Josef Blösche was a Sudeten German which was a name for ethnic Germans that lived in Czechoslovakia. In 1933 Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party came into power in Germany.
In 1935, Josef Blösche joined the Sudeten German Party which was a major pro-Nazi force in Czechoslovakia with the explicit official aim of breaking the country up and joining it to the Third Reich.
In the night from the 29th to the 30th of September 1938, Germany, Italy, Great Britain, and France signed the Munich agreement, by which Czechoslovakia was forced to surrender Sudeteland, its border regions and defenses, to Nazi Germany. German troops started to occupy these regions between the 1st and 10th of October 1938.
On the 13th of January 1939 Blösche applied for admission to the Nazi party and was admitted retrospectively to the 1st of November 1938. Soon after he joined the SS.
On the 15th of March 1939, less than 6 months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia and one day later Adolf Hitler, by a proclamation from Prague Castle, established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia which by contrast to the Sudetenland, consisted mostly of ethnic Czechs.
The Second World War started on the 1st of September 1939 with the invasion of Poland. Warsaw suffered heavy air attacks and artillery bombardment and German troops entered the capital on 29th of September shortly after its surrender.
The campaign in Poland ended on the 6th of October the same year with Germany and the Soviet Union dividing and annexing the whole of the country.
Blösche briefly served in Warsaw beginning in March 1940 and was then deployed 120 kilometers east of the capital patrolling 6 miles of the Bug River which was the dividing line between German Wehrmacht and Soviet Red Army zones.
This border no longer existed from Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 when Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, started.
The 3,000 personnel of four Einsatzgruppen were sent to the Eastern Front to kill the Jews and Gypsies, as well as Soviet political commissars. From August 1941 Blösche served with Einsatzkommando 8 which was assigned to the Einsatzgruppe B responsible for mass shootings in Belarus.
In mid-1942, Joseph Blösche was again transferred, this time to the Warsaw ghetto. German authorities had decreed the establishment of a ghetto in Warsaw on the 12th of October 1940. The decree required all Jewish residents of Warsaw to move into a designated area, which German authorities sealed off from the rest of the city in November 1940.The population of the ghetto, increased by Jews compelled to move in from nearby towns, was estimated to be over 400,000 Jews. German authorities forced ghetto residents to live in an area of 1.3 square miles, with an average of 7.2 persons per room...
