Friday, December 21, 1979
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
Major General Juergen
(Josef) Stroop was hanged
in 1951 in Warsaw for his
crimes as the Nazi director
of the destruction of the
Warsaw Ghetto. He had
compiled and published his
personal record of the War-
saw Ghetto resistance
under the title "The Jewish
Quarter of Warsaw Is No
More," as his Stroop Report.
The misrepresentations it
contained, the manner in
which he sought to
minimize his own barbaric
22
rStroop Report' Dissected in Prof. Andrzej Wirth's Expose of Mass
Murderer's Aim to Minimize His Warsaw Ghetto Liquidation Guilt
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role, is exposed in a fac-
simile edition of his text,
with explanatory state-
ments exposing the crimi-
nal by Andrzej Wirth.
The book, with an intro-
duction by Wirth, was
translated and edited by
Sybil Milton and is a De-
cember release from Panth-
eon.
The immense value of
this book is in the intro-
duction which exposes
the crimes and the crimi-
nal.
The many photographs in
his book, for example, indi-
cate the distortions. He re-
fers to the Jewish victims as
"Dregs of Humanity" and
"These Bandits." Naturally,
he did not give an indication
that those he had belittled
had resisted the mighty
German forces, exacted a
heavy toll from the Ger-
mans and recorded one of
the most heroic acts of defy-
ing an enemy by refusing to
be subjected to tyranny.
For 28 days, during the
Passover month of 1943,
Jews organized and con-
ducted the resistance in the
Warsaw Ghetto. Most of
their weapons were home-
made. The official Nazi ac-
count of the battle of the
helpless against the
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mighty, embodied in the
Stroop Report, is the his-
toric occurrence inerasable
as courage and dignity.
Originally bound in black
leather as a memento for SS
Chief Himmler, the report
was assembled by Stroop,
the commander of the oper-
ation which liquidated the
ghetto. The document has
an introduction by Stroop
himself. It contains 32 tele-
types serving as descrip-
tions of the daily operations
of the Nazi forces in
macabre detail.
The bizarre document,
hitherto unknown in the
English-speaking world,
is as chilling as the events
depicted.
The distortions are indi-
cated in the essay appended
to the report by Wirth, who
edited the first published
edition of the report. The
technical and bureaucratic
language of the report is
indicated by Wirth, among
them:
"The Stroop album is the
classical product of an ob-
session with documentation
in our technological age.
Everything is inventoried
and documented by the
bureaucratic machine —
and mass murder is no ex-
ception. The daily com-
muniques sent by teletype
to Krueger in Cracow are
pedantic, factual, profes-
sional, and expressed in fig-
ures. Mass murder is
abstracted into a statistical
quantity: 'The total number
of Jews apprehended has
risen to 55,885.' The count
includes attack and block-
ade forces, losses, booty,
ammunition, and bunkers
blown up."
The basic facts regarding
the Jewish resistance and
the Nazi distortions relat-
ing to them are presented by
Wirth as follows:
"The reader should
critically examine some
of Strg,op's statistics.
Stroop tried to minimize
his own losses, perhaps
to impress his superiors.
The casualty list prob-
ably included only the
names and estimated that
between 400 and 700
Germans were killed or
wounded.
The report is also silent
about the fact that during
the Ghetto revolt and after
that, until October 1944,
Poles arrested in the 'A-
ryan' part of the city were
routinely taken to the •
ghetto for liquidation.
"According to informa-
tion provided by Kazimierz
Moczarski, the number of
Jews who were murdered
during the ghetto revolt and
the number of Poles who
were then or subsequently
killed was the same —
about 20,000 each. In fact,
the largest mass execution
of Poles, approximately 575
men and women, took place
in the ghetto on May 30,
1943.
"In the end, the report be-
came the victim of its own
obsession with numbers.
The booty of more than a
month's 'battle' between
almost 2,000 troops and
60,000 Jews and bandits' is
startlingly sparse: 'seven
Polish rifles, one USSR
rifle, one German rifle, 59
pistols of various calibers,
several hundred hand gre-
nades, including Polish and
handmade ones, a few
hundred incendiary bottles,
homemade explosives, and
time bombs with fuses.' "
Wirth continues this ex-
pose by indicating the fol-
lowing:
The language of fas-
cism appears in the
Stroop Report practi-
cally unfiltered through
any kind of ideological
screen; it is precise and
direct for its purposes,
even though it represents
a distortion of German
usage. It is the lingua of
the technological age, to
be studied for its use in
relation to mass murder.
"It is interesting that
even in Stroop's more
ideological introduction the
term 'final solution' re-
mains taboo; he writes
about mass resettlements
whose purpose or result is
not mentioned. Mass reset-
tlements were ideas fixes of
both Hitler and Stalin. In
the lingua of the Stroop Re-
port, they are called 'trans-
fers,' an ingenious word for
what it describes — the road
from a transit camp to an
extermination camp, with
the latter usually referred
to only by code number, e.g.,
T II for Treblinka.
"The following synonyms
were used to describe the
place of forced Jewish resi-
dential segregation: the
Jewish quarter, ghetto or
remnant ghetto, quarantine
district, reservation and
confinement.
"'Transported onward'
and 'transferred' are both
euphemisms for a course of
action whose aim, disguised
in meta-language, was to
'protect the Aryan popula-
tion from the Jews.'
"Just as perverse is the
use of the adjective 'volun-
tary.' Behavior which bends
to the will of the master race
is 'voluntary.' This makes
the following sentence
possible: 'The Jews no
longer considered voluntary
resettlement but were de-
termined to resist with all
weapons and means at their
disposal.'
"The destruction of the
Warsaw Ghetto reached
its symbolic end when the
synagogue was blown up.
Also symbolic was the
fact that Dzielna-Prison
of the Security Police was
spared in order `to
change (it) into a concen-
tration camp and to use
the prisoners to strip
down and collect the mil-
lions of bricks, scrap iron
and other materials for
further utilization.' "
"The Stroop Report deals
with one particular phase of
the 'final solution,' the
Nazis' name for their genoc-
idal program for European
Jews. This phase was
unique, an isolated instance
of organized Jewish resis-
tance against extermina-
tion, after the population of
the Warsaw Ghetto had
been reduced by daily de-
portations from almost half
a million to about 60,000
sur
4h
iveors
hi.
s torian and eye-
witness
Emanuel
Ringelblum wrote that 'the
resettlement should not
have been permitted. We
should have run out into the
streets, set fire to every-
thing in sight, torn down
the walls, escaped to the
Other Side. The Germans
would have taken their re-
venge. It would have cost
tens of thousands of lives,
but not 300,000. Now we are
ashamed of 01 rselves, dis-
graced in our ,wn eyes and
in the eyes )f the world,
where our doc.lity earned us
nothing. This must not be
repeated now. We must put
up resistance, defend our-
selves against the enemy,
man and child.'-
Andrzej Wirth, born in
1927, grew up in Warsaw
and was the cultural editor
of the Warsaw weekly
"Polityka." He is now a
noted U.S. literary and
drama critic and a professor
of comparative literature.
• • •
-
Polish Resistance
Hero Shared a Cell
With the Nazi Stroop
An interesting item the
German Tribune published
in Hamburg, dated Dec. 2,
relates how Kazimierz Moc-
zarski, one of ffie heroes of
the Warsaw Ghetto upris-
ing and Juergen Stroop. the
Nazi who was in command
of the ghetto, came to share
the same prison cell in War-
saw in 1949.
According to the article:
Dieter laihn's "Talks
with the' Executioner"
now being premiered at
the Dusseldorf Schaus-
pielhaus, are a
dramatized version of
Moczarski's account of
conversations with
Stroop.
Moczarski
Moczarski himself was in
prison accused of being a
fascist and a Gestapo agent.
He was clearly innocent but
the purpose of the exercise
was to break his morale.
It was the Stalinist era.
For nine months arch-
enemies Moczarski and
Stroop were cell-mates (as a
resistance fighter Moc-
zarski had taken part in an
attempt on Stroop's life).
Moczarski did not do the
Polish Government "by the
grace of Stalin" the favor of
confessing to being a
traitor.
In 1952 Stroop was exe-
cuted and Moczarski sen-
tenced to death. The sen-
tence was later com-
muted to life imprison-
ment. In 1956, in the
course of destalinization ,
e zn rski was rehabili-
t l ocd
Not until 1971, four years
before his death, did Moc-
zarski decide to write down
his conversations with the
executioner which had
taken place 20 years before.