Werner Best, German police officer and jurist (b. 1903)
Karl Rudolf Werner Best (10 July 1903 – 23 June 1989) was a German jurist, police chief, SS-Obergruppenführer, and 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 were responsible for mass killings.
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.