On a May morning in 1943, a small boy stepped out of a dark building in the burning Warsaw Ghetto, his hands raised above his head. He was six, maybe seven years old, dressed in a cap and an oversized coat that hung past his knees. Around him, Jewish men, women, and children were being forced from the bunker where they had hidden, driven out by German soldiers with machine guns. The boy did not look at the camera.

His face was turned slightly away, his mouth open, his eyes fixed on something beyond the lens. A soldier stood a few paces behind him, the barrel of his submachine gun pointed down at the child’s back. The photograph taken in that moment would become one of the most famous images of the Holocaust. The boy’s identity would never be established, and he came to represent all the children and all the Jewish victims of the genocide.

The only person in the photograph ever identified was the soldier behind the boy: SS-Rottenführer Josef Blösche, a man who would be known to Warsaw’s Jews by another name. They called him the Nazi Frankenstein. —

Josef Blösche was born on 12 February 1912 in Friedland, a town in the Bohemian lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His parents were ethnic Germans.

He left school at fourteen and worked on the family farm, and also as a waiter in his parents’ inn. In 1932 he joined the Sudeten German Party, a pro-Nazi organization that backed German expansion into the region. When Germany annexed the Sudetenland in 1938, he joined the Nazi Party, and then volunteered for the Allgemeine SS, the general SS. On 4 December 1939, he was drafted into the Waffen-SS, the armed wing of the SS, and after completing his training he was assigned to Warsaw, on patrol duty.

For a time, Blösche served in Warsaw with the SS, patrolling a stretch of the Bug River. Then he joined the Sicherheitsdienst, Siegfried Heiden’s security service of the SS. In June 1941, Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, and Blösche was transferred to the Eastern Front, where he served with the Einsatzgruppen, the mobile death squads responsible for the mass shootings and massacres of Jews, partisans, and civilians in the occupied Soviet territories. The war on the Eastern Front became the largest military conflict in history, and it produced the most horrific atrocities, the highest casualties, mass deportations, starvation, disease, and massacre.

Blösche took part in rapes, tortures, and executions of innocent people throughout the occupied parts of the Soviet Union. —

In October 1942, Blösche was transferred back to Warsaw. The mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka extermination camp had begun that summer, and he was assigned to guard duty at the ghetto walls. Hundreds of thousands were being sent to their deaths, and many of those still inside the ghetto went into hiding, burrowing into bunkers, attics, and hidden rooms to escape the roundups.

Blösche became expert at finding them. He learned to discover hiding places and secret passages, and he took part in the shooting of about a thousand Jews in 1943. Along with other SS men, he would ride into the ghetto on a bicycle and shoot any Jew he encountered. He killed many outright and sent many more to their deaths in the extermination camps.

He also participated in several massacres, including one in which he raped and killed a woman inside the ghetto. His cruelty became notorious. According to one Warsaw Ghetto survivor, Blösche was the worst of all, because he killed people for no reason. —

In April 1943, the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up in revolt.

The Germans had intended to liquidate the ghetto and ship its remaining inhabitants to Treblinka, but the Jewish fighters resisted, firing from windows, roofs, and bunkers. The German forces, under SS-General Jürgen Stroop, were sent in to crush the uprising. Blösche participated in the suppression of the revolt, which lasted for nearly a month. For his actions during the uprising, he was awarded the German War Merit Cross.

It was during these weeks that the famous photograph was taken. The boy in the picture was one of the ghetto’s last inhabitants, pulled from a bunker along with the others. Blösche stood behind him with his submachine gun, part of the SS squad that had forced the group out. Once the photograph was taken, all the Jews in it were deported to the Treblinka or Majdanek extermination camps.

After the ghetto was destroyed, Blösche remained in Warsaw. In 1944, he participated in the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising, the Polish revolt against German occupation that lasted sixty-three days before the city was reduced to rubble. —

In May 1945, with the collapse of Nazi Germany, Blösche surrendered to the Red Army and became a prisoner of war of the Soviet Union. He was sent to a labor camp, where he worked in a coal mine.

In August 1946, he suffered a serious accident at work: a skull fracture and severe facial injuries that left one side of his face badly deformed. In 1947, his labor camp was dissolved, and the Soviets released him. The scars on his face saved him. Because of his disfigurement, no one identified him as a former SS soldier, and he was able to slip back into civilian life.

He moved to Urspringen, in East Germany, married, and had two children. He did not change his name, but he lived quietly in a small village for many years, unnoticed and at peace. He never spoke of his role in the war. For more than a decade, his past stayed buried.

Then, in 1961, a former SS man who was on trial for war crimes in Hamburg told the German authorities about the atrocities Blösche had committed in the Warsaw Ghetto. The East German police opened an investigation, and Blösche was identified. On 11 January 1967, he was arrested. —

The trial took place in Erfurt, in April 1969.

Blösche confessed to the executions, the rapes, and his participation in the mass deportations. During the trial, the court brought up the events depicted in the famous photograph of the Warsaw Ghetto boy, and questioned him about that moment. The judge asked: “You were with a submachine gun against the small boy whom you extracted from a building with his hands raised. How did those inhabitants react in those moments?

”

Blösche answered: “They were in tremendous dread. ”

The judge pressed him: “This is reflected in that little boy. What did you think? ”

Blösche said: “We witnessed scenes like this daily.

We could not even think. ”

He was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. On 29 July 1969, in Leipzig, Josef Blösche was executed by a single bullet shot to the head. His body was cremated at the Leipzig South Cemetery, and his ashes were buried at the same site.

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The boy in the photograph was never identified. He remains nameless, a face that came to represent not only the children of the Holocaust, but all its Jewish victims, and the millions who were murdered in the Nazi extermination camps. Josef Blösche is the only person in the photograph who has ever been identified.

He became known to the world because he was photographed five times with the SS forces that suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and in at least one of those photographs, the image of the boy with his raised hands would outlive him.