Blösche personally executed many Jews, participating in several massacres,[1] and helped send many more to their deaths in extermination camps.

Blösche became known to the world because he was photographed five times with SS forces that suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, as published in the Stroop Report.

Blösche was convicted of numerous atrocities and sentenced to death by the Erfurt regional court; he was executed in Leipzig on 29 July 1969.

His parents were ethnic Germans: his father, Gustav Blösche, owned a farm and a gasthaus (country inn).

[4] Blösche, who had previously volunteered for local SS, was drafted by the Waffen-SS on 4 December 1939 and reported to training the following day at Pretzsch Castle.

He served in the SD's Warsaw Ghetto outpost in mid-1942, when the mass deportation of Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp started.

In January 1943, during another wave of deportations to the death camps, he took part in another search, which also involved frequent murders or executions.

Blösche was sent to a camp administered by GUPVI (Main Administration for Affairs of Prisoners of War and Internees).

While working at a coal mine in August 1946, Blösche was struck by a descending hoist and suffered a fractured skull and serious facial injuries.

[11] His facial scars protected him from discovery as one of the SS troops that were pictured in the official photos taken by Germans of the Warsaw ghetto.

[4] There, he met a German woman named Hanna Schönstedt, a mother and war widow, and they had two children together before she agreed to marry him.

[16] The extradition request was denied, however, and Blösche was instead put on trial in East Germany in Erfurt in April 1969, and convicted of war crimes.

"[17] Blösche was sentenced to death and executed in Leipzig on 29 July 1969 by a single pistol shot to the back of his neck.