Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger (8 May 1894 – 10 May 1945) was a German paramilitary commander in charge of, and personally involved in progressive annihilation of Polish nation, its culture, its heritage and its wealth. Long before the war he was a high-ranking member of the SA and the SS. Between 1939 and 1943 he was the Higher SS and Police Leader in the General Government, giving him command of all police and security forces in German-occupied Poland. In this capacity, he organized and supervised numerous crimes against humanity and had major responsibility for the German genocide of the Polish nation: the extermination of six million Poles (three million of them Polish Jews) and massive destruction, degradation and impoverishment of the Polish state. Never sentenced for his deeds, he committed suicide in May 1945.
Career
Krüger was born in 1894 into a military family in Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German Empire (today, Strasbourg, France). He attended the gymnasium in Rastatt and then pursued a military career as a cadet in the military school at Karlsruhe and the military academy at Gross-Lichterfelde. In June 1914, Krüger was commissioned a Leutnant in the Imperial German Army's 25th Royal Prussian Infantry Regiment. During the First World War, he served as a platoon leader, a company commander and the regimental adjutant. He was wounded three times, promoted to Oberleutnant and awarded the Iron Cross, 1st and 2nd class. In August 1919, he joined the , which he left in March 1920. He then entered civilian employment as a clerk to a bookseller and to a publisher until 1922. He got married, went to work for a waste disposal firm from 1924 to 1928 and then became a self-employed businessman.
Activities in SA and SS
While working at the refuse company, he probably met Kurt Daluege, who was an engineer at the company at that time and who later became SS commander in Berlin and leader of the Ordnungspolizei (order police) or Orpo. The two men soon formed a friendship. On 15 November 1929, Krüger joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP) as member 171,199. On 1 February 1931, he also joined the SS (member number 6,123), which he left in April to transfer to the SA. With the help of Daluege, Krüger began a rapid rise in the SA ranks. He was promoted to SA-Oberführer (31 July 1931) and SA-Gruppenführer (10 September 1931). He commanded the SA-Gruppe Ost, encompassing the Berlin area, from April 1931 to July 1932. In July 1932 he was made leader of the Group Staff in the supreme SA leadership under SA-Stabschef Ernst Röhm, and he served as the SA representative to the Reich Defense Council. In October 1932, he became a member of the State Board for Youth Physical Training.
On 27 June 1933, Krüger was promoted to SA-Obergruppenführer and appointed chief of Ausbildungswesen (Training). Cooperating closely with the Reichswehr, he used his new position to school the SA's recruits (an estimated 250,000) to become unit leaders. Krüger was not caught in the Night of the Long Knives, in which Röhm and many other high-ranking SA members were killed, and it has been speculated that his switch from the SS to the SA was only for pragmatic reasons, especially in the light of Krüger transferring the SA armouries of which he was in charge to the Reichswehr as soon as the purge began.
On 25 January 1935, Krüger re-entered the SS, was given the rank of SS-Obergruppenführer and placed on Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler's personal staff. In February 1936, he was appointed Inspector of Border Guard Units. On 16 May 1938, he was named Inspector of SS Mounted Units.
Throughout these years, Krüger also pursued a political career within the Nazi Party. At the July 1932 election, he won a seat in the Reichstag from electoral constituency 5 (Frankfurt an der Oder) and, on 10 July 1933, he was made a member of the Prussian State Council. He would hold these seats until the fall of the Nazi regime. Also he served a term as a District Councillor (Rattsherr) in Berlin from 1933 through 1935. In July 1937, he was given a seat on the People's Court and he was appointed the Reich Supreme Authority for Equestrian Sports in January 1939.
Crimes in Poland
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. Krüger thus held the highest police and security post in occupied Poland.