The Stroop Report is a Fabrication

The Stroop Report is a 75-page leather-bound presentation volume titled “Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!” (“There is no Jewish residential area in Warsaw any more!”), prepared by SS-Brigadeführer Jürgen Stroop in May 1943 immediately after his suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 19 April to 16 May 1943. Three copies were produced. One was sent to Heinrich Himmler, one to the Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich Wilhelm Krüger in Krakow, and Stroop kept one for himself. The Krüger copy was captured at Krakow Castle by Polish forces in 1945 and used in evidence at Nuremberg (as Document PS-1061). The Stroop personal copy was captured at Wiesbaden by US forces and is now at the US National Archives. The Himmler copy has not been definitively located, though fragments may have survived. The deniers’ claim that the report is a post-war construction has the awkward problem that two original copies survive, with full chain of custody and forensic authentication.

What the report contains

The report consists of three sections. The first is a 12-page narrative report by Stroop on the suppression of the uprising, written in standard SS reporting style with daily entries from 19 April to 16 May 1943. The narrative describes the units involved (Waffen-SS Panzergrenadier Reserve and Training Battalion 3, Waffen-SS Cavalry Reserve Battalion, the Order Police Battalion 22, Trawniki guards, Polish auxiliary police), the methods (systematic burning of buildings to drive out the resistance fighters; systematic search of bunkers; mass shootings on capture), and the daily totals of “Jews captured or destroyed” (Juden erfasst beziehungsweise vernichtet). The total at the end of the operation is given as 56,065 Jews “captured or destroyed”, of whom approximately 7,000 were killed in the immediate fighting and the remainder deported to Treblinka or shot at the Umschlagplatz.

The second section is a 32-page series of daily teletype messages from Stroop to Krüger, dated and timed, recording the day-by-day progress of the operation. The teletypes include the daily kill counts, the units engaged, the buildings burned, and the casualties (the German side reported 16 killed and 90 wounded across the operation). The teletypes are the operational reporting record contemporaneous with the events. They were sent in real time during the operation and survive in the Krüger copy.

The third section is approximately 53 photographs, taken by SS photographers attached to Stroop’s units during the operation. The photographs include the famous image of a small boy with his hands raised, being marched out of a bunker by an SS soldier with a submachine gun (the so-called Warsaw Ghetto Boy photograph), as well as scenes of buildings burning, of captured fighters, of dead bodies, and of the systematic destruction of the ghetto. The photographs have been examined repeatedly for forensic authenticity; the camera types, film stocks, and developing characteristics are consistent with standard German military photography of 1943.

Authentication and chain of custody

The Krüger copy was captured at Krakow Castle in early 1945 by Polish forces of the advancing Red Army and Polish auxiliaries. The chain of custody from Krakow to the Polish state archives to the Nuremberg prosecution is documented in the Polish prosecution’s case file. The Polish prosecutor at Nuremberg, Stefan Kurowski, was the one who placed the report in evidence at the IMT in December 1945, where it was admitted as PS-1061. The Stroop personal copy was captured at Wiesbaden in 1945 by US Army intelligence as part of the standard document seizure operation and went via the Allied document processing chain to the National Archives. Both copies bear the original SS classification stamps, the original distribution markings, and the original signatures of the responsible officers.

The forensic examination of the report was conducted by the Polish state forensic laboratories in 1946 (for the Krakow copy) and by US Army document specialists in 1945 to 1946 (for the Wiesbaden copy). Both examinations confirmed: that the paper was wartime German paper of the 1942 to 1943 stock; that the typewriter (a standard SS-issue Adler) matched the typewriters used by the Krakow SS office for other surviving correspondence; that the binding (leather over paste-board, with the SS embossing) was consistent with the high-end presentation bindings used by the SS for Himmler-direct reports; that the photographs were on Agfa wartime film stock with developing characteristics consistent with the period; and that Stroop’s signature on the title page matched the signatures on his other surviving correspondence.

Stroop’s own confirmation

Jürgen Stroop himself was captured by US forces in 1945, transferred to American custody, then handed over to Poland in 1947. At his Polish trial in Warsaw in July 1951, he testified about the suppression of the uprising and about his report. He confirmed that he had personally written the narrative section, that he had supervised the production of the bound presentation copies, and that the photographs in the report were ones he had ordered taken. He gave the same account, in greater detail, in conversations with his cellmate Kazimierz Moczarski (an officer of the Polish Home Army awaiting his own trial) over the period of his imprisonment. Moczarski’s account, published as Conversations with an Executioner (Polish original 1977; English edition 1981), is one of the most detailed perpetrator accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto operation. Stroop was sentenced to death by the Polish court and hanged on 6 March 1952. His confirmation of the report was given over a period of years in two different settings; he had no incentive to confirm a forgery.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it asks the listener to dismiss a document with two surviving original copies, full chain of custody from the SS office of origin to the post-war courts, multiple forensic authentications, and the perpetrator’s own confirmation under oath. The Stroop Report is one of the most evidentially solid documents in the entire Holocaust corpus. The denial is therefore the move of asserting forgery as a default and refusing to engage with the forensic record, the chain of custody, the perpetrator’s testimony, and the simple reality that the operation the report describes is corroborated at every level by the surviving Jewish accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (the diaries of Mordechai Anielewicz, the Oneg Shabbat archive of Emanuel Ringelblum, the testimonies of the few survivors of the operation), by the Polish underground reports of the period, and by the post-war recollections of the surviving German participants.

How many copies of the Stroop Report survive? Where are they held? What did Stroop say about it under oath?

See also

• The Stroop Report
• Heinrich Himmler
• The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 1943

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Sources

• Jürgen Stroop, Es gibt keinen jüdischen Wohnbezirk in Warschau mehr!, May 1943, Krüger copy held at the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw, with Nuremberg Document number PS-1061; Stroop personal copy held at the US National Archives, College Park
• Andrzej Żbikowski (ed.), The Stroop Report, Polish-English critical edition, Institute of National Remembrance, 2009
• Sybil Milton (ed.), The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!, Pantheon, 1979, English edition with the photographs and texts
• Kazimierz Moczarski, Rozmowy z katem, Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1977; English edition Conversations with an Executioner, edited by Mariana Fitzpatrick, Prentice-Hall, 1981
• Polish Trial of Jürgen Stroop, Warsaw, July 1951, transcripts in the Institute of National Remembrance, Warsaw
• Israel Gutman, Resistance: The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, Houghton Mifflin, 1994
• Emanuel Ringelblum, Notes from the Warsaw Ghetto: The Journal of Emmanuel Ringelblum, edited by Jacob Sloan, Schocken, 1958, with the parallel Jewish-side account
• Marek Edelman, The Ghetto Fights, Bookmarks, 1990
• Richard C. Lukas, The Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation 1939 to 1944, Hippocrene, 1986, with Polish underground reports on the operation
• Frédéric Rousseau, L’Enfant juif de Varsovie: Histoire d’une photographie, Editions du Seuil, 2009, on the Warsaw Ghetto Boy photograph and its provenance
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Warsaw Ghetto Uprising” and “Stroop Report”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org