EXECUTION of Ludwig Fischer - Brutal NAZI Governor of Warsaw District - Warsaw Uprising - Holocaust. The second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 with the invasion of Poland. To justify the action, Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans who were living in Poland. They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning, with its allies Great Britain and France, to encircle and dismember Germany. After the SS, in collusion with the German military, staged a phony attack on a German radio station, the Germans accused the Poles. Hitler then used the action to launch a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland.
Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment and German troops entered the capital on 29th of September shortly after its surrender.
After defeating the Polish army, the Germans ruthlessly suppressed the Poles whom they considered to be racially inferior and, in the weeks, following the German attack on Poland, German SS, police, and military units shot thousands of Polish civilians, including many members of the Polish nobility, clergy, and intelligentsia.
Poland was split in three parts: the western third was annexed to the Third Reich; the eastern third was occupied by the Soviet Union; and the central third was made into the General Government, a semi-independent unit which the Nazis intended to use as a place to do all
their racial "dirty work." The General Government was to serve as an endless supply of slave labor, and ultimately, as a site for the mass extermination of European Jewry.
The General Government was divided into four districts: Cracow, Warsaw, Radom, and Lublin, with Cracow serving as the administrative center. On the 24th of October 1939 Ludwig Fischer became the chief administrator and in April 1941 Governor of the Warsaw District.
These areas, which had a total population of 12 million, of which 1.5 million were Jews were further divided into sub-districts. After the Germans attacked the
Soviet Union in the summer of 1941, they attached Eastern Galicia to the General Government, making it the fifth district and adding between three and four million people to the population.
The head of the General Government was Hans Frank, who held the position of governor-general. However, he was not free to govern as he pleased as the racial policies carried out in the General Government were the
responsibility of the SS and the police.
The Nazis treated the Poles of the General Government in a terrible fashion. They viewed them as a
cheap labor source, to be taken advantage of at any occasion. Later, the Germans tried to deal with the Poles by distinguishing between those who were of German origin and those who were deemed as “inferior”. The Germans tried to make sure that the Poles would obey them by terrorizing the population. If the Polish underground killed a German, 50—100 Poles were executed as a punishment and warning. The Poles were made to turn over food to the Germans, and were forbidden to trade foodstuffs. Thus, those Poles living in urban areas were limited to the pitiful food rations provided—a veritable starvation diet, and were forced to smuggle food illegally just to stay alive. The Jews of the General Government were subject to terribly harsh decrees. From the very beginning, the Germans confiscated their property and made them perform forced labor. From late 1939, the Jews were put in ghettos, where they were totally isolated from the outside world and severely restricted.
In his position as the governor of the Warsaw District, Ludwig Fischer oversaw the establishment of 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. In December of the same year Fischer called for the death penalty for Jews who had left the ghetto without permission. The ghetto, which became the largest of all the Jewish ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II, was encircled by a wall that was over 10 feet high, topped with barbed wire, and closely guarded to prevent movement between the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw. ...
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