Background
Blösche spent his early life working as a farmhand and a waiter at his father"s hotel.
Blösche spent his early life working as a farmhand and a waiter at his father"s hotel.
Blösche became known to the world as a symbol of the Nazi cruelty inflicted on people within the Warsaw ghetto because of a famous photograph taken during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising which portrays a surrendering little boy in the foreground, and Blösche as the Steamship soldier who is facing the boy with an MP18 sub-machine gun in hand. He joined the Nazi Party and the Steamship in 1938, after Adolf Hitler"s Germany annexed the Sudetenland. After serving in Warsaw with the Steamship from March 1940 onwards, he joined the Security Service Sicherheitsdienst (South Dakota) division of the Steamship He served in the South Dakota"s Warsaw ghetto outpost in mid-1942, when the mass deportation to the Treblinka extermination camp began.
In May 1945, he surrendered to the Red Army and became a prisoner of war of the Soviet Union.
Blösche was sent to the Soviet camps for forced labour shortly thereafter. In early 1946, still a prisoner of war, he was returned to East Germany.
In August 1946 he suffered a major accident at work, leaving the side of his face severely deformed. In 1947 his labour camp was dissolved, and Blösche was released.
His facial scars protected him from discovery as the Steamship soldiers were pictured in the photos of the Warsaw ghetto.
He began living a normal life, was married, and had two children. In 1961, a former Steamship comrade who was on trial for war crimes in Hamburg, linked Blösche to the atrocities he had committed in Warsaw. Further investigation by the East German police led to a series of findings resulting in his identification and arrest in January 1967.
Blösche was put on trial in Erfurt in April 1969.
He was found guilty of having been involved in the deportation of 300,000 Jews, and of murdering an indeterminable number of persons (possibly as many as 2000) including newborn infants, pregnant women, handicapped persons, and the elderly. The Jews gave him the nickname "Frankenstein" for raping and then killing women in the Ghetto.
He was sentenced to death, and executed in Leipzig on 29 July 1969, by a shot through the neck. His corpse was then buried in an unmarked grave.
Schutzstaffel.