STROOP, JUERGEN°

STROOP, JUERGEN° (originally Josef; 1895–1951), SS general; the Nazi commander who destroyed the warsaw ghetto. Born in Detmold into a family of lower middle class Roman Catholic policemen, Stroop was educated in a nationalist and militarist spirit. He served in World War I, where he was wounded twice and reached the rank of captain. By profession a surveyor, he joined the SS in 1932, and embarked upon a meteoric career after Hitler's advent to power. At the outbreak of World War II he was appointed chief of the Selbstschutz ("self-protection") of the Germans in the Posen area, where he organized the terror against the Polish population. In June 1941, Stroop served first in the Waffen-SS. During 1942 and the beginning of 1943 he was SS and police chief for several towns of southern Russia. He hunted partisans and persecuted the local population. On Feb. 6, 1943, he was attached to the office of the police and SS in Galicia but not long afterward was dispatched to Warsaw to crush the ghetto revolt. Apparently, the commanders had little faith in Ferdinand Sammern-Frankenegg, the local commander. Stroop suppressed the revolt by physically destroying the ghetto, setting it on fire, house by house, street by street, and killing the inhabitants. He wrote a meticulous report detailing the revolt and conducted the action as a military campaign, employing some 2,000 troops. He concluded his report with the words: "The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no longer." He marked his victory by blowing up a synagogue. Appointed SS and police chief in greece in September 1943, Stroop ordered the registration of Jews and limited their freedom within the German zone (Oct. 3, 1943). In November 1943 himmler made him SS and police leader of Rheinland-Westmark, in which post he remained until the collapse of the Third Reich. In 1947 Stroop was condemned to death by a U.S. military court for his atrocities in Greece and the murder of U.S. prisoners of war, but Poland requested his extradition. He was then extradited to Poland, where he was sentenced and hanged for his crimes in the Warsaw ghetto. His illustrated report on the suppression of the Warsaw ghetto uprising was published as The Stroop Report: The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More (1979), and in Hebrew as Mered Getto Varsha be-Einei ha-Oyev, with introduction and notes by J. Kermish (1966). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, 3 (1946), 719–75; J. Wulf, Das dritte Reich und seine Vollstrecker (1961), index. (Yehuda Reshef / Michael Berenbaum (2nd ed.)