The Stroop Report

The small group of ready Jewish partisans knew they would never win. They were not completely powerless, they had a cache of weapons, they had hearty partisan soldiers from the Ghetto, they were young and spirited, and they had vowed to go down fighting rather than be taken by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, to a certain horrible death. Mordecai Anielewicz and Yitzhak Zuckerman were the young leaders of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (described elsewhere). Although they nobly held off the Nazi Stormtroopers for weeks, far longer than anyone envisioned, the result was also as they had expected: all but a few few were killed, the remaining residents of the Warsaw Ghetto were either shot, or deported to the killing centers and executed. The Ghetto was burned, bombed and destroyed.

The Officer in charge of the destruction of the Ghetto was Jurgen Stroop: a fierce and merciless National Socialist who gave the order to kill and destroy. Born in 1885, and 58 at the time of the Uprising, Stroop headed a battalion of Waffen SS who marched into the ghetto to put down an earlier incident. Every apartment and living space in the ghetto was search; any Jewish person found was either shot or rounded up. All buildings were destroyed or burned: later they would be bulldozed. No one was spared, even children were the victims. One eyewitness telegram sent hurriedly to the United States describes women and children jumping from burning buildings amidst flames, with onlookers crying "Komm, komm". (Jump, jump).¹ Contrasting the bitter destructions, one witness on the outside of the ghetto reported the billowing black smoke (see Ghettos while a children's merry-go-round ride was allowing aryan children amusement.

One of the best accounts of the last days of the Warsaw Ghetto came from a document called "The Stroop Report". Jurgen Stroop in addition to being a meticulous and cruel soldier, was also a meticulous record keeper: at each stage of the destruction of the Ghetto, he took copious pictures with attending notes about what was being burned and what was happening. The ubiquitous notes of the Nazis were schizophenic in nature: they both wished to glory in their destructions and record what they though would be a new Aryan history, and yet as allied troops moved closer and closer

to their borders, many of these detailed notes and records were burned and destroyed to hide what they had done, evidencing their knowledge of the criminal nature of their acts, even in wartime. The Stroop notes existed entirely intact providing a detailed account of the burning and bombing complete with photographs and notes. When the last of the Jews were killed or arrested, (56,065 were rounded up; about one third killed, and several thousand died in bombings and fires) Stroop wired his superiors with the infamous line, "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more". Today, there is a monument where the Ghetto once stood.

Stroop was later appointed head of the SS in Greece, making him effectively the governing leader of Greece. Under Stroop a 'puppet' Greek government was formed who were sympathetic to the Nazis, and considered by many in Greece to be traitors. He was captured after the war arrested and tried at the Dachau Trials,² and found guilty of war Crimes. He was then extradicted to the Warsaw Tribunal, & sentenced to death. His execution took place in Warsaw on September 8, 1951.