Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger (8 May 1894[1] – 10 May 1945) was a German paramilitary commander in charge of, and personally involved in progressive annihilation of the Polish nation, its culture, its heritage and its wealth.

Krüger was born in 1894 into a military family in Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German Empire (today, Strasbourg, France).

[7] 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.

[7] 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.

One of the men from units subordinated to Krüger: SS-Hauptsturmführer (captain) Karl Fritzsch, nota bene the deputy (Schutzhaftlagerführer) Auschwitz commander, once said to a new transport of Polish prisoners: You came here not to a holiday in Zoppot, but to the German concentration camp, from which the only way out is through a chimney.

Farmers in GG were obliged to deliver draconian amount of grain, meat, milk and potatoes, which were sent straight to Germany.

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.

Some of the goods - crucial to Polish cultural heritage like paintings: Battle of Grunwald or Prussian Homage, were hidden in a local farms.

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.

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: "Hammer the Poles until they despair of living [...] I have all the sympathy in the world for their situation, but if we want to exist we have no choice but to wipe them out: wolves are only what God made them, but we shoot them all the same when we can get at them.

Krüger's men, hand-in-hand with Order Police battalions, Einsatzgruppen and Wehrmacht were conducting during a few years time, the genocide program of quelling guerrilla activity, so-called: "anti-partisan" fighting in the General Government.

During these operations, which meant to be against Polish "bandits", as the Germans called partisans, the murders of women and children were carried out on a daily basis.

For a help given to the partisans by local farmers and their families, the entire villages were burnt to the ashes with all inhabitants (so-called pacification action).

[27] He was in charge of driving out (ethnic cleansing) of over 116,000 Polish farmers (30 thousands of them were children) from the area around Zamość,[28] known as Aktion Zamosc.

Due to Krüger, Koppe and their troops and policemen, altogether more than 6 million Poles (2.9 million of them were Polish Jews) were killed in gas chambers, in forced labour camps, during mass shootings, from hunger, disease, cold or because of mandatory expulsions from their houses or farms, and transportation of these empty-handed victims on the bare fields of General Government.

Most of the victims have perished due to political doctrine, classifying all the Slavic nations as subhumans, and other administrative and compulsory orders and restrictions set up by the new government, with SS-Obergruppenführer Krüger as the most senior commander of SS and Police in German-occupied Poland.

[33]The Polish Secret State ordered his death, but an assassination attempt on 20 April 1943 in Kraków failed when two bombs hurled at his car missed the target.

[citation needed] Six months later, he wrote in a letter: I have lost honour and reputation due to my four-year struggle in the GG (General Government) (German: Ich habe für meinen vierjährigen Kampf im GG Ehre und Reputation verloren).

[34]From November 1943 until April 1944 Krüger served with the SS Division Prinz Eugen conducting Nazi security warfare in occupied Yugoslavia.