Glucks was born 1889 in Odenkirchen (now part of Monchengladbach) in the Rhineland. Having completed gymnasium in Dusseldorf, he worked in his father's business, a fire insurance agency. In 1909, Glucks joined the army for one year as a volunteer, serving in the artillery. In 1913, he was in England, and later moved to Argentina as a trader.

Just a few days after the Wannsee Conference in January 1942, Himmler ordered Glucks to prepare the camps for the immediate arrival of 100,000 Jewish men and 50,000 women being evacuated from the Reich as labourers in lieu of the diminishing availability of Russian prisoners. In July 1942, he participated in a planning meeting with Himmler on the topic of medical experiments on camp inmates. From several visits to the Auschwitz concentration camps, Glucks was well aware of the mass murders and other atrocities committed there. Correspondingly, Auschwitz Kommandant Rudolf Hoss routinely informed Glucks on the status of the extermination activities. During one of his inspection-tour visits to Auschwitz in 1943, Glucks complained about the unfavorable location of the crematoria since all types of people would be able to "gaze" at the structures. Responding to this observation, Hoss ordered a row of trees planted between Crematorias I and II. When visits from high officials from the Reich or the Nazi Party took place, the administration was instructed by Glucks to avoid showing the crematorias to them; if questions arose about smoke coming from the chimneys, the installation personnel were to tell the visitors that corpses were being burned as a result of epidemics.  In 1942, the CCI became "Amt D" of the Wirtschafts- und Verwaltungshauptamt (SS Economic and Administrative Department; WVHA) under SS-Obergruppenfuhrer Oswald Pohl. Glucks continued to manage the camp administration until the end of the war. Therefore, the entire concentration camp system was placed under the authority of the WVHA with the Inspector of Concentration Camps now a subordinate to the Chief of the WVHA.  According to historian Leni Yahil, Glucks was "the RSHA man responsible for the entire network of concentration camps" and his authority extended to the largest and most infamous of them all, Auschwitz. From what historian Martin Broszat relates, nearly all the important matters concerning the concentration camps were "decided directly between the Inspector of Concentration Camps and the Reichsfuhrer-SS." In January 1945, Glucks was decorated for his contributions to the Reich in managing the fifteen largest camps and the five-hundred satellite camps which employed upwards of 40,000 members of the SS. Glucks' role in the Holocaust "cannot be over-emphasized" as he, together with Pohl, oversaw the entire Nazi camp system and the persecution network it represented.

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