Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger (8 May 1894Döring 2001, p. 600. – 10 May 1945) was a German paramilitary commander in charge of, and personally involved in the progressive annihilation of the Polish nation, its culture, its heritage and its wealth, and never sentenced for his war crimes. Long before the war he was a high-ranking member of the SA and the SS. Between 1939 and 1943 he was the Higher SS and Police LeaderBirn 1986, p. 72. in the General Government, giving him command of all police and security forces in German-occupied Poland. In this capacity, he organized and supervised numerous crimes against humanity and had major responsibility for the German genocide of the Polish nation: the extermination of six million Poles (three million of them Polish Jews) and massive destruction, degradation and impoverishment of the Polish state. He took his own life in May 1945.
Career Krüger was born in 1894 into a military family in Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German Empire (today, Strasbourg, France). He was the younger brother of Walter Krüger who also became a high-ranking SS officer. He attended the gymnasium in Rastatt and then pursued a military career as a cadet in the military school at Karlsruhe and the military academy at Gross-Lichterfelde. In June 1914, Krüger was commissioned a Leutnant in the Imperial German Army's 25th Royal Prussian Infantry Regiment. During the First World War, he served as a platoon leader, a company commander and the regimental adjutant. He was wounded three times, promoted to Oberleutnant and awarded the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class. In August 1919, he joined the , which he left in March 1920.Bundesarchiv Freiburg, MSG/2/13583, Kriegstagebuch der Leutnant Fried.-Wilh. Krüger He then entered civilian employment as a clerk to a bookseller and to a publisher until 1922. He got married, went to work for a waste disposal firm from 1924 to 1928 and then became a self-employed businessman.
Activities in SA and SS While working at the refuse company, he probably met Kurt Daluege, who was an engineer at the company at that time and who later became SS commander in Berlin and leader of the Ordnungspolizei (order police) or Orpo.Thompson 2000, p. 324. The two men soon formed a friendship. On 15 November 1929, Krüger joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) as member 171,199. On 1 February 1931, he also joined the SS (member number 6,123),Friedmann 1995, p. 2. which he left in April to transfer to the SA. With the help of Daluege, Krüger began a rapid rise in the SA ranks. He was promoted to SA-Oberführer (31 July 1931) and SA-Gruppenführer (10 September 1931). He commanded the SA-Gruppe Ost, encompassing the Berlin area, from April 1931 to July 1932. In July 1932 he was made leader of the Group Staff in the supreme SA leadership under SA-Stabschef Ernst Röhm, and he served as the SA representative to the Reich Defense Council. In October 1932, he became a member of the State Board for Youth Physical Training.
On 27 June 1933, Krüger was promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer and appointed chief of Ausbildungswesen (Training).Thilo Vogelsang, “Der Chef des Ausbildungswesens (Chef AW)”, in : Gutachten des Institus für Zeitgeschichte, Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart, 1966, page 154 Cooperating closely with the Reichswehr, he used his new position to school the SA's recruits (an estimated 250,000) to become unit leaders. Krüger was not caught in the Night of the Long Knives, in which Röhm and many other high-ranking SA members were killed, and it has been speculated that his switch from the SS to the SA was only for pragmatic reasons, especially in the light of Krüger transferring the SA armouries of which he was in charge to the Reichswehr as soon as the purge began.
On 25 January 1935, Krüger re-entered the SS, was given the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer and placed on Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. In February 1936, he was appointed Inspector of Border Guard Units. On 16 May 1938, he was named Inspector of SS Mounted Units.
Throughout these years, Krüger also pursued a political career within the Nazi Party. At the July 1932 election, he won a seat in the Reichstag from electoral constituency 5 (Frankfurt an der Oder) and, on 10 July 1933, he was made a member of the Prussian State Council. He would hold these seats until the fall of the Nazi regime. Also he served a term as a District Councillor (Rattsherr) in Berlin from 1933 through 1935. In July 1937, he was given a seat on the People's Court and he was appointed the Reich Supreme Authority for Equestrian Sports in January 1939.
Crimes in Poland
On 4 October 1939, Himmler appointed Krüger as the Higher SS and Police Leader (Höherer SS- und Polizeiführer, HSSPF) to the German military administration in Łódź. This was rapidly followed on 26 October by his formal appointment as HSSPF "Ost" to the part of German-occupied Poland organized into the General Government, with headquarters in Kraków. Krüger thus held the highest police and security post in occupied Poland.
During the first months of the war in Poland, he was one of the coordinators of Action AB – the mass murder by shooting of Polish intelligentsia, which was performed by Orpo or ethnic Germans (Volksdeutscher Selbstschutz). The victims were mainly University lecturers, retired military officers, high-rank policemen, managing staff of the Polish State Railways, journalists, businessmen, landowners, notable Catholic priests, internationally known sportsmen (vide Janusz Kusociński), judges, teachers, social workers, senior administrative officials or other members of Polish intellectual elite.
Already in November 1939, Krüger had fulfilled Hitler's personal order, and 184 professors of Jagiellonian University were arrested in the Sonderaktion Krakau action and deported on a cattle train to Sachsenhausen concentration camp; fewer than 50 of the professors survived the war.
From the very beginning he introduced the terror on a large scale. For every killed German in General Government by Home Army, ten random Polish civilians were shot. Regular arrests of Polish inhabitants of Warsaw, during the street Razzia () and transporting them to the Third Reich to do slave labor for German industry (for among others: Krupp, Audi, IG Farben, Porsche, Volkswagen...), or straight to concentration camps, were organized on his orders.
The deportation to the concentration camp was practically equal to the death sentence. One of the men from units subordinated to Krüger: SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) Karl Fritzsch, the deputy (Schutzhaftlagerführer) Auschwitz commander, once said to a new transport of Polish prisoners:
The collective responsibility was the new law introduced by SS. If someone in the family committed an act against the new rules (for example: failure to comply with the curfew), all the members of the family were sent to concentration camp. In the case, when a serious disobedience was committed by a farmer, the whole village was under process of pacification (mass execution by burning).
Due to harsh "politics" of the occupiers, the shortage of the food and medications in the cities and towns was extreme. The Poles were starving (average food allocation amounted to 2,600 calories for Germans, 700 for Poles and 400 for Jews). The worst situation was in the ghettos, where the mortality was much higher than among "free" Poles. Farmers in GG were obliged to deliver draconian amount of grain, meat, milk and potatoes, which were sent straight to Germany. No pay was given to the victims. Just in the year 1942–1943 around 633,000 tons of the grain were confiscated from Polish villages. In the Autumn period of 1944 nearly 388,000 tons of potatoes were stolen. The contingents were taken by force and in the whole process military or para-military forces were used, acting on orders of local SS or police commander. In the case of refusal to deliver on time, severe punishments like beatings or arrests were applied. Some of them were resulting in sending to a concentration camps. All sorts of repressions were introduced, including the death penalty (without formal accusation or a lawful trial).Witold Kulesza, Vice-president of GKBZPNP – IPN (February 2007). "Zbrodnie Wehrmachtu w Polsce – Wrzesień 1939" [Crimes of the Wehrmacht in Poland]. Bulletin of the Institute of National Remembrance 08-09 / 2004. Archived from the original (PDF file, direct download 1.02 MB, Internet Archive) on June 3, 2013. Retrieved September 5, 2014.
To terrorize the population – on SS commanders' orders – public executions by shooting or hanging were conducted.
The systematic process of kidnapping around 200,000 children from Polish families for further Germanisation was also Krüger's domain.Rethinking Poles and Jews: Troubled Past, Brighter Future, Robert D. Cherry, Annamaria Orla-Bukowska.Rowman & Littlefield, 2007 p. 100 Nowa Encyklopedia Powszechna PWN (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2004), 2: 613. .
People disabled mentally or with Down syndrome were secretly killed by the authorities (mainly by Sicherheitspolizei). Later on, the gas vans were invented by German doctor of chemistry and SS-Untersturmführer August Becker (not subordinated to Krüger), to make the whole process faster, more discreet and taking the burden of participating in a mass shootings from ordinary soldiers.Ministry of Information (1941). The German New Order in Poland (Part One) (PDF). pp. 1–97
Krüger supervised the action of destroying Polish historical buildings (without military significance), cultural sites and in general Polish culture – both by stealing the art works or – if they were related to Polish history – burning some of them on the spot (vide: medieval synagogue). More than 500,000 of Polish and international (paintings by da Vinci, Raphael or Rembrandt) piece of arts were stolen. Most of them never come back to Poland after the war. Some of the goods – crucial to Polish cultural heritage like paintings: Battle of Grunwald or Prussian Homage, were hidden in a local farms. If they were seized by the occupiers, they would be destroyed as anti-German. Policies aimed at cultural genocide resulted in the deaths of thousands of scholars and artists, and the theft and destruction of innumerable cultural artifacts.Ferguson, Niall (2006), The War of the World, New York: Penguin Press
All Polish theatres were disbanded, likewise all universities were shut, and the secondary schools were teaching only basics. Lessons of history, geography and the Polish literature ceased to be performed. The primary education in the countryside was not allowed during the next five years, leaving – in 1945 – a couple of million teenagers, barely able to write and read. In Galicia for every book given to the German authorities, a bottle of alcohol was the pay (one of the assumptions of the Generalplan Ost). The plan was originating from Otto von Bismarck's operations against – among others – Poles, mainly in Provinz Posen (Greater Poland) in the 19th century.
Once Bismarck wrote to his sister in 1861:
Reichsführer SS expressed the German doctrine against Untermenschen by these words: