The 1st of September 1939. After a false accusation that the Poles attacked a German radio
station, Nazi Germany launches a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland triggering World War 2.
Poland finds itself fighting a two front war when it is invaded by the Soviet Union
from the east on the 17th of September. Warsaw officially surrenders to the Germans on the 28th
of September and one day later in accordance with the secret protocol to their non-aggression pact,
Germany and the Soviet Union partition Poland. In the fall of 1940, German authorities establish
a ghetto in Warsaw, Poland’s largest city with the largest Jewish population.
Almost 30 percent of Warsaw’s population are packed into 2.4 percent of the city's area.
German policy toward the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto is particularly brutal and ruthless.
Extreme overcrowding, minimal rations, and unsanitary conditions lead to disease,
starvation, and the death of thousands of Jews each month.
One of the main perpetrators of these atrocities is Heinrich Klaustermeyer.
Karl Heinrich Klaustermeyer, a son of a self-employed master painter,
was born on the 22nd of February 1914 in Bielefeld, then part of the German Empire.
On the 24th of October 1929 the stock market crash marked the beginning of the
Great Depression in the United States which soon spread across the globe.
Due to deteriorating economic conditions in Germany, Heinrich Klaustermeyer,
a trained car mechanic, became unemployed.
The Great Depression also played a role in the emergence of Adolf Hitler, the leader of
the Nazi Party, which Klaustermeyer joined in 1932. The same year he also joined the SA.
While the Great Depression and German economic conditions were not solely
responsible for bringing Hitler to power, they helped to create an environment in
which he gained support and on the 30th of January 1933 Adolf Hitler
was appointed chancellor of Germany by the German President Paul von Hindenburg.
Immediately after Hitler came to power, Germany became a dictatorship, and the
Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil and human rights of the Jews and established the
first concentration camps, imprisoning its political opponents, homosexuals,
Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”. Unlike prisons with which they are
often inaccurately compared today, concentration camps were independent of any judicial review.
The first such camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933, less than
2 months after Hitler became the chancellor. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its
European allies would establish more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites,
including ghettos. The perpetrators used these locations for forced labor,
detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and the mass murder of millions.
In the new Nazi Germany Heinrich Klaustermeyer, got a job as a messenger with the city of Bünde.
In 1935, he joined the Wehrmacht – the German Armed Forces - but was discharged
on health grounds 2 years later. He was then rehired as a caretaker in Bünde.
On the 9th – 10th of November 1938, the Nazi leaders unleashed a series of coordinated
violent riots against the Jews throughout Nazi Germany and recently incorporated territories.
The Nazi SA and German civilians not only ransacked 7,500 Jewish-owned businesses,
homes, and schools, but also destroyed hundreds of synagogues. 91 Jews were murdered and the
German SS and police sent almost 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps, primarily Dachau.
This event came to be called Kristallnacht or The Night of Broken Glass because of the
shattered glass that littered the streets afterwards, but the euphemism does not
convey the full brutality of the event. Immediately after the Kristallnacht,
Nazi officials claimed that the Jews themselves were to blame for the riots, and a fine of one
billion reichsmarks, about $400 million at 1938 rates, was imposed on the German Jewish community.
Kristallnacht was a turning point in the history of the Third Reich, marking the shift from
antisemitic rhetoric and legislation to the violent, aggressive anti-Jewish
measures that would culminate with the Holocaust. Heinrich Klaustermeyer, a well-known “Jew hater”,
played a leading role in the anti-Semitic riots in Bünde.
In August 1939 he was hired by the Gestapo in Bielefeld with the rank of Oberscharführer.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment and German
troops entered the capital on 29th of September shortly after its surrender.
The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with Germany and the Soviet Union
dividing and annexing the whole of the country. On the 23rd of November 1939, German civilian
occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews to identify themselves by wearing white armbands
with a blue Star of David. The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned
property, and conscripted Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved prewar Jewish organizations.
In November 1940, Klaustermeyer became an employee of the Gestapo in the Warsaw
District which was one of the first four Nazi districts of the General Governorate region
of German-occupied Poland during World War II, along with Lublin, Radom and Kraków Districts.
In the autumn of 1941, Klaustermeyer was assigned the task of monitoring Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto.
German authorities had decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw on the 12th of October 1940.
The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area,
which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940. In December
of the same year the Germans called for the death penalty for Jews who had left the ghetto
without permission. The same penalty awaited any person who knowingly gave shelter to such Jews.
The ghetto, which became the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe
during World War II, was enclosed by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire,
and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns,
was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. German authorities forced ghetto residents
to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room.
Proper hygiene was almost impossible, as many homes did not have running water.
Extreme overcrowding, minimal rations, and unsanitary conditions led to disease, starvation,
and the death of thousands of Jews each month. An average daily food ration in 1941 for Jews
in Warsaw was limited to 184 calories, compared to 2,613 calories for the Germans. An official
German order stated that “the basic provisioning of the Jewish Residential District must be less
than the minimum necessary for preserving life, regardless of the consequences.”
The hunger in the ghetto was so great, that dying people were laying on the
streets and small children were seen begging. Economic activity in the ghetto was minimal and
generally illegal. The most prevalent of such activity was the widespread smuggling of food
and medicines into the ghetto which supplemented the miserable official allotments and kept the
death rate from increasing still further. Those individuals who were active in these
illegal acts or who had other savings were generally able to survive longer in the ghetto.
Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.
When a resident from the Warsaw Ghetto passed away, their families would place the body in the
street and it would be picked up in the morning by a funeral cart that made its rounds every day.
Heinrich Klaustermeyer, known in the ghetto for his brutal and ruthless behavior towards Jews,
was corrupted and with the proceeds from his side businesses he was able
to afford a lavish life style and stay at the luxurious hotel.
With his SS comrade Josef Blösche, Klaustermeyer would ride a bicycle into the ghetto and beat
and shoot men, women and children at random, just to terrorize them. For their brutality,
the Jews in the ghetto gave Klaustermeyer and Blösche the nickname "Frankenstein".
In autumn 1941, Klaustermeyer shot the Jewish police officer in the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw.
In the summer of 1942, he captured six women on Kupiecka Street, made them stand against a
wall and then shot every second of them. On one occasion he fired into a Jewish
marching column on one of the Ghetto’s streets and killed one Jew in the process.
After the war one witness testified how on one autumn day in 1942, he had observed Klaustermeyer
shooting three randomly chosen Jews: two women and one man. None of them were older than 30.
Holocaust survivor Irena Rojek reported after the war how in the spring of 1942
she had seen how Klaustermeyer had snatched the child from a woman and threw it onto
the street. He then walked towards the child, pulled out his short gun,
aimed and shot the child. Then he turned to the child’s mother and shot her as well.
Another witness later testified how, while staying just a few meters away,
he had to watch Klaustermeyer shoot his mother, wife and three-month-old child.
In the ghetto, his mode of transportation was a three-wheeled rickshaw that resembled
a two-seater deck chair. Wherever he appeared, the Jews in the ghetto
fled because they were afraid of being shot. Between the fall of 1941 and February 1943,
he killed twenty Jews on this route between the commandant's office and the ghetto,
where he controlled Jewish Ghetto workers in German companies.
After the war, Klaustermeyer claimed that he and his colleagues liked going to the controls
in the Warsaw Ghetto because they usually got breakfast at the factories. However,
one Holocaust survivor later testified that Klaustermeyer together with his Nazi comrades
were unable to have breakfast before they had shot a few Jews.
Heinrich Klaustermeyer did not spare even his rickshaw driver. In August 1942,
he drew his pistol and shot him in the head without any reason.
From the 22nd of July until the 12th of September 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by
auxiliaries, carried out mass deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka killing center,
52 miles away from Warsaw. Rather than fill the daily quotas for deportation, Jewish council
leader Adam Czerniaków committed suicide on the 23rd of July by swallowing a cyanide pill.
The deportees were allowed to carry with them 15 kg of baggage, food for three days, money,
gold, and other valuables. During this period, the Germans deported about 265,000
Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka and they killed approximately
35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation. Heinrich Klaustermeyer served
as a local expert hunting down many Jews who were hiding from deportations during this time.
In January 1943, SS and police units returned to Warsaw, this time with the intent of
deporting thousands of the remaining approximately 70,000-80,000 Jews in the
ghetto to forced-labor camps for Jews in Lublin District. This time, however, many of the Jews,
understandably believing that the SS and police would deport them to the Treblinka killing center,
resisted deportation, some of them using small arms which had been smuggled into the ghetto.
After seizing approximately 5,000 Jews, the SS and police units halted the operation and withdrew.
On the 19th of April 1943, the Warsaw ghetto uprising began after the German
troops and police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants
to the forced labor camps in Lublin district.
The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance in the first days of the operation,
inflicting casualties on the well-armed and well-equipped SS and police units.
They continued to resist deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks.
It was the largest uprising by Jews during World War II and the first
significant urban revolt against the German occupation in Europe.
In the end however, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground. They burned
and demolished this part of Warsaw, block by block, in order to smoke out their prey.
The Germans ended the operation on the 16th of May when Jürgen Stroop,
who led the suppression of the uprising, announced in his daily report to Berlin that “The former
Jewish Quarter in Warsaw is no more.” The SS and police deported approximately
42,000 Warsaw ghetto survivors, who had been captured during the uprising,
to the forced-labor camps at Poniatowa, Trawniki and to the Majdanek concentration camp.
At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto as they were burnt alive or died
from smoke inhalation. The SS and police sent another 7,000 to the Treblinka killing center.
On the following year, Heinrich Klaustermeyer participated in the suppression of the Warsaw
Uprising which began on the 1st of August 1944. The Polish Home Army, a non-Communist underground
resistance army with units stationed throughout German-occupied Poland,
rose against the German occupation authorities in an effort to liberate Warsaw. The impetus for the
uprising was the appearance of Soviet forces along the east bank of the Vistula River. The Soviets
however failed to intervene, and the Germans eventually crushed the revolt and razed the
center of the city to the ground in October 1944. Though they treated captured Home Army combatants
as prisoners of war, the Germans sent thousands of captured Polish civilians to concentration camps
in the Reich. 166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as
17,000 Polish Jews who had either fought with the Polish Home Army or had been discovered in hiding.
After the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, Klaustermeyer left the city.
After Germany's surrender, Klaustermeyer was detained by British occupation forces and sent
to an internment camp. He was released in late 1947, only to be re-arrested for being a member
of the Gestapo. During his denazification trial, Klaustermeyer was incriminated in
his boycotting of Jews in the 1930s, but not for the murders he had committed in Warsaw.
He was quickly released, settled down in West Germany, got married and took a job as a driver.
However, he did not escape justice. In February 1961, Klaustermeyer was
exposed after his name was mentioned during the investigation of former Nazi official Ludwig Hahn
who as Klaustermeyer was directly involved in the destruction and liquidation of the Warsaw
Ghetto and the brutal suppression of both the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Warsaw Uprising.
Klaustermeyer was arrested and admitted to having been a member of the Gestapo in Warsaw from 1941
to 1944. During the investigation, Klaustermeyer implicated his Nazi Comrade Josef Blösche,
who was now living in East Germany, in the atrocities he had committed.
At the trial, Klaustermeyer claimed that although he had often had a reason to intervene against the
Jews in the ghetto, he had instead turned a blind eye to them. However, more than 80
witnesses who came to testify against him, had very different recollections of his conduct.
While Blösche was executed for his crimes in 1969, Heinrich Klaustermeyer,
charged with murdering 20 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto, escaped death sentence.
On 4 February 1965 Heinrich Klaustermeyer was found guilty of murdering 9 Jews in
the Warsaw Ghetto. He was sentenced to nine life terms, one for each murder. In addition,
he was sentenced to hard labor and ordered to permanently forfeit his civil rights.
The judge noted that the proven victims were killed entirely of his own volition
and his "sheer lust for murder." He said that Klaustermeyer, who maintained his innocence,
had hated Jews his entire life and showed no signs of remorse.
Dying from advanced cancer, he was released from prison on the 8th of April 1976.
Heinrich Klaustermeyer was 62 years old when he died 13 days later on the 21st of April.
There were no tears shed for Heinrich Klaustermeyer.
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