Jürgen Stroop
Jürgen Stroop razed the Warsaw ghetto in the spring of 1943 and wrote a seventy-five-page report about it, with photographs, bound in leather for Himmler, which is the document that convicted him. He was born Josef Stroop in Detmold in 1895, a policeman's son, wounded in the First World War, a land-registry clerk afterwards, and a Nazi from 1932; he changed his first name to Jürgen in 1941 because Josef sounded Catholic. He rose in the SS as an administrator rather than a soldier. It was as SS and police leader that Himmler sent him to Warsaw on 19 April 1943, when the first attempt to clear the ghetto had been driven back by the Jewish Combat Organisation with pistols and petrol bombs. Stroop's method was to burn the ghetto block by block and shoot or gas the people the fire drove out of the cellars. It took four weeks against a few hundred fighters, and he ended it on 16 May by blowing up the Great Synagogue on Tlomackie Street, an act he described in the report as a fitting close. The report's title is that the Jewish quarter of Warsaw no longer exists. Its tally is 56,065 Jews captured or killed, and its photographs, including the boy with his hands up, are the images most people carry of the Holocaust. He commanded police in Greece and the Rhineland afterwards, was captured by the Americans in 1945, sentenced to death at Dachau for the murder of American airmen, and handed to Poland, which tried him in Warsaw in 1951 with his own report as the evidence. In the Mokotów prison he shared a cell for nine months with Kazimierz Moczarski, a Home Army officer the communists had also condemned, whose account of their conversations is the best portrait of him. He was hanged on 6 March 1952.
- Lived: 1895 CE – 1952 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: military, ss_officer, war_criminal
