Ludwig Fischer
Ludwig Fischer | |
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Governor of the Warsaw District within the General Government | |
In office September 1939 – January 1945 | |
Personal details | |
Born |
16 April 1905 Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (then in the Palatinate Region of the Kingdom of Bavaria in the German Empire) |
Died |
March 8, 1947 41) Mokotów Prison in Warsaw, Poland | (aged
![](../I/m/Trial_of_Ludwig_Fischer_in_Warsaw_1947.jpg)
Ludwig Fischer (April 16, 1905 – March 8, 1947) was a German National Socialist lawyer, politician and a convicted war criminal who was executed for war crimes.
Background
Born into a Catholic family in Kaiserslautern, Fischer joined the Nazi Party in 1926 while a student, and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1929, eventually rising to the rank of Gruppenführer. In 1937, he was elected to the Reichstag.
Actions during the Nazi occupation of Poland
Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. On 24 October 1939 Fischer became Chief Administrator (and in 1941 Governor) of the Warsaw District in the occupied General Government (the area of Poland that Germany did not formally annex). He held this position until the withdrawal of the German forces from Warsaw in January 1945.
Fischer was directly responsible for a number of war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity. He oversaw the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto and issued many anti-Semitic laws, as well as participating in the bloody Ghetto de-establishment and deportation. Fischer was also responsible for terror in the occupied city, including mass executions, slave-labor programs and the deportation of Poles and Polish Jews to the various German concentration camps. The Special Courts of the Polish resistance movement sentenced him to death for crimes against Polish citizens. His name appeared first on the list of "Operation Heads"—the serial assassinations of Nazi personnel by the Polish Resistance. Before the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, his car was shot at in Operation Hunting (Polish: Akcja Polowanie), but Fischer survived.
After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising of August to October 1944, Fischer played an important role in Nazi Germany's planned destruction of Warsaw. 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.
Postwar trial and execution
Fischer, then aged 41, was arrested after the war by Allied forces and was handed over to the Polish authorities. He was tried before the Supreme National Tribunal and sentenced to death. Treblinka and Warsaw uprising survivor Jankiel Wiernik testified at his trial in 1947. He was executed by hanging in Warsaw's Mokotów Prison.[1] A 2013 National Geographic Channel documentary Bloody Tales claims that a film thought to be of the execution of the Nazi war criminal Amon Goeth is in fact that of Fischer's execution.[2]
References
- ↑ Prosecution of Nazi Crimes in Poland in 1939–2004 Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine.
- ↑ Becky Evans, Historians claim video of camp commander being hanged is NOT him. Daily Mail Online, March 21, 2013. Retrieved June 2, 2013.
Further reading
- Joseph Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker, Frankfurt/Main 1984
- Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, Frankfurt/Main 2003