Ludolf Jakob von Alvensleben

Ludolf Jakob von Alvensleben Wittenmoor-Plutowo/Thorn (9 August 1899 – 23 August 1953) was a Standartenfuhrer (colonel) in the Nazi era SS and a senior staff member of the Action Reinhard group assigned by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler to systematically murder the Jews of Europe. He ended the war as SS and Police Leader (SSPF) of Adria-West, Northern Italy. He escaped investigation after the war and is reported to have died when his car overturned on a road outside Dortmund, in August 1953. There were no witnesses to the accident. The police chief at the time of the discovery and identification of the corpse, had served under von Alvensleben in Southern Russia, during the war.

Ludolf "Ludi" Jakob von Alvensleben was the third of four sons born to Ludolf Udo von Alvensleben () of Wittenmoor, Stendal, Saxony-Anhalt in Germany. His oldest brother, Busso died in 1918, in the First World War. His remaining older brother was the art historian and diarist Udo von Alvensleben-Wittenmoor (). His younger brother Wichard von Alvensleben has entered history as being involved in the rescue of a large number of prominent hostages in Tirol in the last days of the Second World War.

Like his two older brothers, Ludolf Jakob von Alvensleben attended school at the Knights Academy () in Brandenburg on the Havel until he volunteered for service in the First World War. After returning from the war as a 19-year-old Lieutenant, he was active in a Freikorps company, before taking over the family estate in Plutowo / Thorn (Polish; Torun) in West Prussia. This was given as an inheritance from his father. As a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles, Ludolf Jakob von Alvensleben became one of a large number of Junker members who lost their lands to the Polish state. He was compensated by the new German government. However, he lost this compensation in the hyperinflation that was rampant in Germany in the early 1920s. He was also involved in an unsuccessful Ford auto franchise in the then West-Prussian city of Danzig (Polish; Gdańsk).

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