Josef Blosche
Josef Blösche (born February 5, 1912 in Friedland in Bohemia , Austria-Hungary , † July 29, 1969 in Leipzig ) was involved in the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto and the fight against the Warsaw Uprising as an SS Rottenführer . He became world famous as a synonym for the cruelty of the SS through the famous photo of the boy from the Warsaw Ghetto , which shows how he points his submachine gun at a boy in a cloth cap.
Life
origin
Blosche's parents owned a small brick factory and an inn with a beer garden. After the First World War , the family belonged to the Sudeten German minority in Czechoslovakia . From 1926, Blösche completed training as a waiter in Reichenberg . In 1935 he joined the Sudeten German Party , where he acted as a steward, hall guard and delivery man, and in 1938 he received the "Sudeten German Medal" for his efforts. Blösche also took part in the “ Voluntary German Protection Service ” of the Sudeten German Party and made a name for himself as a thug. In 1936 he was arrested for 48 hours because of a brawl.
Border Police School of the SS and Einsatzkommandos
In 1938, after the occupation of Czechoslovakia , the members of the Sudeten German Party were taken over into the NSDAP (membership number 6.547.348). Blosche was also accepted into the SS Security Service (SD), where he received ideological training. From December 1939 he attended the border police school of the SS and the Gestapo in Pretzsch . This is where the operational troops who moved up behind the Wehrmacht in the Eastern campaign were trained.
In March 1940, Blösche was transferred to Warsaw , where he was initially occupied with transporting furniture to a branch of the SD main office. In the summer of 1940 he was transferred to Platerów , 120 kilometers east of Warsaw near the Soviet border. His service there consisted mainly of patrols between Platerów and the border river Bug . He was transferred to the Siedlce border police station in May 1941. After the attack on the Soviet Union in July 1941, he was called back to Warsaw because the previous border no longer existed.
From August 1941, Blösche was a member of a task force that carried out shootings behind the front in smaller towns in the occupied part of the Soviet Union. In October 1941 he returned to Warsaw, where he was subordinate to the commander of the security police and the security service for the Warsaw district, Ludwig Hahn , and was an employee of Department IV of the Gestapo. Blösche's task was to arrest suspicious people in the city and to arrange their transport from the prison for questioning by the Gestapo. But he was also entrusted with interpreting and running errands.
SD man in the Warsaw ghetto
In the summer of 1942, Blösche was transferred to the SD branch in the Warsaw ghetto . It was there that the first major deportations to Treblinka began at that time . Deportation measures were monitored in the branch office and the number of deportees was recorded. Between July 22 and September 30, 1942, at least 225,000 people were evacuated. Blosche and other SD men also carried out random shootings and were soon feared as shooters. Her tasks also included searching buildings that had already been vacated for people hidden or left behind and liquidating them. Blosche developed into a specialist in tracking down hiding places, cavities and secret passages.
In the Warsaw Ghetto, Blosche was nicknamed " Frankenstein " and "Fleischer" by the Jews . This is due to his sadistic urges - Blosche was often involved in rape of Jewish women and notorious for shooting the victims after the rape.
Blosche was also involved in the second wave of deportations in January 1943. He brutally cleared entire streets, combed the abandoned buildings and carried out arbitrary executions. Due to the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto , however, the deportations were temporarily suspended after a few days. When the resistance was to be broken and the ghetto dissolved on the orders of Jürgen Stroop in April 1943 , the newly arrived SS and Schutzpolizei units resorted to the experienced SD men around Blosche, who tracked down people who were still hidden in the buildings that had already been vacated, and mostly shot immediately. Blosche also took part in mass executions . Of the approximately 600 victims of the massacre in the ghetto on April 19, 1943, he is said to have shot 75 himself. More mass executions followed in the following days.
In May 1943 a picture report, the Stroop Report , was created for Heinrich Himmler on the progress made in liquidating the ghetto. The best-known photo of the report was supposed to be a photo showing surrendering women and children who were driven to the transshipment point of the ghetto by Blosche - in SD uniform and with a submachine gun at the ready . The photo later became evidence in the Nuremberg trials and became synonymous with the cruelty of the SS.
At the end of May 1943 the ghetto was completely "liquidated" and Blösche was ordered back to the main office, for which he again ran errands and provided personal protection for Gestapo officers. In September 1943 he was shot by a Pole in front of the main post office in Warsaw, whereupon he was given home leave in Friedland. After his return to Warsaw, Blösche was transferred to the Gestapo registry , where he worked together with Susanne Held, to whom he had been engaged for some time. They had to manage the personal files of the prisoners deported from Warsaw's Pawiak prison to Auschwitz or Treblinka in the registry . On the weekends, however, Blösche continued to take part in the Gestapo's arrest tasks in the city.
When the Warsaw Uprising broke out on August 1, 1944, Blosche and other employees were attacked in the registry and locked up. The Wehrmacht was able to free the trapped after days of fighting. Blosche was transferred to the western outskirts of Warsaw, where there was no fighting and where he was assigned to patrol. In September 1944 he was transferred to Skierniewice and from there assigned to fight the Slovak National Uprising , which, however, had already been crushed when the task force arrived. He moved into winter quarters in Levoča . From there, partisan fighting took place in the surrounding forests and mountains. In April 1945 he was transferred to Žilina near the Polish border. From there, Blösche fled from the approaching Red Army , first in uniform, later in civilian clothes, but was captured near Mährisch-Ostrau in early May 1945 .
post war period
As a prisoner of war , Blösche's path led first to Vienna on foot , then by train to the Soviet transit camp Máramarossziget in Hungary in June 1945 , then to Moscow , from there to Dnepropetrovsk and finally to Kirowabad in Azerbaijan , where the prisoners were used in road construction and mining were. In the spring of 1946, Blösche was taken to Pilsen , where he was called in to clean up the Škoda factories. From July 1946 he was a conveyor man in a coal mine in Vítkovice .
On August 6, 1946, his face was disfigured beyond recognition in a serious accident at work when a cage grabbed his head. The nose, mouth and chin were completely disfigured. He remained unable to work until June 1947 and was then released informally from captivity. He remained employed for a few weeks as a civilian worker in the pit of the prisoner-of-war camp, which had now been closed, but in autumn 1947 set out for Urbach in Thuringia , from where news of his family had reached him.
From January 20, 1948 Blösche was VEB potash Volkenroda in the treatment employed and became fast foreman. In 1957 he completed a master's course in mining engineering at the “Karl Liebknecht” potash plant in Bleicherode . Due to manipulation of a weighing device in the spring of 1961, Blösche was demoted to the position of auxiliary fitter for half a year. From autumn 1961 he was given a more responsible job in the mine again, but no longer the master's title. His wife Hanna, whom he met in 1947 and with whom he had two children, ran the local consumer- friendly restaurant in Urbach from 1961 to 1965 . In addition to his work in the restaurant, Blosche helped out and was also employed as a harvest worker.
Josef Blösche's parents and two sisters also lived in and around Urbach; the restaurant was the central meeting point for the residents. Blosche was completely socially integrated; very few knew about his past life. However, investigations against Blosche had already started in the mid-1960s at the Hamburg public prosecutor's office and the GDR's Ministry for State Security . This was preceded by a complaint against Ludwig Hahn at the Hamburg public prosecutor's office in 1960. During the subsequent investigations, Blösche was seriously incriminated by his former SS comrade Heinrich Klaustermeyer in 1961 and clearly identified at the Hamburg Regional Court in February 1962 . In May 1965, the Hamburg District Court issued an arrest warrant for Blösche. In April 1966 the case was handed over to the Public Prosecutor General of the GDR, which passed on the request for legal assistance from Hamburg to Department IX of State Security, which was responsible for investigating war crimes .
Arrest and trial
On January 11, 1967, Blösche was arrested and imprisoned in the central remand prison of the MfS in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen . During the two-year pre-trial detention, Blösche confessed to numerous war crimes, from individual shootings and mass executions to participation in all major deportation operations from the Warsaw ghetto. He testified his identity on the aforementioned photo from May 1943. From March 1969 negotiated the District Court of Erfurt against him and sentenced for their involvement in the deportation of at least 300,000 people to death . The sentence was carried out by a shot in the neck in the central execution site of the GDR in the Leipzig prison on Alfred-Kästner-Strasse . The body was taken to the nearby Südfriedhof in secrecy and cremated anonymously.
From 2000, Heribert Schwan researched the story of the soldier in the well-known photo together with Helgard Heindrichs and produced a comprehensive report that WDR broadcast in 2003.
literature
- Joe J. Heydecker : The Warsaw Ghetto - photo documents of a German soldier from 1941. dtv, ISBN 3-423-30724-2 .
- Richard Raskin: A Child at Gunpoint. Aarhus University Press, 2004. (The book names four possible identities for the little boy, but only JB's for the SS man)
- Heribert Schwan , Helgard Heindrichs: The SS man. Life and death of a murderer. Knaur 2003. ISBN 3-426-77827-0 .
- Josef Wulf : The Third Reich and its executors. Munich 1978, ISBN 3-598-04603-0 .
- Joachim Jahns: The Warsaw Ghetto King. Dingsda-Verlag Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-928498-99-9 .
- Andreas Mix: The ghetto in court. Two criminal trials against criminal offenders from the Warsaw ghetto before West German and GDR courts in comparison. In: Stephan Alexander Glienke, Volker Paulmann and Joachim Perels (eds.): Success story Federal Republic? Post-war society in the long shadow of National Socialism. Wallstein Verlag Göttingen 2008, ISBN 978-3-8353-0249-5 , pp. 319-345.
- Sascha Münzel: Josef Blösche criminal case. The "executioner of the Warsaw Ghetto" before the Erfurt District Court in 1969. In: Messages from the Association for the History and Antiquity of Erfurt. Vol. 70 = NF 17, 2009, pp. 23-30.
- Christiaan F. Rüter / Dick W. de Mildt (ed.): GDR justice and Nazi crimes. Collection of (East) German criminal judgments for Nazi homicidal crimes, Volume 2, The Trials No. 1031-1061 from 1965-1974 . Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univ. Press, 2002, ISBN 978-3-598-24612-8 pp. 397-411
Web links
- Literature by and about Josef Blösche in the catalog of the German National Library
- Photo analysis at www.deathcamps.org
Individual evidence
- ↑ Cezary Gmyz: Seksualne niewolnice III Rzeszy ; Wprost Magazin, Issue No. 17, 2007 (Polish)
- ↑ Josef Blösche (1912–1969). In: Jewish Virtual Library. Accessed August 4, 2019 .
- ↑ Heribert Schwan : The SS man. Josef Blösche - Life and Death of a Murderer. (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on March 9, 2015 ; accessed on August 4, 2019 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Blouse, Josef |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German SS-Unterscharführer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 5, 1912 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Friedland |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 29, 1969 |
| Place of death | Leipzig |