Josef Blösche

Blösche was born in Frýdlant, a part of the Austrian Empire in Czechoslovakia, in the northern part of Bohemia very near the borders of Germany and Poland. His parents were ethnically German: his father, Gustav Blösche, owned a farm and a gasthaus (country inn).[1] Josef worked on the farm and at the inn while going to school, but his father pulled him out of school at the age of 14 to work full time.[2] Blösche participated in right-wing youth organizations promoting Nazi causes,[3] and he joined the Sudeten German Party, a pro-Nazi group advocating German expansion. In 1938, he joined the Nazi Party and the SS after the annexation of the Sudetenland.[2] Blösche, who had previously volunteered for local SS was drafted by the Waffen-SS on 4 December 1939 and reported to training the following day at Pretzsch Castle. He completed his training on 14 March 1940 and was assigned to Warsaw, but was shortly assigned to patrolling 6 miles (9.7 km) of the Bug River.[4]

After serving in Warsaw with the SS, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service), a division of the SS. In 1941, he was briefly transferred to the Eastern Front, where he served with the Einsatzgruppen mobile death squads and participated in executions in the occupied parts of the Soviet Union, before being transferred back to Warsaw. He served in the SD's Warsaw ghetto outpost in mid-1942, when the mass deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp began. Blösche hunted down many Jews who were hiding from deportation. In January 1943, during another wave of deportations to the death camps, he took part in another search which involved frequent executions. He participated in the shooting of about 1,000 Jews in 1943.[5] The Jews gave him the nickname "Frankenstein" for his brutality, including the raping and killing of women in the ghetto.[2][6] Together with other SS members, he would go on expeditions in the ghetto and shoot random Jews to terrorize the residents. He participated in the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and received the German War Merit Cross for his actions during the uprising. He later took part in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising.[2]

In May 1945, he surrendered to the Red Army and became a prisoner of war of the Soviet Union. Blösche was sent to a camp administered by GUPVI (Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees). In early 1946, he was repatriated to the Ostrava Region in Czechoslovakia, still as an internee. In August 1946 while working at a coal mine he was struck by a descending hoist and suffered a fractured skull and serious facial injuries, and was hospitalised in Ostrava. In 1947, his labour camp was dissolved, and Blösche was released. His facial scars protected him from discovery as one of the SS troops that were pictured in the photos of the Warsaw ghetto. He moved to Urbach in Thuringia, Germany, to began living a normal life.[2] There, he met a German woman named Hanna Schönstedt, a mother and war widow, and they had two children together before she agreed to marry Blösche.[7] He became a master tradesman at a potash works in Menteroda.[3]

Erfurt prison, where Blösche was held while on trial in 1969.[8]

In 1961, a former SS acquaintance who was on trial in Hamburg linked Blösche to the atrocities he had committed in Warsaw. Blösche was eventually found in Urbach where he was arrested by the Stasi on 11 January 1967.[8] He was then detained in Hohenschönhausen Prison in Berlin.[9] He was put on trial in Erfurt in April 1969, and found guilty of crimes against humanity. Witnesses at the trial described him as a callous sadist.[8]

During the trial, the Judge asked Blösche about the events depicted in the infamous Warsaw Ghetto boy photograph:

Judge: "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: "They were in enormous dread."

Judge: "This reflects well in that little boy. What did you think?"

Blösche: "We witnessed scenes like these daily. We could not even think."[10]

Blösche was sentenced to death and executed in Leipzig on 29 July 1969 by firing squad.[11]

• 
  The infamous Warsaw Ghetto boy photograph (Blösche with submachine gun on the right).
• 
  Blösche at right, with Jürgen Stroop at center watching housing blocks burn during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Picture taken at Nowolipie street looking East, near intersection with Smocza street. On the left burning balcony of the townhouse Nowolipie 66.
• 
  Photo from Nowolipie Street. In the back (from the left) are townhouses at Nowolipie 32 (fragment), 30 and 28.[12] Second from right is Josef Blösche. Similar picture, Stroop report original caption: "Jewish Rabbis."
• 
  Stroop report showing Blösche at left. Original caption "Die Räumung eines Betriebes wird besprochen" {The clearance of a factory is being discussed}.

• 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.
• Richard Raskin. A Child at Gunpoint. A Case Study in the Life of a Photo. Aarhus University Press, 2004. ISBN 87-7934-099-7

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Josef Blösche.

• Josef Blösche at the Jewish Virtual Library