Arthur Greiser
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Arthur Greiser (born January 22, 1897, in Schroda, Province of Posen, West Prussia (Środa, Poland); executed July 14, 1946, at Poznan, Poland) was a Nazi German politician .
Greiser joined the Nazi party and SA in 1929 and the SS in 1931. He was the Senate President (Senatspräsident) of the Free City of Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) (1935–1939), and the administrator (Reichsstatthalter und Gauleiter) of Reichsgau Wartheland (1939–1945).
Greiser typified the brutality exhibited by officials of Nazi Germany to the Poles. He was an ardent racist who enthusiastically pursued an 'ethnic cleansing' program to rid the Warthegau of Poles and to resettle the 'cleansed' areas with ethnic Germans. This was along the lines of the racial theories espoused by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler. Mass expulsions of Poles from the Warthegau to the General Government and summary executions were the norm.
After the war, the Poles tried him for war crimes. His plea 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 of responsibility proficient in German to be Germans. After Greiser was convicted, he was paraded around the city of Poznan in a cage before being hanged.de:Arthur Greiser pl:Arthur Greiser sv:Arthur Greiser