Arthur Greiser

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Arthur Karl Greiser
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Arthur Greiser
Greiser in 1934
Reichsstatthalter of Wartheland
In office
2 November 1939 – 8 May 1945
Appointed byAdolf Hitler
Preceded byPosition created
Succeeded byPosition abolished
Gauleiter of Wartheland
In office
21 October 1939 – 8 May 1945
Appointed byAdolf Hitler
Preceded byPosition created
Succeeded byPost abolished
President of the Free City of Danzig Senate
In office
23 November 1934 – 23 August 1939
Preceded byHermann Rauschning
Succeeded byAlbert Forster
(as Head of State)
Personal details
Born22 January 1897
Execution by hanging
Political party
SS-Obergruppenführer
(Lieutenant General)

Arthur Karl Greiser (22 January 1897 – 21 July 1946) was a

Holocaust in occupied Poland and numerous other crimes against humanity. He was arrested by the Americans in 1945, and was tried, convicted and executed by hanging
in Poland in 1946 for his crimes, most notably genocide.

Early life and career

Greiser was born in

Danzig, now Gdańsk). Whilst posted to combat duty, he flew missions over the North Sea
between the southern English and Belgian coasts. He was later shot down and wounded by gunfire. On 30 September 1919, he was classified as 50% war-disabled and discharged from naval service.

Greiser earned the

Honour Cross of the World War 1914/1918 and a Wound Badge in Black in 1914. From 1919 to May 1921, he served in the Freikorps Grenzschutz Ost and fought in the Baltic states
.

Joining the Nazi Party

According to Richard Evans, Greiser was fanatically anti-Christian,

SS on 29 September 1931.[3]

Greiser as Senate President in 1936 with his wife

He was the Deputy President of the

Rauschning Senate, and was made Senate President (Senatspräsident) in 1935–1939. As Senate President of Danzig, he was a rival to his nominal superior Albert Forster, Gauleiter of the city since 1930. Greiser was part of the SS empire whilst Forster was closely aligned with the Nazi Party Mandarins Rudolf Hess and later Martin Bormann
. On 23 August 1939 Forster replaced Greiser as Danzig's head of state.

Greiser was accused by Poland as being directly responsible for escalating tensions between the Free City and the Republic of Poland in 1939. When the Polish Foreign Affairs Minister Józef Beck announced economic reprisals following the harassment of Polish frontier guards and customs officers, Greiser issued an announcement on 29 July 1939 declaring that the Danzig police no longer recognised their authority or power, and demanded their immediate withdrawal. The notice was so rudely worded that the Polish diplomatic representative to Danzig, Marian Chodacki, refused to forward it to Beck and instead sent a court summary.

World War II

In occupied Poznań, 1939
Reviewing the troops in Poznań, November 1939. Greiser is on the right with Wilhelm Frick (center) and Generalmajor Walter Petzel (left).

Immediately following the

Wehrkreis XXI, consisting of the new Reichsgau. Additionally, he was appointed to the Prussian State Council. On 2 November, he was also named Reichsstatthalter (Reich Governor) of the new territory, thereby uniting under his control the highest party and governmental offices in his jurisdiction. On 29 January 1940, the region was renamed Reichsgau Wartheland. A member of several Nazi paramilitary organizations, Greiser was made a NSFK-Gruppenführer as well as a NSKK-Obergruppenführer in April 1940. Finally, on 30 January 1942, he was promoted to SS-Obergruppenführer.[4]

The territory over which Greiser ruled was potentially very rich – the

Wilhelmine Germany before 1914, possessed an excellent rail and road network, and a comparatively healthy and well educated workforce; Litzmanstadt (Łódź) had developed a fairly sophisticated industrial base during the 19th century. Although every Gauleiter was expected to fully Germanize his assigned area by any means,[5] Greiser emphasized brutality to achieve this goal. He was an ardent racist who enthusiastically pursued an 'ethnic cleansing' program to rid the Warthegau of Poles and to resettle the 'cleansed' areas with ethnic Germans.[6] This was along the lines of the racial theories espoused by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler. Mass expulsions of Poles from the Warthegau to the General Government and summary executions were the norm. A Polish servant in Greiser's house described him as "a powerfully built figure. He was a tall man, you could see his arrogance, his conceit. He was so vain, so full of himself—as if there was nothing above him, a god, almost. Everybody tried to get out of his way, people had to bow to him, salute him. And the Poles, he treated them with great contempt. For him the Poles were slaves, good for nothing but work".[7] Greiser himself stated his beliefs: "If, in past times, other peoples enjoyed their century-long history by living well, and doing so by getting foreign peoples to work for them without compensating them accordingly and without meting out justice to them, then we too, as Germans want to learn from this history. No longer must we stand in the wings; on the contrary, we must altogether become a master race!".[8]

In addition to mass deportation, Greiser's district was also at the forefront of "internal" racial cleansing according to Nazi ideals. His subordinate

Gau of East Prussia during May and June 1940. This SS squad gassed 1558 patients from mental asylums at the Soldau concentration camp and then returned to his region to continue this process.[9]

Arthur Greiser in March 1944 welcoming the one-millionth Volksdeutscher resettled from East Europe to occupied Poland as part of the "Heim ins Reich" campaign.

Greiser was involved in the resettlement of German

Nazi General Government of Poland to Greiser's domain. After 1941 a further 300,000 ethnic Germans were evacuated from Russia and Ukraine to Wartheland during the German invasion and occupation of the Soviet Union. Greiser's Poznań was considered the Germanised city par excellence, and on 3 August 1943 he hosted a national gathering of Gauleiter and senior Nazis, including Martin Bormann, Joseph Goebbels
and Heinrich Himmler.

Anti-Church campaign

Richard J. Evans wrote that the Catholic Church was the institution that, "more than any other had sustained Polish national identity over the centuries".[10] The Nazi plan for Poland entailed the destruction of the Polish nation.[11] This necessarily required attacking the Polish Church, particularly in those areas annexed to Germany.[12] Greiser, with the encouragement of Reinhard Heydrich and Martin Bormann, launched a severe attack on the Catholic Church. He cut off support to the Church from the state and from outside influences such as the Vatican and Germany. In July 1940 he instituted Bormann's anti-church "thirteen point" measures in the territory.[13] The anti-church measures, which had Hitler's approval, suggest how the Nazis aimed to «'de-church' German society».[14]

Catholic Church properties and funds were confiscated, and lay organisations shut down. Evans wrote that "Numerous clergy, monks, diocesan administrators and officials of the Church were arrested, deported to the General Government, taken off to a concentration camp in the Reich, or simply shot. Altogether some 1700 Polish priests ended up at Dachau: half of them did not survive their imprisonment." Greiser's administrative chief August Jäger had earlier led the effort at Nazification of the Evangelical Church in Prussia.[15] In Poland, he earned the nickname "Kirchenjäger" (Church Hunter) for the vehemence of his hostility to the Church.[16] "By the end of 1941", wrote Evans, "the Polish Catholic Church had been effectively outlawed in the Wartheland. It was more or less Germanized in the other occupied territories, despite an encyclical issued by Pope Pius XII as early as 27 October 1939 protesting against this persecution."[10]

Holocaust

SS-Obergruppenführer Greiser actively participated in the

Posen Speech). Greiser's mass murder operations were coordinated by SS-Oberführer Herbert Mehlhorn.[19]

On 20 January 1945, Greiser ordered a general evacuation of Posen (having received a telegram from Bormann relaying Hitler's order to leave the city). Greiser left the city the same evening and reported to Himmler's personal train in Frankfurt an der Oder. There Greiser found that he had been tricked by Bormann. Hitler had announced that Posen must be held at all costs, and Greiser was now viewed as a deserter and coward, particularly by Goebbels, who in his diary on 2 March 1945 labeled Greiser "a real disgrace to the (Nazi) Party", but his recommendations for punishment after the capture of Poznań were ignored.[20]

He surrendered to the Americans in Austria in 1945.

Trial and execution

Execution of Arthur Greiser, Poznań, July 21, 1946.

After the war, the Polish government (the

Danzig-West Prussia (the other German-annexed section of occupied Poland), simply declared all Poles in his area who were reasonably proficient in German to be Germans (although he was guilty of the elimination of the Jewish population under his jurisdiction either by murder or deportation). Greiser's advocates, Stanisław Hejmowski and Jan Kręglewski, tried to convince the Tribunal that Greiser, as a head of formally independent state, the Free City of Danzig
, could not be judged by another country, an argument rejected by the court. Greiser was convicted of the following:

The Tribunal decided that Greiser was guilty of all charges and sentenced him to death by hanging,

Pius XII that his life be spared.[21][22]

See also

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Arthur Greiser.

References

Notes

  1. ^ Evans 2009, pp. 482ff.
  2. ^ Epstein 2012, p. 45.
  3. ^ Epstein 2012, p. 52.
  4. ^ Miller & Schulz 2012, pp. 354, 360–364.
  5. ^ Kershaw 2000, p. 251.
  6. ^ Rees 1997, pp. 143–5.
  7. ^ Rees 1997, p. 142.
  8. ^ Rees 1997, p. 145.
  9. ^ Kershaw 2000, p. 261.
  10. ^ a b Evans 2009, p. 34.
  11. ^ "The destruction of Warsaw: the Nazi plan to obliterate a city". Sky HISTORY TV channel. Retrieved 5 July 2023.
  12. ^ Jozef Garlinski; Poland and the Second World War; Macmillan Press, 1985; p 60
  13. ^ Epstein 2012, p. 224.
  14. ^ Epstein 2012, pp. 225–8.
  15. ^ Evans 2009, pp. 33–4.
  16. ISBN 978-0-713-99681-4
    ; p. 92.
  17. ^ Epstein 2012, pp. 231–232.
  18. ^ Kershaw 2000, p. 484.
  19. ISBN 978-1-78238-444-1
    . Wartheland's Security Police and SS-Oberführer Herbert Mehlhorn, who was ordered by Greiser to coordinate the mass murder operations, resorted to gas wagons, which had already ...
  20. ^ Kershaw 2000, p. 759n24.
  21. ^ Epstein 2012, pp. 334–5.
  22. YouTube

Bibliography

External links
Government offices
Preceded by Danzig Head of State
1934–1939 		Succeeded by
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