February 12, 1912 - Josef Blösche

Josef Blösche (12 February 1912 – 29 July 1969) was a German war criminal and a member of the Nazi Party who served in the SS and SD during World War II. Blösche personally executed many Jews, participated in several massacres, and helped send many more to their deaths in extermination camps.

Blösche became known to the world because he was photographed five times with SS forces that suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as published in the Stroop Report. The most famous photograph portrays a boy surrendering in the foreground, and Blösche as the SS man who is facing the boy with a sub-machine gun in hand. The Report was used in prosecuting former Nazis for war crimes. Blösche initially avoided detection after the war due to an accident that permanently scarred his face. During the Warsaw Uprising, he earned a reputation as a "brutal sadist, murderer, and rapist", being nicknamed "Frankenstein".

West German prosecutors were able to identify Blösche in 1962. East German officials became aware that Blösche was living somewhere in East Germany after receiving documents on the West German case.

Content sourced from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef Blösche under CC BY-SA 4.0.