Jürgen Stroop

Jürgen Stroop ( Detmold , 26 of September of 1895 - Warsaw , 6 of March of 1952 ) was a general of the SS . Born in the name of Josef , he changed it to Jürgen in May 1941 , a month before the war broke out on the Eastern Front , by the constant taunts of the wife of a Gauleiter who called him ” Juzik .” Stroop was the son of a police officer .

Biography

World War I

Stroop served as a volunteer in the German Army during World War I , in an infantry battalion . He came to the rank of sergeant . He was wounded and was awarded the Iron Cross 2nd class, as well as the wound badge in Black (third class).

He married in 1923 and had three children. After the war, Stroop worked in the Civil Cadastre in Detmold until 1933.

Nazi regime

In July 1932 he enlisted in the Schutzstaffel (SS) and in September of that same year became a member of the Nazi Party . During the 1932 election campaign, he attracted the attention of Adolf Hitler , Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring . In March 1934 he was promoted from Scharführer ( Sergeant ) to Hauptsturmführer ( Captain ). Later he worked in the administration of the SS in Münster and Hamburg . In the autumn of 1938 he had the rank of Standartenführer ( Colonel ).

Between 1936 and 1938, Stroop received several courses Functions Command, Political Education and Administration at the Riding School SS in Munich and racial education courses in Berlin and military leadership at the School of Dachau . When war broke out in 1939, Stroop was commander of the SS sector in Gnesen ( Gniezno ). In 1941 it happened to command an Infantry Regiment of the 3rd Division SS Totenkopf in Russia , where it was until 1943.

On April 19, 1943, Heinrich Himmler transferred him to Poland as head of the SS, Police and Army units with the mission to quell the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (19 April-16 May 1943), task that General Ferdinand von Sammern-Frankenegg had failed to accomplish successfully. About 600 armed members of the Jewish Fighting Organization (Polish Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa , or ZOB) offered stiff resistance for nearly four weeks at about 2000 soldiers of the SS, the Wehrmacht and the police who had the support of tanks And artillery. Few of the fighters survived the massacre. The best known of them is Marek Edelman . By crushing Jewish resistance in the Warsaw ghetto , Stroop telegraphed triumphantly to Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger , his immediate superior: “The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw has ceased to exist.” In the ghetto 17,000 Jews were murdered, 7,000 were transported to Treblinka to be settled in the gas chambers and 42000 ended up in the concentration camp of Majdanek near Lublin . Stroop was decorated for this action with the Iron Cross 1st class and wrote a report in three copies: the first sent him directly to Himmler, the second went to Krüger and the third one he did. This report includes, among other things, the telex of Stroop and photos taken during the fighting. After the war, American soldiers were seized with a specimen which later served as evidence during the Nuremberg Trials against war criminals. Stroop did not question the authenticity of the report but did try to dismiss it.

After crushing the uprising of the Warsaw ghetto, he was appointed head of the SS and Police in Warsaw. In September of 1943 was destined to Greece and in November of that year returned with a high position to Wiesbaden , where it was until the end of the war.

Execution

After the war, Stroop was judged at the Dachau trials , led by the United States , and was held responsible for a series of illegal executions of airborne troops Americans in Germany. On March 21, 1947, he was sentenced to death. However, he was immediately extradited to the People’s Republic of Poland , where he was tried again, this time for crimes committed against the Poles. Declared guilty, the 6 of March of 1952 was executed in the old location of the Ghetto of Warsaw .

Conversations with an executioner

In 1949, when I was imprisoned in the prison of Mokotow awaiting trial, he shared cell with the writer and resistant Polish Kazimierz Moczarski who years later wrote a book entitled Conversations with an executioner , dealing confidences Stroop did to Moczarski During the captivity. Among them, he claimed to have personally killed Marshal Günther von Kluge . ¹

References