Name Ludwig Fischer Role German Politician | ||
 | ||
Born 16 April 1905Kaiserslautern, Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany (then in the Palatinate Region of the Kingdom of Bavaria in the German Empire) ( 1905-04-16 ) Died March 8, 1947, Warsaw, Poland | ||
Ludwig Fischer (April 16, 1905 – March 8, 1947) was a German National Socialist lawyer, politician and a convicted war criminal.
Contents
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 Nazi occupation of Poland
After the 1939 Invasion of Poland, he was appointed Governor of the Warsaw District in the occupied General Government (the area of Poland that was not formally annexed). 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 was responsible for the creation of the Warsaw Ghetto, issued many anti-Semitic laws, as well as participating in the bloody Ghetto de-establishment and deportation. He was also responsible for terror in the occupied city, including mass executions, slave labor programs and deportation of Polish Jews to the various German Concentration Camps. He was sentenced to death by the Special Courts of the Polish resistance movement for crimes against Polish citizens. His name was 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, but Fischer survived.
After the failure of the Warsaw Uprising, Fischer played an important role in the planned destruction of Warsaw by Nazi Germany. He was also responsible for the poor conditions in the temporary transit camp in Pruszków, which was built 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. A 2013 National Geographic Channel documentary Bloody Tales claims that a film thought to be of the execution of the Nazi war criminal Amon Goeth is in fact that of Fischer's execution.