Ludwig Fischer

Ludwig Fischer (16 April 1905 – 8 March 1947) was a German Nazi Party lawyer, politician and a convicted war criminal who was executed for war crimes.

For other people named Ludwig Fischer, see Ludwig Fischer (disambiguation).
Ludwig Fischer
Governor of the Warsaw District within the General Government
In office
September 1939 – January 1945
Personal details
Born16 April 1905 (1905-04-16)
Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (then in the Palatinate Region of the Kingdom of Bavaria in the German Empire)
Died8 March 1947(1947-03-08) (aged 41)
Mokotów Prison in Warsaw, Poland
Ludwig Fisher (second row, second from the left) during his trial before the Supreme National Tribunal in Warsaw.

Background

Born into a Catholic family in Kaiserslautern, Fischer joined the Nazi Party in 1926 while a student, and the Sturmabteilung (SA) in 1929, eventually rising to the rank of Gruppenführer. In 1937, he was elected to the Reichstag.

Actions during the Nazi occupation of Poland
Main article: General Government administration

Germany invaded Poland in September 1939. On 24 October 1939 Fischer became Chief Administrator (and in 1941 Governor) of the Warsaw District in the occupied General Government (the area of Poland that Germany did not formally annex). He held this position until the withdrawal of the German forces from Warsaw in January 1945.

Fischer was directly responsible for a number of war crimes, as well as crimes against humanity. He oversaw the establishment of the Warsaw Ghetto and issued many anti-Semitic laws, as well as participating in the bloody Ghetto de-establishment and deportation. Fischer was also responsible for terror in the occupied city, including mass executions, slave-labor programs and the deportation of Poles and Polish Jews to the various German concentration camps. The Special Courts of the Polish resistance movement sentenced him to death for crimes against Polish citizens. His name appeared first on the list of "Operation Heads"—the serial assassinations of Nazi personnel by the Polish Resistance. Before the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, his car was shot at in Operation Hunting (Polish: Akcja Polowanie), but Fischer survived.

After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising of August to October 1944, Fischer played an important role in Germany's planned destruction of Warsaw. He was also responsible for the poor conditions in the temporary transit camp on the western outskirts of Warsaw in Pruszków, which the Nazis set up to intern people expelled from the capital.

Postwar trial and execution

Fischer, then aged 41, was arrested after the war by Allied forces and was handed over to the Polish authorities. He was tried before the Supreme National Tribunal and sentenced to death. Treblinka and Warsaw uprising survivor Jankiel Wiernik testified at his trial in 1947. He was executed by hanging in Warsaw's Mokotów Prison.[1]

References
  1. Prosecution of Nazi Crimes in Poland in 1939–2004 Archived 2016-03-03 at the Wayback Machine

Further reading
  • Joseph Wulf, Das Dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker, Frankfurt/Main 1984
  • Ernst Klee, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, Frankfurt/Main 2003
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