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. They divide Poland into thirds,
the western third annexed to Germany, the eastern third annexed to
the Soviet Union, and the middle third turned into a semi-independent administrative unit, called the
General Government, which is run by German authorities and divided into four districts,
one of them being the Warsaw district. Its governor becomes Ludwig Fischer.
Ludwig Fischer, a son of Catholic parents, was born on the 16th of April 1905 in Kaiserslautern,
then part of the German Empire. After attending elementary school and high school in his hometown,
Fischer studied law and political science at several German Universities.
In May 1926, while he was still a student,
he joined the Nazi Party. 3 years later in 1929 he received the doctorate from
the University of Erlangen. The title of his dissertation was: The Failure to Report a Crime.
The same year he joined the SA, which was a paramilitary organization associated with the
Nazi Party, also known as the Storm Troopers and the Brownshirts, for the color of their uniform.
From 1928 to 1932 Ludwig Fischer, fluent in English and French,
gained court practice in Kaiserslautern and worked as a lawyer in Munich.
After Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party came into power in January 1933,
Ludwig Fischer joined the newly founded "Academy for German Law" in Munich. Its
president became Hans Frank and the chairman of its Criminal Law Committee became Roland Freisler,
a fanatical Nazi Judge who would later become a president of notorious People’s Court infamous
for its show trials which condemned thousands of Germans to death, often on the barest evidence.
The Academy for German Law was charged with promoting reform of German legal
life by working in liaison with legislative bodies to implement
the National Socialist program in the fields of law and economics.
At Academy, Fischer held a position as chief service officer.
In 1937 he was elected as a member of the Reichstag – parliament of Nazi Germany.
The second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
To justify the action, Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic
Germans who were living in Poland. They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning,
with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany. After the SS, in
collusion with the German military, staged a phony attack on a German radio station, the Germans
accused the Poles. Hitler then used the action to launch a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland.
Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment and German
troops entered the capital on 29th of September shortly after its surrender.
After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppressed the Poles whom they
considered to be racially inferior and, in the weeks, following the German attack on Poland,
German SS, police, and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians,
including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.
Poland was split in three parts: the western third was annexed to the Third Reich;
the eastern third was occupied by the Soviet Union; and the central third was made into the
General Government, a semi-independent unit which the Nazis intended to use as a place to do all
their racial "dirty work." The General Government was to serve as an endless supply of slave labor,
and ultimately, as a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry.
The General Government was divided into four districts: Cracow, Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin,
with Cracow serving as the administrative center. On the 24th of October 1939 Ludwig
Fischer became the chief administrator and in April 1941 Governor of the Warsaw District.
These areas, which had a total population of 12 million, of which
1.5 million were Jews were further divided into sub-districts. After the Germans attacked the
Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they attached Eastern Galicia to the General Government,
making it the fifth district and adding between three and four million people to the population.
The head of the General Government was Hans Frank, who held the position of
governor-general. However, he was not free to govern as he pleased as the racial policies
carried out in the General Government were the responsibility of the SS and the police.
The Nazis treated the Poles of the General Government
in a terrible fashion. They viewed them as a cheap labor source, to be taken advantage of
at any occasion. Later, the Germans tried to deal with the Poles by distinguishing between those who
were of German origin and those who were deemed as “inferior”. The Germans tried to make sure
that the Poles would obey them by terrorizing the population. If the Polish underground
killed a German, 50—100 Poles were executed as a punishment and warning. The Poles were made to
turn over food to the Germans, and were forbidden to trade foodstuffs. Thus, those Poles living in
urban areas were limited to the pitiful food rations provided—a veritable starvation diet,
and were forced to smuggle food illegally just to stay alive. The Jews of the General Government
were subject to terribly harsh decrees. From the very beginning, the Germans confiscated their
property and made them perform forced labor. From late 1939, the Jews were put in ghettos,
where they were totally isolated from the outside world and severely restricted.
In his position as the governor of the Warsaw District, Ludwig Fischer oversaw the establishment
of 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 Fischer called for the death penalty for Jews who had left the
ghetto without permission. The ghetto, which became the largest of all the Jewish ghettos
in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, was encircled 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.
Ludwig Fischer oversaw the establishment of other ghettos in his district,
as well. He also organized terror actions against both Jews and Poles in the Warsaw
district and was responsible for mass executions, slave-labor pogroms and the
deportation of Poles and Polish Jews to the various German concentration camps.
During his stay in Poland, Ludwig Fischer, married with two daughters, lived in a
requisitioned villa in the posh Warsaw suburb of Konstancin. He maintained private contacts
with the Governor General Hans Frank and the wives of both men often traveled together to
the ghettos to take advantage of German terror to procure jewellery, furs and other valuables.
From the 10th of April to the end of May 1943,
Fischer was acting governor in the Lublin District.
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.”
Fischer was in his position responsible for brutal
suppression of this uprising and his name appeared first on the list of
"Operation Heads"—the serial assassinations of Nazi personnel by the Polish Resistance.
Those targeted for assassination had been sentenced to death by Polish Underground Special
Courts for crimes against Polish citizens during the World War II German occupation of Poland.
In January 1944 his car was shot at, but Fischer managed to escape.
The Warsaw Uprising began on the 1st of August 1944 when 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.
On the 9th of August, during the evacuation from the Brühl Palace, Fischer came under fire from
insurgence and was wounded. Among those killed was his deputy, Herbert Hummel. 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 uprising, Ludwig Fischer cooperated with the military
administration in destroying and plundering the city. He was also responsible for the
poor conditions in the temporary transit camp on the western outskirts of Warsaw in Pruszków,
which the Nazis set up to intern people expelled from the capital. Around 550,000
Warsaw residents and approximately 100,000 more from its outskirts were incarcerated
in the camp. The SS and Gestapo segregated the Poles, who were then either deported to forced
labour in Germany, sent to Nazi concentration camps, or expelled to more southern locations
of German-occupied Poland. Approximately 650,000 Poles passed through the Pruszków camp in August,
September and October 1944. Approximately 55,000 were sent to concentration camps,
including 13,500 to Auschwitz, 12,000 to Ravensbrück and 8,700 to Mauthausen.
In addition, the Germans murdered several Polish Catholic monks and nuns in the camp.
Fischer fled Warsaw on the 17th of January 1945 and went to Bad Neustadt an der Saale, where he
was arrested on 10th of May 1945 by members of the US Army. In March of the following year, he was
extradited to Poland and tried before the Polish Supreme National Tribunal. The trial began on the
17th of December 1946 and Fischer’s co-defendants were three other members of the Nazi authorities
of occupied Warsaw - Ludwig Leist – the mayor of the city of Warsaw, Josef Meisinger – commander
of Einsatzgruppe IV in Poland and Commander of the State Police in the Warsaw District
known as "The Butcher of Warsaw"; and Max Daume - Acting Commander of the Order Police in Warsaw
responsible for the massacre of Polish civilians in Wawer which took place on the 27th of December
1939. During this massacre, 107 of 114 people sentenced to death were killed. The rest managed
to survive by simulating their own death. On 3rd of March 1947, the Polish Supreme
National Tribunal found Ludwig Fischer guilty, deprived him of his civil rights
and sentenced him to death by hanging. He was 41 years old when he was executed on
the 8th of March 1947 in Mokotów Prison in Warsaw. Out of the 4 defendants who stood trial, the only
one who avoided a death sentence was Ludwig Leist. There were no tears shed for Ludwig Fischer.
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