In 1941 the Nazi Gestapo "Obersturmbannführer" (Lt. Col.) Josef Meisinger, the "Butcher of Warsaw", acting as the Gestapo's liaison with the German Embassy in Tokyo and the Imperial Japanese Army's own "Kenpeitai" military police and security service, tried to influence the Japanese to "exterminate" or enslave approximately 18,000–20,000 Jews who had escaped from Austria and Germany and who were living in Japanese-occupied Shanghai. His proposals included the creation of a concentration camp on Chongming Island in the delta of the Yangtze or starvation on freighters off the coast of China. The Japanese admiral who ran Shanghai would not yield to pressure from Meisinger. However, the Japanese built a ghetto in the Shanghai neighborhood of Hongkew (which had already been planned in Tokyo in 1939), a slum with about twice the population density of Manhattan, which remained strictly isolated by Japanese soldiers under the command of the sadistic official Kanoh Ghoya, and which Jews could only leave with special permission. Some 2,000 Jews died in the Shanghai ghetto. The Japanese government did not accept Meisinger's requests, and never persecuted the Jews under its control. Meisinger's plans were reduced to the creation of what came to be known as the Shanghai ghetto.