On 23 July 1951, the German political and police official Juergen Stroop, responsible for numerous war crimes and the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, was sentenced to death. He pleaded not guilty, claiming that, as a German and a representative of the Third Reich, he had to follow his commanders’ orders scrupulously.
Juergen Stroop was born on 26 September 1895 in Detmold as Josef Stroop. He was the son of a police officer. He only changed his name to the more “nordic” Juergen in 1941.
Before the outbreak of the First World War, Stroop worked in the cadastral office in his hometown. In 1914, he enlisted as a volunteer in the German army. He fought on the Eastern Front and in Romania. He was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class for his wounds.
In July 1932, he joined the SS, which at the time served as a personal security force to protect Hitler. He rose steadily through the ranks in the organisation, achieving the rank of SS-Gruppenfuhrer by the end of the war.
In September 1932, Stroop became a member of the Nazi party, the NSDAP. In 1933, Stroop successfully led the NSDAP campaign in the Lippe region during the Reichstag elections, which brought victory to the Nazis and enabled Adolf Hitler to become Chancellor.
In 1938, after the Third Reich occupied the so-called Sudetenland belonging to Czechoslovakia, Stroop became the SS commander in Karlove Vary.
After the outbreak of the Second World War, as Oberfuehrer-SS and police colonel, he took part in the murder of the Polish and Jewish population of Poznan and other cities in the Greater Poland region.
In April 1943, Stroop was sent to Warsaw with the task of overseeing the deportation of the Jewish population to the Treblinka extermination camp. Shortly after his arrival on 19 April, an uprising broke out in the Warsaw ghetto.
Stroop, as SS and police commander, was ordered to put it down. As a result of his Grossaktion in Warschau, the Warsaw ghetto was razed to the ground, with all fighting Jews killed and others deported to various death camps.
Jurgen Stroop was detained by the Americans on 8 May 1945. In March 1947, the American Supreme Military Tribunal in Dachau sentenced him to death for ordering the murder of Allied paratroopers.
The sentence was not carried as the Americans decided to hand Stroop over to the Polish authorities, who were to try his crimes against the Polish and Jewish populations, above all the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.
After being transported to Poland, he was imprisoned in Mokotow prison in Warsaw. From March to November 1949, he shared a prison cell with Kazimierz Moczarski, a participant in the Warsaw Rising and head of the Information and Propaganda Office of the Home Army HQ, who was arrested by the communist authorities.
Their conversations were later described in a book “Conversations with an Executioner” (Polish: “Rozmowy z katem”), written by Moczarski.
The trial against Stroop for crimes committed in Poland began before the Voivodship Court for the City of Warsaw on 18 July 1951. Stroop was accused of belonging to the SS criminal organisation, of the destruction and murder of all inhabitants in the Warsaw Ghetto and ordering the murder of at least 56,065 people there and the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews.
Stroop pleaded not guilty to the offences charged in the indictment.
On 23 July 1951, Stroop was sentenced to death with deprivation of public rights and civil rights of honour forever.
“His deeds testify that he is an individual devoid of all human feelings, a fascist executioner, who preys on his victims and whose complete elimination from human society is necessary,” the sentence said.
Stroop’s death sentence was carried out by hanging on 6 March 1952 in the Mokotow prison in Warsaw.
Source: PAP
Photo: IPN
Tomasz Modrzejewski
