The Stroop Report is the official German account of the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April and May 1943, written and presented by SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop, the SS officer who commanded the operation. It runs to 75 pages, contains 53 photographs, and is bound in black leather with a typeset title page reading Es gibt keinen judischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr, There is no Jewish district in Warsaw any more. Stroop wrote the report as a presentation copy for Heinrich Himmler. It is one of the strangest and most damning documents of the Holocaust. The man who burned the Warsaw ghetto was so proud of what he had done that he had a souvenir album made.
What the report contains
The text describes, in daily entries from 19 April to 16 May 1943, the SS operation to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto and to suppress the Jewish armed resistance that met the operation. Stroop’s prose is bureaucratic and self-congratulatory. He praises the bravery and discipline of his men. He records casualty figures: 16 SS men killed, 85 wounded. He records Jewish casualties: around 13,000 dead in the ghetto, mostly from being burned alive when the SS set fire to the buildings systematically, plus another 56,000 deported to Treblinka or Majdanek and there gassed.
The photographs are the part of the report best known today. They were taken by SS photographers attached to the operation. They show ghetto inhabitants emerging from cellars under SS guard with their hands up, ghetto buildings on fire, SS men posing with captured weapons. The single most-reproduced photograph in the entire visual record of the Holocaust is from this report: a small boy, perhaps seven years old, in a peaked cap and short trousers, hands raised, walking out of a building under the rifle of an SS soldier. The boy’s identity has never been established with certainty. He almost certainly did not survive the war. The image is on the cover of dozens of books on the Holocaust and is one of the few images that almost any reader of those books will recognise on sight.
What the report shows about Stroop
Stroop’s tone in the report is the most chilling thing about it. He treats the Warsaw operation as a successful military campaign. He acknowledges Jewish resistance and grants it a kind of grudging respect, while making clear that the resisters were of course doomed and that the SS conducted itself with proper military bearing throughout. The report is not a confession or a private record. It is a presentation document. Stroop wanted Himmler, and through Himmler the wider Nazi leadership, to know what he had done.
The report also makes clear, in passing, the methods used. The SS systematically burned the ghetto block by block, setting fire to the buildings to drive Jews out of the cellars and bunkers where they were hiding. People who came out were shot or deported. People who did not come out were burned alive. The Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street was demolished with explosives by Stroop personally on 16 May 1943, the last day of the operation. Stroop later told an Allied interrogator that pressing the detonator had been a fantastic show.
The discovery of the report
The Stroop Report was found among the captured German files in 1945. There were three known copies. One was used at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, where it was registered as Document PS-1061 and used in evidence against the SS. The original copy presented to Himmler was found in the Reich Main Security Office files. A second copy belonging to Stroop himself was recovered later. The report was the central piece of evidence at Stroop’s own subsequent trials.
What happened to Stroop
Jürgen Stroop was captured by the Americans in 1945. He was tried at Dachau in 1947 for the killing of American prisoners of war, sentenced to death, and his sentence commuted to life imprisonment. He was then extradited to Poland in 1947, tried in Warsaw in 1951 for the destruction of the Warsaw ghetto, sentenced to death again, and hanged in March 1952. While in Polish prison awaiting trial he had long conversations with a fellow inmate, Kazimierz Moczarski, a non-communist Polish resistance officer who had been imprisoned by the new communist government. Moczarski survived and published the conversations in 1972 as Conversations with an Executioner. The book is one of the strangest and most useful accounts of the SS officer mind, written by a man who shared a cell with one for nine months.
What the report is now
The Stroop Report sits in two places. The original copy presented to Himmler is in the United States National Archives. Photographs from it are in every Holocaust museum in the world. It has been reproduced in full in scholarly editions, with English translations of the text. It is required reading for anyone who wants to understand both what the SS did at Warsaw and how the men who did it thought of themselves.
The boy with his hands up has become, more than any other single image, the visual symbol of the Holocaust. The image is reproduced for that reason. It is also a reminder of where it came from: not from a sympathetic photographer recording an atrocity, but from an SS photographer producing souvenir material for a presentation album. The Holocaust supplied its own visual record, and a great deal of that record is what the perpetrators chose to keep.
See also
Sources
- Jürgen Stroop, The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is No More!, Pantheon, 1979
- Kazimierz Moczarski, Conversations with an Executioner, Prentice-Hall, 1981
- Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1994
- USHMM: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising