Walter Blume (23 July 1906 – 13 November 1974) was a mid-ranking SS commander and leader of Sonderkommando 7a, part of the extermination commando group Einsatzgruppe B.

He was hired as a police inspector in his hometown of Dortmund on 1 March 1933, serving under Wilhelm Schepmann, and joined the SA and Nazi Party (member 3,282,505) on 1 May 1933.

In May he assumed the leadership of Sonderkommando 7a attached to Einsatzgruppe B (under Arthur Nebe) assigned to the 9th Army, part of Operation Barbarossa which started on 22 June 1941.

Blume had been personally informed by Reinhard Heydrich that he and the 91 men under his command had a single task: the Judenvernichtungsbefehl (order to exterminate the Jews).

It appears that he was recalled to Berlin due to his reluctance to shoot women and children, which led him to acquire a reputation among his fellow SS officers for being "weak and bureaucratic".

[7]In late 1943 Blume was promoted to SS-Standartenführer and assigned as commander in charge of the Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo, Security Police) in Athens, together with Hauptsturmführer Anton Burger, during the Axis occupation of Greece.

Between October 1943 and September 1944 Blume managed, under the direction of Adolf Eichmann, the deportation of over 46,000 Greek Jews, the majority of them from Salonika, along with approximately 3,000 from Rhodes, Kos, Athens, Ioannina, and Corfu, to Auschwitz Concentration Camp.

Blume rewarded his subordinates, including Anton Burger, with gold coins, jewellery and fine clothes stolen from the victims of deportation.

Blume also proposed sending the entire able-bodied male population of Athens to forced labor in Germany, to prevent them from joining the andartes.

Hermann Neubacher at the German Foreign Office did not receive this suggestion favorably, however Blume proceeded with plans to arrest Greek politicians and send them to Haidari concentration camp.

[2] When the Nazis left Greece in September 1944, the country was considered Judenfrei ("free of Jews"), and Blume returned to RSHA headquarters in Berlin.

[9] Concerning his motivation for helping to perpetrate the Holocaust, Blume said that he admired, adored, and worshipped Hitler because Hitler was successful not only in the domestic rehabilitation of Germany, as Blume interpreted it, but successful in defeating Poland, France, Belgium, Belarus, Bulgaria, the Netherlands, Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece, Luxembourg, Lithuania, Russia, and other countries.

In 1968, Blume was arrested and re-tried by a state court in Bremen, together with his subordinate Obersturmführer Friedrich Linnemann, for charges related to the deportation of Jews in Greece.