Jürgen Stroop

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Stroop in US captivity

Jürgen Stroop (born September 26, 1895 in Detmold as Josef Stroop ; † March 6, 1952 in Warsaw ) was a German SS group leader and lieutenant general of the police . After the end of the Second World War , he was sentenced to death by a Polish court and executed.

Life

The son of a police superintendent from Lippe attended elementary school in Detmold and then completed training at the land registry office there . He worked as a land registry assistant until the beginning of the First World War . As a war volunteer, he was released as deputy sergeant in 1918 . Then he worked again in the Detmold land registry office until 1933. Stroop was married from 1923 and had three children.

National Socialism

In July 1932 he joined the SS (SS no. 44,611) and in September 1932 the NSDAP ( membership number 1,292,297). In the 1932 election campaign, Adolf Hitler , Heinrich Himmler and Hermann Göring became aware of Stroop, and in March 1933 he became the leader of the Lippe State's auxiliary police . In March 1934 he was promoted from SS-Oberscharführer to SS-Hauptsturmführer . He was then employed in the SS administration in Münster and Hamburg . In autumn 1938 he was promoted to SS-Standartenführer .

Maximilian von Herff interrogating Jewish prisoners. Behind him on the left Jürgen Stroop (1943).
"Stroop Report" (May 16, 1943)

Second World War

After the invasion of Poland , Stroop was used as commander of the SS section in Gniezno . After being transferred to the SS Totenkopf Division, he performed his service in the stage. On May 9, 1941, Stroop changed his first name "due to an ideological setting" and in memory of his deceased son from Josef to Jürgen.

Personally commissioned by Himmler, he was in charge of the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto (April 19 to May 16, 1943) as commander of the SS, police and Wehrmacht units, from these "Ghetto Action", later "Ghetto Major Action" or just called "major action". Around 600 members of the Jewish Fighting Organization ( Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa, ŻOB) armed with a few weapons and Molotov cocktails put up bitter resistance for almost four weeks , with around 2,000 SS and Wehrmacht soldiers supported by tanks and artillery . Only a few fighters of the ŻOB survived the massacre. The best known was Marek Edelman .

Stroop telegraphed triumphantly to his direct superior, SS-Obergruppenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger : "The former Jewish residential area Warsaw no longer exists."

17,000 Jews were murdered in the ghetto, another 7,000 were brought to Treblinka and 42,000 to the Majdanek concentration camp near Lublin . Stroop, who was awarded the Iron Cross First Class for leading the action , documented his actions in the so-called Stroop Report . This was drawn up in three copies: one went directly to Himmler, one to Krüger, and one kept Stroop. The report includes, among other things, copies of Stroop's telex messages and photos taken during the fighting. “Numerous Jews who could not be counted were blown up in canals and bunkers. [...] The longer the resistance lasted, the tougher the men of the Waffen-SS , the police and the Wehrmacht became , who [...] were always exemplary and exemplary. ”After the end of the war, a copy was seized by American soldiers and later used as evidence in the Nuremberg trial of the major war criminals . Stroop did not deny the authenticity of the report, but tried to downplay its importance. The report was declared World Document Heritage in 2017 .

After the suppression of the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto, Stroop was appointed Higher SS and Police Leader (HSSPF) for Warsaw. As HSSPF he moved to Greece in September 1943 and to Wiesbaden in November 1943 as HSSPF "Rhein-Westmark" until the end of the war. Here he was involved in air murders , among other things .

Stroop before the Polish court (1951)

After 1945

US soldiers arrested Stroop on May 8, 1945. He was sentenced to death by an American military tribunal as part of the Dachau trials (US vs. Jürgen Stroop et al.) On March 21, 1947 for his involvement in the murder of Allied airmen . However, the judgment, confirmed in September 1947, was not carried out, but Stroop was extradited to Poland. In the Polish prison he was locked in a cell with the Polish freedom fighter of the Polish Home Army, Kazimierz Moczarski , who later wrote down his memories of the conversations with Stroop.

On 23 July 1951 Stroop by a court of the Polish People's Republic to death by the strand convicted and around 19:00 in Warsaw on 6 March 1952 mokotów prison executed .

Awards

Movies

For the German-Israeli production You are free, Dr. Korczak from 1973, a highly respected representation of the work of Janusz Korczak and his devotion to the orphans entrusted to him up to the gas chambers of Treblinka , Heinz Lieven could be won over to the role of Jürgen Stroop.

In his film The Pianist (2002), a film biography about the Polish-Jewish pianist and Holocaust survivor Władysław Szpilman , who lived in the Warsaw ghetto for a while and witnessed the uprising there in hiding, the director Roman Polański presents numerous recordings from the 1943 Stroop Report in detail.

In the US television film of 2002 Uprising - Uprising on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was of Stroop Jon Voight played the purpose an Emmy received nomination.

literature

  • Stroop report . Document 1061-PS in IMT : The Nuremberg Trial. Volume 26, volume of documents 2. Federal Archives Berlin; Signature: R 58/9030.
  • Kazimierz Moczarski: Conversations with the executioner. The life of the SS group leader and lieutenant general of the police Jürgen Stroop, recorded in the Mokotów prison in Warsaw. German translation by Margitta Weber. With the contributions: About Kazimierz Moczarski by Andrzej Szczypiorski and A very ordinary German by Erich Kuby . Droste, Düsseldorf 1978, ISBN 3-7700-0511-2 , slightly revised new edition by Osburg, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-940731-12-8 .
  • Joseph Wulf : The Third Reich and its executors. The liquidation of 500,000 Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto . Arani, Berlin 1961; Saur, Munich 1978, ISBN 3-5980-4603-0 ; Fourier, Wiesbaden 1989, ISBN 3-9250-3747-0 ; change Reprinted from Ullstein, Frankfurt 1984 & 2001, ISBN 3-5483-3039-8 .
  • Ruth Bettina Birn : The Higher SS and Police Leaders. Himmler's representative in the Reich and in the occupied territories. Droste, Düsseldorf 1986, ISBN 3-7700-0710-7 .
  • Mark Mazower : Inside Hitler's Greece. The Experience of Occupation 1941-1944 . Yale UP, New Haven 1993, ISBN 0-3000-8923-6 .
  • Joachim Jahns: The Warsaw Ghetto King. Dingsda, Leipzig 2009, ISBN 978-3-928498-99-9 (about his accomplice Franz Konrad).
  • Ziviah Lubetkin : The Last Days of the Warsaw Ghetto. [sic!] In: Neue Auslese. Issue 1, 3rd year 1948. Ed. Alliierter Informationsdienst, pp. 1-14; again as a single print: VVN- Verlag, Berlin 1949 (first in Engl. in Commentary , New York).
  • Christoph Hamann: The boy from the Warsaw ghetto. The Stroop Report and the globalized iconography of the Holocaust , in: Gerhard Paul : The Century of Images. Picture atlas . Volume 1. 1900 to 1949 . Göttingen: V&R, 2009, pp. 614–623.
  • Michael Sauer: The picture of the little boy from the Stroop report. A photo icon in history textbooks . In: History in Science and Education , Vol. 71 (2020), Issue 7/8, pp. 373–384.

Web links

Commons : Jürgen Stroop  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ruth Bettina Birn: The higher SS and police leaders. Himmler's representative in the Reich and in the occupied territories. Düsseldorf 1986, p. 347.
  2. ^ Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer Taschenbuch, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 3-596-16048-0 , p. 609.
  3. ↑ Daily report of May 16, 1943 ( Memento of July 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) in the Stroop report .
  4. ↑ Stroop Report, pp. 9-10.
  5. ↑ See also: Stroop's personal statement, read on April 12, 1946. In: The Nuremberg Trial. Document 3841 / PS.
  6. ↑ Jürgen Stroop's Report , UNESCO Memory of the World, accessed June 25, 2019.
  7. ^ Stroop at Dachau Trials ( Memento from September 15, 2011 in the Internet Archive ).
  8. ↑ Engelbert, Arthur (2014): Global Images - A study on the practice of images , transcript Verlag, ISBN 3839416876 , p. 55.
  9. ↑ Ebbrecht-Hartmann, Dr. Tobias: New DVD: You are free, Dr. Korczak (Federal Republic / Israel 1973) , on the Yad Vashem website
  10. ↑ to insert / scroll instead of: strp001.jpg
personal data
SURNAME Stroop, Jürgen
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Stroop, Josef (until 1941)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German SS group leader and lieutenant general of the Waffen SS and police, leader of the mass murder in the Warsaw ghetto
DATE OF BIRTH September 26, 1895
PLACE OF BIRTH Detmold
DATE OF DEATH March 6, 1952
Place of death Warsaw