...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.
