On
this date, July 21, 1946, Arthur Greiser was executed by hanging in Poland. I
will post information about this Nazi War Criminal from Wikipedia and other
links.
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SS-Oberführer Arthur
Greiser 1934
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Arthur Greiser
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In
office
29 January 1940 – 20 January 1945 |
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Appointed by
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Preceded by
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Position created
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Succeeded by
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Position abolished
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In
office
8 October 1939 – May 1945 |
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Appointed by
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Preceded by
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Position created
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Succeeded by
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Post abolished
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In
office
23 November 1934 – 23 August 1939 |
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Preceded by
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Succeeded by
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Albert Forster
(as State President) |
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Personal
details
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Born
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22 January 1897
Schroda, Province of Posen Kingdom of Prussia, German Empire, now Środa Wielkopolska, Poland |
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Died
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21 July 1946 (aged 49)
Poznań, Republic of Poland |
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Political
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Arthur Karl Greiser (22 January 1897 – 21 July 1946) was
a Nazi German politician, SS-Obergruppenführer
and Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) of the German-occupied territory of Wartheland. He was one of the persons
primarily responsible for organizing the Holocaust in Poland and numerous other crimes against
humanity. Arrested by the Americans in 1945, he was tried, convicted
and executed by hanging in Poland in 1946.
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Greiser as Senate
President in 1936 with his wife
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Early
life and career
Born
in Schroda
(Środa Wielkopolska), Province of Posen,
Imperial Germany,
Greiser was the son of a minor local bailiff (Gerichtsvollzieher). He
learned to speak Polish
fluently during his childhood. In 1903, he enrolled in elementary school, which
was followed by two years of intermediate school and finally the
Königlich-Humanistisches Gymnasium (Royal Humanities Secondary School) in Hohensalza, which he left in 1914 without
receiving a diploma. In August 1914, he volunteered to join the Imperial German
Navy. He served in the Kiel harbour naval forts
at Korugen, Falckenstein, and in the fortress tower of Laboe
from August, 1914 to July, 1915. He was then assigned as an artillery observer
in Flanders as well as participating in minesweeping operations in Friedrichsort.
In April, 1917, he volunteered for service in the Naval Flying Corps
where he initially served as an observer with SEE I and II and then with
Küstenfliegerstaffel I and II. From August, 1917 to August, 1918, he was
assigned as a naval aviator to Marine Schutzstaffel I. During this time, he was
transferred to Seeflugstation Flandern II (Ostende) and he later flew with the
Seefrontstaffel and MFJ IV. From December, 1917 to January, 1918, he was
attached to the KE-Schule Langfuhr (near Danzig). While deployed to combat duty, he
flew missions over the North Sea between
the southern English and Belgian coasts. He was later shot down and wounded by
gunfire. On 30 September 1919, he was classified as 50% war-disabled and
discharged from naval service.
He
earned the Iron Cross (First and Second Class), the Honour
Cross of the World War 1914/1918 and a Wound Badge in Black in 1914. From 1919 to
May 1921, he served in the Freikorps Grenzschutz
Ost and fought in the Baltic states.
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In occupied Poznań,
1939
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Beginning
career in the Nazi Party
Greiser
was fanatically anti-Christian and an early member of the Nazi Party (number 166,635). After many
years with the nationalist Deutschsoziale
Partei (DtSP) founded by Richard Kunze and membership in the Stahlhelm
in the mid-1920s, he joined the NSDAP and SA on 1 November 1929. He joined the SS on 30
June 1931 and was later awarded the Golden Party Badge.
He
was the Senate President (Senatspräsident) of the Free City of Danzig
(Gdańsk, Poland) in 1935–1939, and the administrator
(Reichsstatthalter und Gauleiter) of Reichsgau
Wartheland (1939–1945). As Senate President of Danzig, he was
described as a "hothead" and was a serious rival to his nominal
superior Albert Forster, Gauleiter of the city since 1930. Greiser was part of
the SS empire whilst Forster was closely aligned to the Nazi Party Mandarins Rudolf Hess and later Martin Bormann.
Greiser
was directly responsible for escalating tensions between the Free City and the
Republic of Poland in 1939. When the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Józef Beck threatened economic reprisals
following the harassment of Polish frontier guards and customs officers,
Greiser issued an announcement on 29 July 1939 declaring that the Danzig police
no longer recognised their authority or power, and demanded their immediate
withdrawal. The notice was so rudely worded that the Polish diplomatic
representative to Danzig, Marian Chodacki, refused to forward it to
Beck and instead sent a court summary.
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Reviewing the troops
in Poznań, November 1939. Greiser is on the right with Wilhelm
Frick (center) and Generalmajor Walter Petzel (left).
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World
War II
Immediately
following the German invasion of Poland, Greiser was
transferred from Danzig and appointed "Chef der Zivilverwaltung im
Militärbezirk Posen" or Chief of Civil Administration in the military
district of Posen, which was annexed to the German Reich on 8
September 1939. The military administration ended the following month, and he
was then appointed Gauleiter (21 October) and "Reichsstatthalter
für den Reichsgau Posen" (26 October). On 29 January
1940, the region was renamed Reichsgau Wartheland.
The
territory was potentially very rich – the Prussian Imperial province of Posen had been the
breadbasket of Wilhelmine Germany before 1914, possessed an excellent
rail and road network, and a comparatively healthy and well educated workforce;
Litzmanstadt
(Łódź) had developed a fairly sophisticated industrial base during the 19th
century. Although every Gauleiter was expected to fully Germanize his assigned
area by any means, Greiser emphasized brutality to achieve this goal. He was an
ardent racist
who enthusiastically pursued an 'ethnic
cleansing' program to rid the Warthegau of Poles and to
resettle the 'cleansed' areas with ethnic Germans. This was along the lines of
the racial theories espoused by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Mass
expulsions of Poles from the Warthegau to the General Government
and summary executions were the norm. A Polish servant in Greiser's house
described him as "a powerfully built figure. He was a tall man, you could
see his arrogance, his conceit. He was so vain, so full of himself—as if there
was nothing above him, a god, almost. Everybody tried to get out of his way,
people had to bow to him, salute him. And the Poles, he treated them with great
contempt. For him the Poles were slaves, good for nothing but work".
Greiser himself stated his beliefs: "If, in past times, other peoples
enjoyed their century-long history by living well, and doing so by getting
foreign peoples to work for them without compensating them accordingly and
without meting out justice to them, then we too, as Germans want to learn from
this history. No longer must we stand in the wings; on the contrary, we must altogether
become a master race!".
In
addition to mass deportation, Greiser's district was also at the forefront of
"internal" racial cleansing according to Nazi ideals. His subordinate
Wilhelm Koppe provided the 'Special Detachment (Sonderkommando) Lange'
to the nearby Gau
of East Prussia during May and June 1940. This
SS squad gassed 1558 patients from mental asylums at the Soldau
concentration camp and then returned to his region to continue this
process.
Greiser
was also involved in the resettlement of German refugees from lands annexed to the Soviet Union in 1939 and 1940. Between
October and December 1939, nearly 60,000 Volksdeutsche arrived in Germany from the Baltic states of Estonia and Latvia. Evidently Wilfried
Strik-Strikfeldt (later employed as translator for General Andrey Vlasov) was in this group, as he
"resettled" in Posen. Neighbouring Gauleiter and rival Albert Forster refused
them entry, and they were largely settled in properties seized from Poles in Poznań and across the Wartheland. However even Greiser was wary,
noting that many were elderly and urbanized aristocrats with a strong class
consciousness, not the virile peasant warrior types idolized by the SS. Closer
to his heart were the over 100,000 Volksdeutsche who were evacuated from Volhynia and eastern Galicia.
These were mostly farmers and rural people, and, learning from the Baltic
experience, Łódź in eastern Wartheland was designated the main Volksdeutsche
Mittelstelle (VoMi) reception centre. In May 1940 a further 30,000 Volksdeutsche were relocated from the Nazi
General Government of Poland to Greiser's domain. After 1941 a further 300,000 Volksdeutsche were evacuated from Russia and Ukraine to Wartheland during the German
invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union. Greiser's Poznań was considered
the Germanised city par excellence, and on 3 August 1943 he hosted a national
gathering of Gauleiter and senior Nazis, including Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels
and Heinrich Himmler.
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Arthur Greiser in
March 1944 welcoming the one-millionth Volksdeutscher
resettled from East Europe to occupied Poland as part of the "Heim
ins Reich" campaign.
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Anti-Church
campaign
Richard
J. Evans wrote that the Catholic Church was the institution that,
"more than any other had sustained Polish national identity over the
centuries". The Nazi plan for Poland entailed the destruction of the
Polish nation. This necessarily required attacking the Polish Church,
particularly in those areas annexed to Germany. Greiser, with the encouragement
of Reinhard Heydrich and Martin Bormann, launched a severe attack on the Catholic
Church. He cut off support to the Church from the state and from outside
influences such as the Vatican and Germany. In July 1940 he instituted
Bormann's anti-church "thirteen point" measures in the territory. The
anti-church measures, which had Hitler's approval, suggest how the Nazis aimed
to de-church German society.
Catholic
Church properties and funds were confiscated, and lay organisations shut down.
Evans wrote that "Numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and
officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government,
taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot. Altogether some
1700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of them did not survive their
imprisonment." Greiser's administrative chief August
Jager had earlier led the effort at Nazification of the Evangelical Church
in Prussia. In Poland, he earned the nickname "Kirchenjäger"
(Church Hunter) for the vehemence of his hostility to the Church. "By the
end of 1941", wrote Evans, "the Polish Catholic Church had been
effectively outlawed in the Wartheland. It was more or less Germanized in the
other occupied territories, despite an encyclical issued by the Pope as early
as 27 October 1939 protesting against this persecution."
Holocaust
SS-Obergruppenführer Greiser was not only fully aware
of the Holocaust
but actively participated in it. Early in 1940, Greiser is on record
challenging Hermann Göring over efforts to delay the expulsion
of Łódź Jews to
Poland. On 18 September 1941, Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler informed Greiser
that he intended to transfer 60,000 Czech and German
Jews to the Łódź ghetto
until spring 1942, when they would be "resettled". The first
transport arrived a few weeks later, and Greiser sought and received permission
from Himmler to kill 100,000 Jews in his area. He then instructed HSSPF Wilhelm
Koppe to manage the overcrowding. Koppe and SS-Sturmbannführer Herbert
Lange proceeded to manage the problem by experimenting at a country estate
at Chełmno nad Nerem with gas vans, establishing the
first extermination unit which ultimately carried out the mass murder of
approximately 150,000 Jews between late 1941 and April 1942. Furthermore on 6
October 1943 Greiser hosted a national assembly of senior SS officers in Posen at
which Himmler candidly spoke of the mass executions of civilians (the infamous Posen Speech).
On
20 January 1945, Greiser ordered a general evacuation of Posen (having received
a telegram from Bormann relaying Hitler's order to leave the city). Greiser
left the city the same evening and reported to Himmler's personal train in
Frankfurt am Oder. There Greiser found that he had been tricked by Bormann.
Hitler had announced that Posen must be held at all costs, and Greiser was now
viewed as a deserter and coward, particularly by Goebbels, who in his diary on
2 March 1945 labeled Greiser "a real disgrace to the (Nazi) Party",
but his recommendations for punishment after the capture of Poznań were ignored.
He
surrendered to the Americans in Austria with
SS-Obergruppenführer Heinz Reinefarth in 1945.
Trial
and execution
After
the war, the Polish government (the Supreme
National Tribunal) tried him for war crimes. His defence that he was only
following orders did not hold up as it was shown that other Gauleiters had not
followed a similar policy. For example, Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia
(the other German-annexed section of occupied Poland), simply declared all
Poles in his area who were reasonably proficient in German to be Germans (although he was
guilty of the elimination of the Jewish population under his jurisdiction
either by murder or deportation). Greiser's advocates, Stanisław Hejmowski and
Jan Kręglewski, tried to convince the Tribunal that Greiser, as a head of
formally independent state, the Free City of Danzig,
could not be judged by another country, an argument rejected by the court.
Greiser was convicted of:
- genocide and the murder of civilians and POWs;
- torture, persecution, and injuring civilians and POWs;
- organized and systematic destruction of Polish culture, plunder of Polish cultural heritage, Germanisation of the country and the Polish people, illegal appropriation of public property;
- organised and systematic looting of Polish property;
- insulting and deriding the Polish nation by propagating its cultural inferiority and low social worth;
- forcibly expelling individuals, families, neighbourhoods and whole districts to the General Government or forced labour camps in the German Reich;
- persecution and murder of Polish Jews by killing them in their places of residence, grouping them in closed ghettos from which they were sent to the Chelmno extermination camp for extermination in gas chambers, deriding the Jewish people in actions and words, causing physical suffering, injury and humiliation of human dignity;
- taking Polish children against the will of their parents or guardians, forcibly putting them in German families or public orphanages within the Reich while severing all contacts with their families and nation by giving them German names.
The
Tribunal decided that Greiser was guilty of all charges and sentenced him to
death by hanging, civil death, and confiscation of all his property. In
the early morning of 21 July 1946 he was transported from prison to the slope
of Fort
Winiary where he was hanged before a large crowd. It was the last public execution in Poland.
Execution
of Arthur Greiser
VIDEO SOURCE: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTAOqG_i3cs
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