On June 7, 1933, he became a member of the SS. He was the German Commissioner of the Warsaw Ghetto ("Kommissar für den jüdischen Wohnbezirk"), from April 1941 to November 1942. While the Nazis depicted themselves as administrators and managers pursuing a would-be "productionalist policy of economic independence providing the Ghetto with essential materials for its inhabitants continual survival until the adoption of the final solution", in reality they were already pursuing the National Socialist goal of exterminating European Jewry through starvation, exposure and diseases induced by abysmal living conditions.