Background
Arthur Greiser was born in Sroda Wielkopolska on 22 January 1897. He was a son of a civil servant.
Arthur Greiser was born in Sroda Wielkopolska on 22 January 1897. He was a son of a civil servant.
During World War I he served as a naval officer, and, after a period in the Freikorps and later as an unsuccessful businessman, co-founded the Stahlhelm veterans' organization in Danzig in 1924.
Greiser joined the NSDAP and the SA in 1929 and the following year he entered the SS as one of Himmler’s earliest adherents. From November 1930 Greiser was deputy district leader of the NSDAP in Danzig and leader of the Party fraction in the diet.
On 20 June 1933 he became Deputy President of the Danzig Senate and on 28 November 1934 he succeeded Hermann Rauschning as President, a post he retained until 1 September 1939. Greiser was then made head of the Civil Administration in Posen and on 21 October 1939 he became Gauleiter and Reich Governor of the Warthegau - the Polish western regions annexed to the German Reich, which also included the district of Lodz (Litzmannstadt).
In 1943 he was promoted to the rank of SS General. As Gauleiter for the Warthegau and Lodz, he was in charge of the mass deportation and extermination of Jews and Poles to secure room for Germans from the Baltic States, Volhynia, the Balkans and the Reich proper.
Towards the end of the war he fled to the Bavarian Alps, where he eventually surrendered to the Americans.
Extradited to Poland and tried by a Polish court, he was sentenced to death and hanged on 20 June 1946 in front of his former palace in Poznan after being paraded around the town in a cage.
As a result of his measures the German population in his region swelled from 325,000 in 1939 to almost 950,000 by the end of 1943. Greiser had a black record of cruelty towards the Polish population, advocating in a letter to Himmler of 1 May 1942 that tubercular Poles be sent for ‘special treatment' to Chelmno death camp. Greiser also supervised the anti-Jewish terror which led to the burning of synagogues, the sending of thousands of Jews to forced labour, deportations to Germany, to the Generalgouvernment (occupied Poland) and to the extermination camps.