out by the Romanian units that accompanied the Einsatzgruppen in their murderous tasks, since they were not only leaving a trail of corpses in their wake, they were also pillaging and raping in the process.

[3] Believing their expertise invaluable, Ohlendorf, Ludwig Erhard, and other experts concerned themselves with how to stabilize German currency after the prospective end of the war.

[47] Hoping to salvage the reputation of the SD, Ohlendorf offered his services in the hopes that he could shape the postwar reconstruction of Germany, but along "National Socialist lines", remaining convinced—as was Admiral Karl Dönitz (who would make Ohlendorf his de facto economics minister under Albert Speer in the Flensburg Government of May 1945)—that some form of Nazism would ultimately survive.

[56] Ohlendorf attempted to present Einsatzgruppen operations in the Soviet area "not as a racist programme for the annihilation of all the Jews ... but as a general liquidation order primarily aimed at 'securing' the newly won territory.

"[57] Defending his actions, Ohlendorf compared Einsatzgruppen activities to the Biblical Jewish extirpation of its enemies; he likewise claimed that his firing squads were "no worse than the 'press-button killers' who dropped the atom bomb on Japan.

Moses argues that permanent security is an unobtainable goal that if pursued, inevitably leads to anticipatory attacks that harm civilians, and therefore it "underlies all atrocity crimes and common state practices like aerial bombing and sanctions.