September 1938, Czechoslovakia. Adolf Hitler, the chancellor of Germany,
threatens to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland, a border area of Czechoslovakia on
which the ethnic German population lives, is ceded to Germany. The leaders of Britain, France, Italy,
and Germany hold a conference in Munich between the 29th and 30th of September 1938 and agree
to the German annexation of the Sudetenland in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler. Many
Sudeten Germans welcome the Nazis with Swastika banners, flags and flowers thrown onto the road.
One of them who would later commit unspeakable atrocities in Nazi Occupied Poland and Belarus
becoming one of the most infamous perpetrators of the criminal Nazi Regime is Josef Blösche.
Josef Blösche was born on the 12th of February 1912 in
Friedland in Böhmen then part of Austria-Hungary.
Blösche was 6 years old when in October 1918 the Czechoslovak National Council in Prague
proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia. 50 percent of the Czechoslovak population consisted
of Czechs. Germans and Slovaks accounted for 22 and 16 percent respectively. Josef Blösche
was a Sudeten German which was a name for ethnic Germans that lived in Czechoslovakia. His father
Gustav Blösche owned a farm and a country inn where Josef began to work while going to school.
He was only 14 years old, when his father pulled him out of school to work full time.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in Germany.
One of the main objectives of the Nazi regime was to redraw the map of post-World
War I Europe. Hitler and the Nazis considered the postwar international borders unfair and
illegitimate. They claimed that Germans had been denied the right of self-determination.
Redrawing Europe’s borders would allow the Nazis to achieve two main goals: unite all Germans in a
Nazi German Empire; and acquire Lebensraum meaning “living space” in eastern Europe.
In 1935, Josef Blösche joined the Sudeten German Party which was a major pro-Nazi
force in Czechoslovakia with the explicit official aim of breaking
the country up and joining it to the Third Reich.
In the night from the 29th to the 30th of September 1938, Germany,
Italy, Great Britain, and France signed the Munich agreement, by which Czechoslovakia was
forced to surrender Sudeteland, its border regions and defenses, to Nazi Germany.
German troops started to occupy these regions between the 1st and 10th of October 1938.
On the 13th of January 1939 Blösche applied for admission to the Nazi party
and was admitted retrospectively to the 1st of November 1938. Soon after he joined the SS.
On the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months after the annexation of the Sudetenland,
Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia and one day
later Adolf Hitler, by a proclamation from Prague Castle, established the Protectorate
of Bohemia and Moravia which by contrast to the Sudetenland, consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs.
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.
Blösche briefly served in Warsaw beginning in March 1940 and was
then deployed 120 kilometers east of the capital patrolling 6 miles of the
Bug River which was the dividing line between German Wehrmacht and Soviet Red Army zones.
This border no longer existed from Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 when Operation Barbarossa,
the German invasion of the Soviet Union, started. The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were
sent to the Eastern Front to kill the Jews and Gypsies,
as well as Soviet political commissars. From August 1941 Blösche served with Einsatzkommando
8 which was assigned to the Einsatzgruppe B responsible for mass shootings in Belarus.
Einsatzkommando 8 consisted of six subdivisions varying in strength, each under an SS leader. The
unit's total strength was about 60 to 80 men and was responsible for killing over 74,000 people.
In October 1941 Blösche returned to Warsaw,
where he became an employee of the Gestapo. Blösche 's job was to arrest suspects in the
city and organize their transport from the prison to the Gestapo for interrogation.
In addition, he was also entrusted with interpreting tasks and running errands.
In mid-1942, Joseph Blösche was again transferred, this time to 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. 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.
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 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. Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and
disease. Widespread smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto supplemented the
miserable official allotments and kept the death rate from increasing still further.
From the 22nd of July when Joseph Blösche was transferred to the ghetto,
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.
During this period, Blösche and other SD men hunted down many Jews who were hiding
from deportations. His tasks also included searching buildings that had already been
cleared for people who were hidden or left behind and then murdering these
people. Blösche became a specialist in finding hiding places, cavities and secret passages and
was known as a sadist and cold-blooded killer. Josef Blösche and his colleagues always found
an excuse to kill people. Sometimes the starved Jews did not take off their hats
or they did not get off the sidewalk. When he could not find victims in the street,
he would force open doors and break into houses, killing anybody he found inside.
In the ghetto, there was a wall, which children carrying contraband goods, such as potatoes,
used to climb. Because the holes in the wall were very narrow, it was difficult
to squeeze through and when some of the children got stuck, Blösche shot them without hesitation.
With his SS comrade Heinrich Klaustermeyer, Blösche would ride a bicycle into the ghetto
and beat and shoot men, women and children at random, just to terrorize them. Anna Kacprzak,
who survived the war later recalled her encounter with the SS-man: “All of a sudden people started
running. It was Blösche on his bicycle. I was walking slowly and when I saw him,
I stopped, I was terrified. Blösche looked at me as he was passing by on his bicycle
and then he opened fire on those trying to flee, killing several people. I was scared
to death. “ More survivors later testified how after bloody street patrols by Blösche,
they saw people lying and bleeding on the streets of the ghetto.
Josef Blösche, who became known as “Frankenstein” and the “ Butcher” was not only a sadist but also
a sexual deviant. He would frequently go into the ghetto, brutally rape the
Jewish women, and then murder them. His favorite targets were children
and pregnant women. On one occasion, he shot a three-month-old child, lying in the cradle, in
the head. On another, he killed a pregnant woman. Once he told a Jewish man to run but to drop his
pants first which meant that he could not run. Blösche then told him “I see
that Jews cannot run. I will show you how to run“. Then he shot the man on the spot.
On another occasion there was a 13-year-old boy whom Blösche told he would let live if he
told him where the other Jews were hiding. But after he did, Blösche killed the boy as well.
From the 22nd of July until the 12th of September 1942 the Germans deported about 265,000
Jews from Warsaw to Treblinka and they killed approximately
35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation.
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 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. According to his own statements, Josef
Blösche shot 75 of approximately 600 victims of the massacre in the ghetto on the 19th of April
1943, the same day the uprising began. The mass executions continued in the days that followed.
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 captured during the uprising to the forced-labor
camps at Poniatowa and 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.
For his actions during the uprising, Blösche received the German War Merit Cross.
The photograph in which Josef Blösche aims his gun at the terrified little
boy with his hands raised has become one of the most iconic photographs of the Holocaust.
Joseph Blösche was still serving in the Gestapo office in Warsaw when the Warsaw Uprising began
on the 1st of August 1944. He was surrounded and cut-off by Polish resistance fighters,
until he was rescued by German army forces after several days of fierce fighting.
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 Blösche left Warsaw, he was sent to Slovakia to suppress Slovak National Uprising but by the
time he arrived the uprising had been put down. He then served in Slovak cities in Levoča and Žilina
before in May 1945, he surrendered to the Red Army and became a prisoner of war of the Soviet
Union. He was forced to perform hard labour, with officials having him work in quarries and building
roads. In early 1946, Blösche was repatriated to the Ostrava Region in Czechoslovakia,
still as an internee. While working at a coal mine in August 1946, he was struck by
a descending hoist and suffered a fractured skull and serious facial injuries. He was hospitalised
in Ostrava and left with disfigured face. In the summer of 1947, Blösche's labour camp was
dissolved and he was set free. His facial scars protected him from discovery as no one recognized
him as one of the SS troops that were pictured in the official photos taken by the Germans of the
Warsaw ghetto. He moved to Urbach in East Germany, met a German woman named Hanna Schönstedt,
a mother and war widow, and they had two children together before she agreed to marry him. They were
living a normal life and Schönstedt would later say that Blösche was a very loving husband and
father who constantly worried about every ailment of their children. Having a family and regular
job, Blösche was completely socially integrated, and very few people knew about his past life.
However, he did not escape justice. In February 1961, Heinrich Klaustermeyer,
who served with Blösche in Warsaw, implicated him in the atrocities they had committed there during
the war. Blösche was identified and West Germany requested his extradition which was denied.
Instead, on the 11th of January 1967 Blösche was arrested by the Stasi,
secret police of the East Germany and detained in Hohenschönhausen in East Berlin.
During his two years in custody, he confessed to numerous war crimes, from individual shootings to
mass executions and participation in all major deportation operations from the Warsaw Ghetto.
In April 1969 he was put on a trial. Numerous witnesses called Blösche a sadist and recalled
the crimes he had committed in Warsaw. One of them recalled how on the 18th of
January 1943 when the Nazis were liquidating the Jewish hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto,
Blösche was the commanding officer of the squad. He went through all the floors and
all the wards, killing bedridden patients. He killed infants and newborns as well.
Blösche did not deny the accusations and openly admitted his guilt. He said
that he did not remember everything, but that the general accusations were true.
During the trial, the Judge asked Blösche about the events depicted
in the infamous photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy. The judge asked him:
"You were with a submachine gun against a small boy that you extracted from a
building with his hands raised. How did those inhabitants react in those moments?"
Blösche responded: "They were in tremendous dread."
The judge then asked him: "This reflects well in that little boy. What did you think?" to
which Blösche responded: "We witnessed scenes like these daily. We could not even think."
On the 29th of July 1969 Josef Blösche was found guilty of the murder of over 2,000 Jews and the
deportation of 300,000 Jews to the extermination camps and sentenced to death. Blösche was executed
in Leipzig the same day by a single shot to the back of his neck. He was 57 years old.
Afterward, his body was secretly taken to the nearby South Cemetery,
cremated and his ashes were buried in an unmarked grave.
There were no tears shed for Josef Blösche.
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