The Stroop Report is the official German account of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto from April to May 1943, prepared by the Commanding Officer of the operation, SS-Brigade Leader J rgen Stroop.
Divided up into three sections--an executive summary, copies of the official day-to-day combat reports, and a photographic record, the report contains a number of fascinating insights into the brief and brutal conflict: The Warsaw Ghetto contained a large number of factories in which the Jews worked--and many of these factories were vital to the German war effort.
The decision to relocate these factories--and their workers--to Lublin (and the Majdanek concentration camp) was opposed by the Jews in Warsaw, and served as the spark for physical resistance to the Germans.
The Jewish residential area was up to that time fully under the control of the elected Jewish Council, and the German forces only intervened in Ghetto affairs when German interests were affected.
The Jewish Council had its own police force, complete with armbands and military-style caps, with which it maintained law and order within the Ghetto walls.
Under instruction from this Jewish Council, the Jews working in the armaments factories in the Ghetto started building a series of interconnected underground bunkers in 1942.
They told the Germans they were constructing air-raid shelters.
Two previous German attempts to relocate the Jews of Warsaw had succeeded in emptying the Ghetto of more than two-thirds of its inhabitants.
The ferocity of the Jewish resistance initially caught the German forces unaware, and the head of the SS in Warsaw was replaced after the first day by Heinrich Himmler, who ordered Stroop in to suppress the uprising.
Stroop's first course of action was to close down all the armaments factories within the Ghetto which had been supplying the Jewish forces with weapons and explosives.
The extent of the Jewish autonomy within the Ghetto was revealed when Stroop discovered that some of the fac.
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Ostara Publications The stroop report in german and english, paperback/jurgen stroop
