- Extended Description
- Josef Blsche (February 12, 1912 July 29, 1969) was a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazi Party) in Germany, and served in the SS & SD during World War II as a Rottenfhrer.
He became known to the world as a symbol of Nazi cruelty in the Warsaw ghetto, through a famous photograph taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, showing a surrendering little boy in the foreground, and Blsche as the SS soldier facing the boy, MP18 sub-machine gun in hand.
Blsche 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.
Blsche 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 sent to 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, leaving his face severely deformed. In 1947 his labour camp was dissolved, Blsche was released, and he returned to where his parents lived. His facial injuries protected him from discovery as the SS soldier displayed in the photos. He began a normal life, was married, and had two children.
In 1961, a former SS comrade, who was on trial for war crimes in Hamburg, linked Blsche to the atrocities he had committed in Warsaw. Further investigation led to a series of findings resulting in his identification and discovery in January 1967.
Blsche 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.
