...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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Josef Blösche, who became known as “Frankenstein” and the “ Butcher” was not only a sadist but also a sexual deviant.
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 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.”
In April 1969 he was put on a trial. Numerous witnesses called Blösche a sadist and recalled the crimes he had committed in Warsaw.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Josef Blösche, who became known as “Frankenstein” and the “ Butcher” was not only a sadist but also a sexual deviant.
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 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.”
In April 1969 he was put on a trial. Numerous witnesses called Blösche a sadist and recalled the crimes he had committed in Warsaw.
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.
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LearningTranscript
00:00September, 1938, Czechoslovakia.
00:10Adolf Hitler, the Chancellor of Germany, threatens to unleash a European war unless the Sudetenland,
00:16a border area of Czechoslovakia on which the ethnic German population lives, is ceded to
00:21Germany.
00:22The leaders of Britain, France, Italy and Germany hold a conference in Munich between
00:27the 29th and 30th of September, 1938, and agree to the German annexation of the Sudetenland
00:33in exchange for a pledge of peace from Hitler.
00:36Many Sudeten Germans welcome the Nazis with swastika banners, flags and flowers thrown
00:41onto the road.
00:43One of them, who would later commit unspeakable atrocities in Nazi-occupied Poland and Belarus,
00:48becoming one of the most infamous perpetrators of the criminal Nazi regime, is Josef Blerscher.
00:54Josef Blerscher was born on the 12th of February, 1912, in Friedland in Bormann, then part of
01:00Austria-Hungary.
01:02Blerscher was six years old when in October 1918, the Czechoslovak National Council in
01:07Prague proclaimed the independence of Czechoslovakia.
01:1050% of the Czechoslovak population consisted of Czechs.
01:14Germans and Slovaks accounted for 22% and 16% respectively.
01:19Josef Blerscher was a Sudeten German, which was the name for ethnic Germans that lived
01:23in Czechoslovakia.
01:25His father, Gustav Blerscher, owned a farm in Country Inn, where Josef began to work
01:30while going to school.
01:31He was only 14 years old when his father pulled him out of school to work full-time.
01:36In 1933, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party came into power in Germany.
01:42One of the main objectives of the Nazi regime was to redraw the map of post-World War I
01:47Europe.
01:48The German Nazis considered the post-war international borders unfair and illegitimate.
01:53They claimed that the Germans had been denied the right of self-determination.
01:58Redrawing Europe's borders would allow the Nazis to achieve two main goals – unite
02:03all Germans in a Nazi German Empire and acquire Lebensraum, meaning living space, in Eastern
02:09Europe.
02:10In 1935, Josef Blerscher joined the Sudeten German party, which was the major pro-Nazi
02:16force in Czechoslovakia, with the explicit official aim of breaking the country up and
02:21joining it to the Third Reich.
02:23In the night from the 29th to the 30th of September 1938, Germany, Italy, Great Britain
02:30and France signed the Munich Agreement, by which Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender
02:35the Sudetenland, its border regions and defences to Nazi Germany.
02:39German troops started to occupy these regions between the 1st and 10th of October 1938.
02:46On the 13th of January 1939, Blerscher applied for admission to the Nazi party and was admitted
02:52retrospectively to the 1st of November 1938.
02:56Soon after, he joined the SS.
02:59On the 15th of March 1939, less than six months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi
03:05Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia and one day later,
03:11Adolf Hitler, by a proclamation from Prague Castle, established the Protectorate of Bohemia
03:16and Moravia, which by contrast to the Sudetenland, consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs.
03:22The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland.
03:28Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment and German troops entered the
03:33capital on the 29th of September shortly after its surrender.
03:37The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year, with Germany and the
03:42Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country.
03:46On the 23rd of November 1939, German civilian occupation authorities required Warsaw's Jews
03:52to identify themselves by wearing white armbands with a blue Star of David.
03:57The German authorities closed Jewish schools, confiscated Jewish-owned properties and conscripted
04:02Jewish men into forced labor and dissolved pre-war Jewish organizations.
04:07Bloscher briefly served in Warsaw beginning in March 1940 and was then deployed 120 kilometers
04:12east of the capital, patrolling six miles of the Bug River, which was the dividing line
04:17between the German Wehrmacht and the Soviet Red Army zones.
04:21This border no longer existed from Sunday the 22nd of June 1941, when Operation Barbarossa,
04:27the German invasion of the Soviet Union, started.
04:30The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Eastern Front to kill the
04:35Jews and Gypsies, as well as the Soviet political commissars.
04:39From August 1941, Bloscher served with the Einsatzkommando 8, which was assigned to the
04:44Einsatzgruppe B, responsible for mass shootings in Belarus.
04:48Einsatzkommando 8 consisted of six subdivisions varying in strength, each under an SS leader.
04:55The unit's total strength was about 60 to 80 men and was responsible for killing
04:59over 74,000 people.
05:02In October 1941, Bloscher returned to Warsaw, where he became an employee of the Gestapo.
05:08Bloscher's job was to arrest suspects in the city and organize their transport from
05:12the prison to the Gestapo for interrogation.
05:15In addition, he was also entrusted with interpreting tasks and running errands.
05:19In mid-1942, Josef Bloscher was again transferred, this time to the Warsaw Ghetto.
05:26German authorities had decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw on the 12th of October
05:301940.
05:32The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which
05:37German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940.
05:41The ghetto, which became the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe
05:46during World War II, was enclosed by a wall that was over ten feet high, topped with barbed
05:51wire and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
05:56The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns,
06:00was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews.
06:04German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles with
06:09an average of 7.2 persons per room.
06:12Home overcrowding, minimal rations and unsanitary conditions led to disease, starvation and
06:18the death of thousands of Jews each month.
06:21An average daily food ration in 1941 for Jews in Warsaw was limited to 184 calories, compared
06:28to the 2,613 calories for the Germans.
06:32An official German order stated that the basic provisioning of the Jewish residential district
06:37must be less than the minimum necessary for preserving life, regardless of the consequences.
06:42The hunger in the ghetto was so great that dying people were laying on the streets and
06:47small children were seen begging.
06:50Between 1940 and mid-1942, 83,000 Jews died of starvation and disease.
06:57Widespread smuggling of food and medicines into the ghetto supplemented the miserable
07:01official allotments and kept the death rate from increasing still further.
07:05On the 22nd of July, when Josef Blerscher was transferred to the ghetto, until the 12th
07:10of September 1942, German SS and police units, assisted by auxiliaries, carried out mass
07:16deportations from the Warsaw ghetto to the Treblinka Killing Centre.
07:20During this period, Blerscher and other SD men hunted down many Jews who were hiding
07:25from deportations.
07:27His tasks also included searching buildings that had already been cleared for people who
07:31were hidden or left behind and then murdering these people.
07:36Blerscher became a specialist in finding hiding places, cavities and secret passages and was
07:41known as a sadist and cold-blooded killer.
07:45Josef Blerscher and his colleagues always found an excuse to kill people.
07:49Sometimes the starved Jews did not take off their hats or they did not get off the sidewalk.
07:54When he could not find victims in the street, he would force open doors and break into houses,
07:59killing anybody he found inside.
08:02In the ghetto, there was a wall, which children carrying contraband goods such as potatoes
08:06used to climb.
08:08Because the holes in the wall were very narrow, it was difficult to squeeze through and when
08:12some of the children got stuck, Blerscher shot them without hesitation.
08:16With his SS comrade Heinrich Claustermeyer, Blerscher would ride a bicycle into the ghetto
08:21and beat and shoot men, women and children at random, just to terrorize them.
08:26Anna Kopchak, who survived the war, later recalled her encounter with the SS man.
08:31All of a sudden people started running.
08:34It was Blerscher on his bicycle.
08:36I was walking slowly and when I saw him I stopped.
08:39I was terrified.
08:41Blerscher looked at me as he was passing by on his bicycle and then he opened fire on
08:45those trying to flee, killing several people.
08:48I was scared to death.
08:51More survivors later testified how after bloody street patrols by Blerscher, they saw people
08:55lying and bleeding on the streets of the ghetto.
08:58Josef Blerscher, who became known as Frankenstein and the Butcher, was not only a sadist but
09:03also a sexual deviant.
09:05He would frequently go into the ghetto, brutally rape the Jewish women and then murder them.
09:11His favorite targets were children and pregnant women.
09:15On one occasion, he shot a three-month-old child lying in the cradle, in the head.
09:20On another, he killed a pregnant woman.
09:23Next he told a Jewish man to run, but to drop his pants first, which meant that he
09:28could not run.
09:29Blerscher then told him, I see that Jews cannot run, I will show you how to run.
09:35Then he shot the man on the spot.
09:37On another occasion, there was a 13-year-old boy whom Blerscher told he would let live
09:42if he told him where the other Jews were hiding.
09:45But after he did, Blerscher killed the boy as well.
09:48From the 22nd of July until the 12th of September 1942, the Germans deported about 265,000 Jews
09:56from Warsaw to Treblinka and they killed approximately 35,000 Jews inside the ghetto during the operation.
10:03In January 1943, SS and police units returned to Warsaw, this time with the intent of deporting
10:09thousands of the remaining approximately 70,000 to 80,000 Jews in the ghetto to forced labor
10:15camps for Jews in Lublin district.
10:18This time however, many of the Jews, understandably believing that the SS and police would deport
10:23them to the Treblinka killing center, resisted deportation, some of them using small arms
10:29which had been smuggled into the ghetto.
10:31After seizing approximately 5,000 Jews, the SS and police units halted the operation and
10:36withdrew.
10:37On the 19th of April 1943, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising began after the German troops and
10:43police entered the ghetto to deport its surviving inhabitants to the forced labor camps in Lublin
10:48district.
10:49According to his own statements, Josef Blerscher shot 75 of approximately 600 victims of the
10:55massacre in the ghetto on the 19th of April 1943, the same day the uprising began.
11:01The mass executions continued in the days that followed.
11:05The ghetto inhabitants offered organized resistance in the first days of the operation, inflicting
11:10casualties on the well-armed and well-equipped SS and police units.
11:14They continued to resist the deportation as individuals or in small groups for four weeks.
11:20It was the largest uprising by the Jews during World War II and the first significant urban
11:24revolt against the German occupation in Europe.
11:27In the end however, the Germans razed the ghetto to the ground.
11:31They burned and demolished this part of Warsaw block by block in order to smoke out their
11:36prey.
11:37The Germans ended the operation on the 16th of May, when Jürgen Strupp, who led the suppression
11:42of the uprising, announced in his daily report to Berlin that the former Jewish quarter in
11:47Warsaw is no more.
11:50The SS and police deported approximately 42,000 Warsaw Ghetto survivors captured during the
11:55uprising to the forced labor camps at Poniatowa and Trawniki and to the Majdanek concentration
12:01camp.
12:02At least 7,000 Jews died fighting or in hiding in the ghetto as they were burnt alive or
12:07died from smoke inhalation.
12:09The SS and police sent another 7,000 to the Drablinka killing center.
12:13For his actions during the uprising, Bleszar received the German War Merit Cross.
12:18The photograph in which Josef Bleszar aims his gun at a terrified little boy with his
12:23hands raised has become one of the most iconic photographs of the Holocaust.
12:27Josef Bleszar was still serving in the Gestapo office in Warsaw when the Warsaw Uprising
12:32began on the 1st of August 1944.
12:35He was surrounded and cut off by Polish resistance fighters until he was rescued by German army
12:40forces after several days of fierce fighting.
12:43The Polish Home Army, a non-communist underground resistance army with units stationed throughout
12:48German-occupied Poland, rose against the German occupational authorities in an effort to liberate
12:52Warsaw.
12:54The impetus for the uprising was the appearance of the Soviet forces along the east bank of
12:58the Vistula River.
12:59The Soviets, however, failed to intervene and the Germans eventually crushed the revolt
13:04and razed the center of the city to the ground in October 1944.
13:08Though they treated the captured Home Army combatants as prisoners of war, the Germans
13:12sent thousands of captured Polish civilians to concentration camps in the Reich.
13:16166,000 people lost their lives in the uprising, including perhaps as many as 17,000 Polish
13:22Jews who had either fought with the Polish Home Army or had been discovered in hiding.
13:28After Bleszar left Warsaw, he was sent to Slovakia to suppress the Slovak National Uprising,
13:33but by the time he arrived the uprising had been put down.
13:36He then served in Slovak cities in Lvovce and Žilina, before in May 1945, he surrendered
13:42to the Red Army and became a prisoner of war of the Soviet Union.
13:47He was forced to perform hard labor, with officials having him work in quarries and
13:50building roads.
13:52In early 1946, Bleszar was repatriated to the Ostrava region in Czechoslovakia, still
13:58as an internee.
14:00While working at a coal mine in August 1946, he was struck by a descending hoist and suffered
14:05a fractured skull and serious facial injuries.
14:09He was hospitalized in Ostrava and left with a disfigured face.
14:13In the summer of 1947, Bleszar's labor camp was dissolved and he was set free.
14:18His facial scars protected him from discovery, as no one recognized him as one of the SS
14:23troops that were pictured in the official photos taken by the Germans of the Warsaw
14:26Ghetto.
14:27He moved to Urbach in East Germany, met a German woman named Hanna Schönstedt, a mother
14:32and war widow, and they had two children together before she agreed to marry him.
14:37They were living a normal life and Schönstedt would later say that Bleszar was a very loving
14:42husband and father who constantly worried about every ailment of their children.
14:46Having a family and regular job, Bleszar was completely socially integrated and very few
14:51people knew about his past life.
14:53However, he did not escape justice.
14:56In February 1961, Heinrich Claustermeyer, who served with Bleszar in Warsaw, implicated
15:02him in the atrocities they had committed there during the war.
15:05Bleszar was identified and West Germany requested his extradition, which was denied.
15:11Instead, on the 11th of January 1967, Bleszar was arrested by the Stasi, the secret police
15:17of East Germany, and detained in Hohenschönhausen prison in East Berlin.
15:22During his two years in custody, he confessed to numerous war crimes, from individual shootings
15:27to mass executions and participation in all major deportation operations from the Warsaw
15:32Ghetto.
15:34In April 1969, he was put on trial.
15:38Numerous witnesses called Bleszar a sadist and recalled the crimes he had committed in
15:42Warsaw.
15:43One of them recalled how on the 18th of January 1943, when the Nazis were liquidating the
15:48Jewish hospital in the Warsaw Ghetto, Bleszar was the commanding officer of the squad.
15:53He went through all the floors in all the wards, killing bedridden patients.
15:57He killed infants and newborns as well.
16:00Bleszar did not deny the accusations and openly admitted his guilt.
16:04He said that he did not remember everything, but that the general accusations were true.
16:09During the trial, the judge asked Bleszar about the events depicted in the infamous
16:13photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy.
16:16The judge asked him, you were with a submachine gun against a small boy that you extracted
16:21from a building with his hands raised.
16:23How did those inhabitants react in those moments?
16:27Bleszar responded, they were in tremendous dread.
16:30The judge then asked him, this reflects well in that little boy, what did you think?
16:35To which Bleszar responded, we witness scenes like these daily, we could not even think.
16:41On the 29th of July, 1969, Josef Bleszar was found guilty of the murder of over 2,000
16:47Jews and the deportation of 300,000 Jews to the extermination camps and sentenced to death.
16:55Bleszar was executed in Leipzig the same day by a single shot to the back of his neck.
16:59He was 57 years old.
17:02Afterward, his body was secretly taken to the nearby South Cemetery, cremated, and his
17:06ashes were buried in an unmarked grave.
17:10There were no tears shed for Josef Bleszar.