Visa 1940 Issued By Warsaw Ghetto Commander Department
Visa 1940 Issued By Warsaw Ghetto Commander Department
At the first view this Lithuanian passport, or to be more exact “Safe Conduct”, shows a 27 yo woman but the back of the document reveals a German transit visa issued in May 1940 by the department of the “Chief of the District Warschau”, here “Passstelle” (passport office). The person in charge was Ludwig Fischer, who was not only in charge of the Jewish Ghetto in Warsaw but also a convicted war criminal, hanged 1947 in Poland. I’ve never seen such a visa before and even it’s not signed by Fischer himself this visa is most rare to spot.
After the 1939 Invasion of Poland, Fischer 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 Nazi 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.
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.
Read more on Prosecution of Nazi Crimes in Poland in 1939–2004 and on the Warsaw Ghetto.
Visa 1940 Issued By Warsaw Ghetto Commander Department
