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Jürgen Stroop was an SS general (German: Gruppenführer). He took part in the occupation of the so-called Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. In occupied Poland he actively participated in pacification actions. These were punitive measures designed by Nazi Germany to inflict terror on the civilian population of occupied Polish villages and towns with the use of military and police force. In the occupied territories of the Soviet Union, Stroop was involved in actions against the partisans. In the spring of 1943, he was ordered to pacify the Warsaw Ghetto.
Stroop was a trusted officer of Heinrich Himmler. After the outbreak of World War II, he participated in the murder of Poles and Jews in the Polish territories that were part of the Third Reich (the so-called Wartheland). Stroop’s efficient and effective work was recognised, and after Germany attacked the Soviet Union, he was sent to the East. As head of the SS and Police, he was a specialist in combating partisans, and worked in Ukraine and the Caucasus.
In the spring of 1943, he returned to Poland where he was directed to exterminate the Warsaw Ghetto. On April 19, an uprising broke out there, and Stroop was in charge of suppressing the Jewish revolt. During the pacification of the ghetto, he compiled daily reports, which he sent directly to Heinrich Himmler.
His documentation of the pacification was extremely conscientious, and the so-called “Stroop Report” included many photographs capturing the murder of the insurgents. In his report, Stroop wrote:
The course of the Great Action on 16 May 1943, 10 am. 180 Jews, bandits and subhumans were exterminated. The former Jewish residential area of Warsaw ceased to exist. The Great Action was completed by blowing up the Warsaw synagogue at 8:15 pm.
Stroop supervised the deportation of Jews to the Treblinka death camp. He then played a similar role in Greece, where he was active from September 1943. As Higher Commander of the SS and Police in Athens, he supervised the deportation of several thousand Jews to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the KL Warschau camp, which was established on the site of the destroyed ghetto.
In the final phase of the war, it was him that Reichführer Himmler ordered to form divisions of the partisan organisation in western Germany, and then to organise a defense in the Alps. The American forces arrested Stroop on 8 May 1945. Two years later, they sentenced him to death for giving orders to murder Allied airmen captured as prisoners of war. However, under international agreements Stroop was handed over to Poland, where he was convicted of his crimes by a court and hanged in 1952.
During his trial, he was in a cell with Home Army soldier Kazimierz Moczarski, who wrote down his memories of the period. He described Stroop as follows:
Stroop remembered the course of the Great Action (ghetto uprising) admirably well. He was able to spill, at random, the dates and times of events, the number of Jews captured on each day and killed, data on the personnel status of the German troops.