Josef Blösche

Josef Blösche (February 12, 1912 - July 29, 1969) was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) in Germany during World War II, and served their armed SS organisation in Warsaw as a Rottenführer.

He became known to the world as a symbol of the cruelty of the armed SS in the Warsaw ghetto, mostly through a famous photograph showing a surrendering little boy in the foreground, and Blösche as the armed SS man standing in the background.

World War II

Blösche spent his early life working as a farmhand and a waiter at his father's hotel, and joined the Nazi Party and the SS in 1938 after Adolf Hitler annexed the Sudetenland. After starting to serve the SS in Warsaw with minor jobs from March 1940 onwards, he joined the Security Service "Sicherheitsdienst" (SD) division of the SS, serving in their Warsaw ghetto outpost in summer 1942, when the big deportation into the extermination camp of Treblinka began.

He was given the nickname "Frankenstein" for his sadistic treatment of Jews in the ghetto. In his instance, the term "sadistic" refers not only to a mental, but indeed also to an apparent sexually orientated disorder. Blösche was feared for shooting any Jewish woman who had become a victim of his sexual abuse, immediately after the rape.

Blösche received the Nazi War Merit Cross with swords for his actions during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

In May 1945, he became a prisoner of war of the Soviet Union, and was deported into the Soviet Union for forced labour shortly thereafter. In early 1946, he was returned to East Germany, still as a prisoner of war. In August 1946 he suffered a major accident at work, which deformed his face severely. In 1947 his labour camp was dissolved, Blösche was released, and he returned to where his parents lived. His facial injuries protected him from discovery as the armed SS man displayed in photos.

He began a normal life, married, and had two children.

War crimes trial

In 1961, a former SS comrade who was on trial on a court in Hamburg linked Blösche to the crimes he committed in Warsaw, which then led to a series of findings resulting in his identification and discovery in January 1967.

Blösche was put on trial in Erfurt in April 1969. He was found guilty of
* having been involved in the deportation of 300,000 Jews
* murdering of an undeterminable number of persons (possibly 2000) including infants, pregnant women, handicapped persons, and old persons.He was sentenced to death, and executed by a shot through the neck in Leipzig on July 29, 1969.

References

* German TV Documentary (2003) and accompanying book "Der SS-Mann Josef Blösche - Leben und Sterben eines Mörders" (The SS figure Josef Blösche - A Murderer's Life and Death) by Heribert Schwan. See also http://www.wdr.de/tv/dokumentation/ss-mann.html
*Richard Raskin. "A Child at Gunpoint. A Case Study in the Life of a Photo". Aarhus University Press, 2004. ISBN 87-7934-099-7