Arthur Greiser
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Arthur Greiser (January 22, 1897 – July 14, 1946) was a Nazi German politician.
Born in Schroda, Province of Posen, Imperial Germany, after serving in World War I as a Pilot and postwar in the Freikorps, Greiser joined the Nazi party and SA in 1929 and the SS in 1931.[1] He was the Senate President (Senatspräsident) of the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) (1935–1939), and the administrator (Reichsstatthalter und Gauleiter) of Reichsgau Wartheland (1939–1945).
Greiser typified the brutality exhibited by officials of Nazi Germany to the Poles. 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. This was along the lines of the racial theories espoused by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Mass expulsions of Poles from the Warthegau to the General Government and summary executions were the norm.
Joseph Goebbels disliked Greiser. In Goebbels' diary entry of March 2, 1945, Greiser was considered "a real disgrace to the (Nazi) Party." Four days later, Goebbels criticized Greiser for abandoning a town which was threatened (but not encircled) by Russian forces.
After the war, the Polish government tried him for war crimes. His plea that he was only following orders did not hold up as it was shown that other Gauleiters had not followed a similar policy—for example, Albert Forster, Gauleiter of Danzig-West Prussia (the other German-annexed section of occupied Poland), simply declared all Poles in his area of responsibility proficient in German to be Germans. After Greiser was convicted, he was paraded around the city of Poznań in a cage before being hanged. It was the last public execution in Poland.
[edit] References
- Rees, Laurence The Nazis : A Warning From History, foreword by Sir Ian Kershaw, New York : New Press, 1997 ISBN 1-56584-551-X
