Background
Jurgen Stroopwas born on 26 September 1895 in Detmold. He was the son of a policeman and raised in a lower- middle-class, Catholic milieu.
Jurgen Stroopwas born on 26 September 1895 in Detmold. He was the son of a policeman and raised in a lower- middle-class, Catholic milieu.
Volunteered for military service in World War I, from which he returned as a Vice-Sergeant. Appointed SS Sergeant in 1934, Stroop had advanced to the position of SS-Brigadeführer and Colonel in the police by 1939.
On 23 April 1943 he complained that his operations were being made more difficult by ‘the cunning ways in which the Jews and bandits behave. For example, we discovered that the wagons used to collect the scattered corpses were also caning live Jews to the Jewish cemetery, thus enabling them to escape outside the ghetto.'
By 25 April Stroop had combed out much of the ghetto and taken prisoner 25,000 Jews. He noted: ‘I am going to obtain a train for T2 [Treblinka] tomorrow, otherwise liquidation will be carried out forthwith. Not one of the Jews whom we have caught remains in Warsaw.' On 16 May 1943 Stroop reported that the ‘operation’ was complete: 14,000 Jews had either been killed in the ghetto or sent to Treblinka death camp and another 42,000 to Lublin labour camps, while unknown numbers had been buried under the débris or burnt alive. Stroop recorded his deeds in a boastful seventy-five-page report bound together in black pebble leather and including copies of all daily communiqués sent to his superior officer as well as photographs with captions in Gothic script like ‘Smoking out the Jews and bandits'. The Stroop-Bericht was later published in Warsaw in 1960 and a German edition appeared in 1976.
General Stroop was awarded the Iron Cross (First Class) in recognition of his services and was then transferred to Greece, where he was appointed a Higher SS and Police Leader.
On 22 March 1947 he was sentenced to death by an American military tribunal at Dachau for shooting American pilots and hostages in Greece. He was subsequently extradited to Poland in 1948, re-tried and executed as a ‘fascist hangman' in Warsaw on 8 September 1951.
During World War II he proved himself an expert in the ‘pacification’ of civilian populations in the occupied lands of Czechoslovakia, Soviet Russia, Poland and Greece. A cold, puritanical Nazi who worshipped General Ludendorff and had absorbed the anti-semitic ideas of his fanatical wife, Stroop idealized authority and power, to which he always displayed servile deference.
He savagely put down the Warsaw ghetto rebellion of April-May 1943, which had begun when the Jewish Combat organization, fighting from rooftops and cellars, took on the armoured cars, tanks and trucks of the SS and Wehrmacht. General Stroop had been sent to Warsaw from Lemberg (Galicia) to remove the 56,000 surviving Jews from the ghetto. He moved in to crush the revolt and originally planned to annihilate the ghetto in three days, but the fighting lasted until mid-May with some 300 Germans killed and about a 1,000 wounded by the ghetto fighters.
Stroop, who treated the liquidation of the Jewish community as a military campaign, had just over 2,000 men at his disposal, including two SS training battalions and some Wehrmacht details. His diaries and despatches, which record the daily killings with cold-blooded brutality, express his surprise that the Warsaw Jews ‘despite the danger of being burned alive, preferred to return to the flames, rather than be caught by us’.
