Arthur Greiser - Trial and Execution

Trial and Execution

After the war, the Polish government (the Supreme National Tribunal) tried him for war crimes. His defense 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 who were reasonably proficient in German to be Germans (although he was guilty of the elimination of the Jewish population under his jurisdiction either by murder or deportation). Greiser's advocates, Stanisław Hejmowski and Jan Kręglewski, tried to convince the Tribunal that Greiser, as a head of formally independent state, the Free City of Danzig, could not be judged by another country, an argument rejected by the court. Greiser was convicted for:

• Genocide and the murders of civilians and POW
• Torture, persecution, and injuring civilians and POWs
• Organized and systematic destruction of Polish culture, plunder of Polish cultural heritage, Germanisation of the country and the Polish people, illegal appropriation of public property.
• Organized and systematic looting of Polish property
• Insulting and deriding the Polish nation by propagating its cultural inferiority and low social worth
• Forcible expelling of whole districts, streets, families and singular persons to General Government or forced labor camps in German Reich
• Persecution and murder of Polish Jews by killing them in place of residence, grouping in closed ghettos from where they were sent to Chelmno extermination camp for extermination in gas chambers, deriding the Jewish people in actions and words, causing physical suffering, injury and humiliation of human dignity
• Taking Polish children against the will of their parents or guardians, forcibly putting them in German families or public orphanages within the Reich while breaking all contacts with their family and nation by giving them German names

The Tribunal decided that Greiser was guilty of all charges, and sentenced him to death by hanging, civil death, and confiscation of all his property. In the early morning of 21 July 1946 he was transported from prison to the slope of Fort Winiary where he was hanged before a large crowd. It was the last public execution in Poland.