The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Jewish Self-Assertion in Warsaw

The everyday lives of those forced into the Ghetto were marked by systematic deprivation, mass hunger, the spread of disease, and shockingly high death rates from its founding and enclosing in mid-November 1940. Forced labour and daily terror by the SS were additional forms of National Socialist Jewish policy. At times, nearly half a million Jews were attempting to hold their own against the Germans in the Warsaw Ghetto. In addition to all the persecution and suffering, their story is also one of resolute resistance to the National Socialists' intention to destroy their humanity and compassion in the struggle for survival and to eradicate their cultural and religious traditions. Thus, countless people organised food and supplies, provided medical care, and preserved their identity and traditions through a multitude of concerts, performances, readings, and services held in secret.¹ Historians and chroniclers working with Emanuel Ringelblum founded the group Oneg Shabbat [Joy of Shabbat], which systematically collected, wrote, and secured for posterity testimonies of life, death, and of everyday self-assertion in the ghetto. The archive, which was hidden and largely rediscovered after the war, is today a tremendously valuable source of information on the history of the eventually-destroyed Jewish community under National Socialist rule.²

In the summer of 1942, everything changed once again. Knowledge gathered and discussed in the ghetto about the Shoah that had begun in other parts of Poland had led to the first attempts to build an anti-Nazi resistance structure. These were abruptly interrupted by the beginning of the mass deportations to the death camps. In the nine weeks from 22 July to 21 September 1942, the SS deported well over a quarter of a million Jewish children, women, and men as part of ‘Aktion Reinhard’ and murdered them in the gas chambers of Treblinka. Afterwards, a shaken calm returned to the greatly reduced ghetto. Traumatised and ashamed, the survivors had to realise that they had once again believed the Germans’ deceit and had largely failed to prevent the deportation of their nearest and dearest. ‘Why did the enemy have such an easy time of it?’, noted Ringelblum in mid-October, horrified.³ Vehemently rejected by a majority until then, direct forms of resistance against the National Socialists and their helpers now developed into a mass phenomenon among the barely more than 60,000 survivors.

The majority of the people had to carry out forced labour in the last ‘war-important’ businesses remaining in the ghetto and were thus officially registered. In addition, about 25,000 had chosen to live in illegality following the deportations. They hid in the empty apartment blocks and had to come by food in the face of many dangers. Checks or a chance encounter with Germans or with the non-Jewish Polish ‘grabbers’ seeking financial extortion could mean death at any time.⁴ Increasingly, however, the survival strategies of the ‘official’ workers and the ‘illegals’, who were called ‘wild ones’ in the ghetto, began to converge. Hundreds of hiding places were bricked up or dug out in attics, flats, or underground in so-called bunkers, in which people hoped to avoid the impending attempts at deportation. At the same time, they had to stock up on supplies and gather additional equipment, an enormously difficult task, in order to be able to survive weeks of isolation. According to Rachel Auerbach of Oneg Shabbat, at the beginning of 1943, many also saw an incentive in the development of the war, much discussed and reflected upon by the remaining people of the ghetto, and the accompanying ‘conviction that the war would soon end, especially in view of Stalingrad’.⁵ All these widespread preparations for resistance took place in secret, beyond the everyday life of the ghetto, and indeed their extent remained largely hidden from the attention of the Germans.

A small share of the people also began to arm themselves. Surviving testimonies about individual initiatives are the exception. However, in addition to the self-armament organised in the family context or via other social ties, two larger armed Jewish resistance organisations formed in the ghetto. Left-wing Zionist-oriented youth associations founded the Żydowska Organizacja Bojowa [Jewish Combat Organisation, ZOB] at the end of July 1942. Months later, the socialist-Jewish workers’ party Bund, which had a large number of members, and members of the communist Polska Partia Robotnicza [Polish Workers’ Party, PPR] joined the combat organisation, which had already been weakened by the mass deportations. Mordechaj Anielewicz, only 24 years old, was appointed commander of the ZOB. Under his leadership, it was possible to unite the political factions for the shared struggle against the National Socialists. During their preparations, however, the most serious problem, apart from the lack of military training and combat experience, was the glaring lack of weapons.⁶
 

As a second combat alliance in the ghetto, the Żydowski Związek Wojskowy [Jewish Military Union, ZZW] was founded by the right-wing Zionist, so-called revisionist spectrum around the youth organisation Betar. Many of its members were former soldiers of the Polish army with professional military training. Continuing contacts with factions of the Polish national resistance helped them to attain much better weaponry.⁷ The left-wing Zionist Ringelblum was impressed by a visit to the ZZW headquarters at Muranów Square shortly before the start of the uprising, noting:

‘The room buzzed with activity and was reminiscent of a military headquarters. They took reports of expropriations carried out by different groups to extract money for weapons from rich Jews. I witnessed a deal with a former Polish army officer in which the ŻZW paid 250,000 [Zloty] for weapons and made a down payment of 50,000.’⁸

In contrast to the ZOB, the ZZW had decided to also open its ranks to small armed groups and individuals beyond its own political spectrum. And while the ZOB took up positions in all areas the remaining ghetto with a total of 22 fighting groups, each consisting of 10-12 people, the ZZW concentrated its efforts on the north-eastern area of the central ghetto around its headquarters at Muranów Square. Due in particular to their lack of weapons, the fighting strength of both organisations remained limited. On the eve of the ghetto uprising, the ZOB probably consisted of hardly more than 300 armed members, and the ZZW of about 250. About one percent of the entire ghetto population thus had weapons and was preparing for a direct confrontation with the SS.⁹ Both organisers of the struggle had also opened their ranks to women, who had long played a prominent role in the resistance to the National Socialist occupation. In this way, the ideologically conditioned blindness of the National Socialists was also deliberately exploited in tactical terms. Under the eyes of the Germans, who were entrenched in their sexist understanding of their roles, Jewish women deliberately took on central tasks in the transmission of news and communication, in the smuggling of weapons, and even in the combat actions themselves.¹⁰

When the National Socialists unexpectedly invaded the ghetto on 18 January 1943 in order to deal a decisive blow to the population once again through their intended deportation of 8,000 people, they were met with massive armed resistance for the first time. In the course of the clashes, ZOB fighters killed several Germans and the SS temporarily withdrew after four days without having reached their intended deportation numbers. Himmler then ordered the final liquidation of the ghetto in February, arguing that ‘otherwise we will probably never achieve  peaceful conditions in Warsaw, and the criminal nuisance cannot be eradicated if the ghetto remains’.¹¹ The Germans had finally lost their authority among the ghetto population from the time of the January battles at the latest, with the population instead looking to the Jewish combat organisations for leadership. Their widely-heeded appeals helped the people to organise themselves. In addition, the ZOB and ZZW sabotaged the German war economy with their direct actions and carried out spectacular attacks on some of the most notorious Jewish collaborators of the SS.¹²

Ghetto Uprising and Remembrance

In the early hours of 19 April 1943, the SS and police marched into the ghetto to put a final end to its existence. The date also marked the first day of Passover, which meant that the Germans had once again chosen to launch one of their murderous actions on a high Jewish holiday. But on this morning, to their horror, they came under fire from various sides only a few metres into the ghetto, were pelted with Molotov cocktails and, because of the intensity of the attacks, were soon beaten back behind the ghetto walls. Immediately after the debacle, Jürgen Stroop, whom Himmler had appointed the new head of the Warsaw SS and police just days before, officially took command of the entire operation. Born in Detmold in 1895, Stroop had joined the National Socialists in 1932 after training as a land registry assistant and shortly afterwards also joined the SS. There, he realised a respectable career that took him to various posts in German-occupied Poland and the Soviet Union before Himmler called him to Warsaw for the destruction of the ghetto with the rank of SS brigade leader and police major general. After a clearer picture of the situation emerged following the initial fighting, Stroop ordered his heavily armed superior force to attack again that same morning. However, the massive Jewish resistance continued and finally forced him to withdraw his troops from the ghetto without any presentable result.¹³

On the second day of the uprising, the ZZW created one of the most well-known symbols of the uprising by hoisting the Zionist and Polish flags on the roof of house number 7 at Muranów Square. Visible from afar, the flags were also noticed by the city population beyond the ghetto, leading Himmler, who now was extremely incensed, to demand an immediate end to the disgraceful scene. SS soldiers, however, only succeeded in taking down the flags days later.¹⁴ In view of their successful resistance, the Jewish side enjoyed relief, satisfaction, and unmistakable pride. Mordechai Anielewicz wrote in a letter, ‘What we experienced cannot be described in words. We would never have dared to hope for it in our wildest dreams. We forced the Germans to leave the ghetto in flight two times.’¹⁵ On the opposing side, members of the SS and police also described the Jewish success in a multi-faceted way in post-war interrogations, usually sounding something like this:

‘We were repeatedly shot at, and occasionally hand grenades were thrown at us, so that we had to take cover. I also heard from another police officer that a woman once shot at a police officer, but without hitting him. So, things went haywire in the ghetto, there was a real state of war.’¹⁶

In the weeks that followed, there were repeated fierce battles that also claimed victims on the German side; the operation, originally projected by Stroop to last three days, became extremely protracted. At the end of April, the Polish government-in-exile, on behalf of its Warsaw plenipotentiary, issued an appeal for solidarity with those attacked in the remaining ghetto, including the key sentence addressed to the city population: ‘Polish society is right to feel compassion for the hunted and persecuted Jews and to help them’.¹⁷ Around 25 April in particular, which was during the Easter holidays, crowds grew outside the walls, although Jews in the ghetto concluded that few showed any real sympathy or solidarity.¹⁸ News of the uprising had long since reached an international audience. By 22 April, the Polish underground radio station Świt, working in London, had broadcast a detailed report, followed by reports and articles in numerous US daily newspapers, among others.¹⁹ The struggling Warsaw ghetto encouraged anti-Nazi Jewish resistance elsewhere, as well. Both the uprisings in the extermination camps of Treblinka, Sobibor, and the Birkenau crematorium and those in various ghettos in German-occupied Europe were inspired by it.²⁰

After the debacle of the first few days, Stroop’s priority was to regain control of the remaining ghetto with his SS and police formations. At the same time, the Germans tried to push ahead with the originally planned relocation of war-important businesses and their Jewish workers to the Lublin district, at least to the areas that seemed safe. However, as the operation progressed, the German side became increasingly perplexed, angry, and frustrated by the vehemence of the Jewish non-compliance. In the end, the suppression of the Jewish resistance ended in a monstrous excess of violence, in the course of which the ghetto was systematically burnt down and razed to the ground. Residents who were still alive were often murdered at the place of capture or by central firing squad locations. Those who were to be deported had to fear maltreatment or murder by the point of transfer at the latest, and women had to additionally fear rape by the Trawniki men deployed there.²¹

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has been described many times and its immense historical significance is beyond question. Some chapters in the history of the uprising have received much more attention than others, both academically and within the culture of remembrance. The struggle of the ZOB under Mordechai Anielewicz has sometimes been equated with the ghetto uprising, which is also due to some of its fighters having managed to withdraw from the ghetto in time and survived. As a result, legendary ZOB leaders such as Zivia Lubetkin or Yitzhak Zuckerman were able to make an important historical-political contribution to the Israel’s defensive self-image after the hard-fought and ultimately successful founding of the Jewish state.²² Marek Edelman, another ZOB commander from the Jewish socialist Bund, on the other hand, decided to remain in post-war Poland, where he successfully resisted the regime’s attempts to discipline and assimilate him. His books, articles, interviews, and speeches made him a living legend far beyond Poland and a preserver of the memory of the socialist-inspired struggle in the Warsaw Ghetto.²³

In stark contrast to the ZOB, the ZZW’s fight received little attention for quite some time. Only a few fighters of the military association survived the uprising, leaving hardly anyone who was able to adequately remember the history of the resistance after 1945. For political reasons in Israel, there was no interest in fundamentally changing this state of affairs for many years.²⁴ There are other underrepresented research questions, and thus gaps in the culture of remembrance, as well: with all due respect to the armed uprising, the mass resistance of the ghetto population went comparatively unnoticed for a long time.²⁵ However, the German operation was primarily directed against exactly this unarmed majority, thus becoming a final, gigantic inferno. The central final report of the perpetrators provides meaningful insights into this.

The Stroop Report as a source on the Ghetto Uprising

In addition to the remarkably broad spectrum of sources preserving Jewish perspectives, the so-called Stroop Report, compiled by the SS and police leader of Warsaw of the same name as the central document of German provenance on the events of spring 1943, is even available in two versions. In view of the small edition originally comprising no more than four copies, and against the background of the systematic destruction of evidence by the National Socialists in the final phase of the war at the latest, this marks an extraordinary coincidence. Entitled ‘There is no longer a Jewish residential district in Warsaw!’, the report, composed of two written parts and a collection of photographs, conveys in remarkable density the view of the SS man on the phases and strategies of the counterinsurgency and the accompanying destruction of Jewish Warsaw. Due to its authorship and intended audience, the Stroop report cannot be said to offer any objective view of the subject. Nevertheless, it is a revealing source on the murderous German actions in the Warsaw Ghetto. It vividly testifies to the practical consequences of exterminationist antisemitism and reveals the last chapter of National Socialist Jewish policy in Warsaw in a multi-layered way. It is no coincidence that, upon Polish initiative, the source was included in the UNESCO List of Documentary Heritage in 2017.²⁶

Due to the lack of Jewish source images, the Stroop photos still very much shape the visual memory of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. In particular, the famous photo of the boy with his hands up has taken on a life of its own, and over time has become an almost iconic symbol for the Shoah as a whole. The motif has been used countless times in a wide variety of contexts, often without any contextualisation.²⁷ Other photographs from the Stroop report have also been published many times without their actual context being adequately represented. The Stroop photos are thus a good example of how prints originally created to illustrate and legitimise the actions of National Socialist perpetrators are used by posterity as mere illustrations, hindering any real gain in knowledge that could best be conveyed with by source images.²⁸

The Stroop Report has been available to a broader, international public in several important editions since the 1950s. Nevertheless, the source as a whole has rarely been analysed in a systematic way.²⁹ Yet the three report formats alone – final report, daily reports, and photos – offer a unique set of prerequisites for a critical analysis. In addition, contextualised with further relevant sources, a diversity of questions and promising perspectives unfold. If the immanent potential of the document as a whole were to be exhausted, and the Stroop report thus taken seriously as a source, valuable insights into the topic could be attained.

Origin and transmission of the Stroop Report

The immediate context in which this report was compiled is comparatively well known. After taking command, Stroop sent a summary report at least once a day from 20 April 1943 onwards to the Supreme Commander of the  SS in the General Government in occupied Poland and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger, his direct superior in Krakow, who then forwarded the reports to Himmler. These teletype messages form the basis of the contents of the later, final summary report. According to Stroop’s account, during his visit to Warsaw on 2 July, Krüger is said to have given the order to also have photos taken of the operation. However, since some of the photos were clearly taken earlier, Stroop must have given the command prior to that. In his daily report from 13 May, he announced that he would submit a complete report ‘with photographic appendix’ for the conference of SS and police leaders scheduled to take place in Krakow five days later, which was the first time the document was officially announced.³⁰

Under unmistakable time pressure, a total of four copies of the report were probably prepared. While Stroop formulated his final report himself and primarily used his own daily reports as a source of information, additional copies of these were made at the same time and attached to the overall report. In addition, they searched photographs sourced from several photographers in the office of the SS and police leader, selecting suitable motifs and hastily making additional prints of numerous photos.³¹

The importance of the operation is evident from the format in which Stroop presented his final report. Despite the short time available, the SS and police leader instructed his subordinates to graphically design the different parts of the report. Cover sheets were made in artistic Fraktur script in ink. The first bears the aforementioned, performative title of the overall report, others separately divide the daily reports as well as the picture section and thus give the document a uniform structure. In addition, most of the photos in the concluding picture section were annotated by hand. Finally, Stroop had the copy intended for Himmler, and most likely also the copy intended for Krüger and himself, bound in leather in order to deliver an eye-catching testimony of his actions. The 126-page final report thus clearly exceeds comparable documents in both design and scope. This shows how much Stroop wanted to win over his superiors, while the form of the report also suggests that the SS leader was aware of the historical significance of his weeks in Warsaw.

Stroop presented both copies intended for his superiors to Krüger in Krakow on 18 May, with the latter forwarding one to Himmler by courier on 2 June.³² In addition to the third bound copy for himself, another unbound copy had been made, which Stroop presumably used during the meeting of the SS and police leaders of the Generalgouvernement as a working version for his personally delivered account. He then brought this fourth copy back to his Warsaw office, where it was again changed and supplemented in several places days later after Krüger had requested additional information. While the bound reports belonging to Krüger and Stroop were presumably disposed of at the end of the war, the copy delivered to Himmler has survived, as has the Warsaw working version. Both were used by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg as evidence against the Nazi elite facing trial. Himmler’s copy subsequently went to Poland, where it is now kept at the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in Warsaw. The working version was transferred to the National Archives of the United States (NARA) for safekeeping and further use.³³

Structure and content

The two surviving versions of the Stroop report share a basic structure. They contain a final report which, in addition to a list of casualties, also contains an overview of the forces used, followed by the daily reports transmitted during the counterinsurgency, and finally a picture section with 53 photos each. Alongside their extensive similarities, the two surviving editions also differ in interesting details that provide additional information on the history of the versions and the further handling of the sources. In particular, Stroop’s unbound version was supplemented with a concluding Part IV on 23 May at the earliest. In it, Stroop indicates the total number of people arrested in the ghetto at 56,056; of these, 7,000 were allegedly murdered on the spot and 6,929 deported to the Treblinka extermination camp. The remaining Jews, without any extra mention, were sent to the Lublin district for forced labour. Another 5,000 to 6,000 had perished in the fires and demolitions, and 631 hiding places had also been ‘destroyed’.³⁴

Apart from that, additional personnel from the Warsaw Security Police were added to the deployment list at the beginning and added to an updated total of 36 officers and 2,054 men deployed. In addition, a final daily report dated 24 May was added to the report version, listing the same deployment totals requested by Krüger three days earlier, which Stroop had also already presented in Part IV of his final report. This last daily report was only added to the bound version of the report as a copy after the war.³⁵

Also, the final and daily reports of both versions differ only in terms of insignificant details, probably mainly due to transmission errors. In contrast, the ‘picture reports’ differ much more. In the bound version, there are 53 photos on 49 pages, and in the unbound version 50 on 47 pages, originally. It was only after the war that the three missing pictures from the bound report, which were apparently considered essential, were also added to the ‘working version’, as suggested both by the design of the prints themselves and the deviating paging of the subsequently added sheets.³⁶ Both report versions contain 37 largely identical motifs, and 16 prints are included only once each, meaning that there are 69 different photos between the two copies. The ‘picture reports’ are only completely identical on the first six pages; after that, they differ from each other in terms of the pictures selected and the accompanying commentary. In Himmler's bound version, 38 of the 53 photos have captions, while the copy that remained in Stroop’s office has one more.

The style of language echoed throughout the document, with its frequent euphemisms, is typical of the perpetrators involved in the Shoah. From today’s perspective, this obscures some of the circumstances of the crimes and renders the crimes committed in Warsaw almost unrecognisable. When questioned by West German investigators years later, Max Jesuiter, Stroop’s former chief of staff, attempted to shed some light on the lingua tertii imperii of the overall document, which at least provided evidence that some relevant euphemisms were used inconsistently.³⁷ In general, however, it remains important to consider that Stroop wrote his key document for a contemporary, extremely elite, and very narrow circle of readers who were completely familiar with the distinctive semantic features of the correspondence associated with the crime against humanity. These addressees would have had no difficulty whatsoever in correctly interpreting the contents.

Himmler had even demanded the use of special terms himself. In the Stroop report, for example, the ghetto population was often referred to in general terms as ‘bandits’. Stroop had thus adopted the common linguistic rule that Himmler himself had introduced the previous year in view of a partisan movement spreading in the German-occupied Soviet Union, when he ordered on 13 August 1942 that the glorifying term ‘partisan’ should no longer be used. ‘For us, these are not fighters and soldiers, but bandits, guerillas, and criminal criminals.’³⁸ By adopting this term, Stroop nevertheless committed a remarkable, de facto recognition of the Jewish resistance by transferring the choice of words, originally introduced in a completely different context, to the people in the ghetto.

The Nazi jargon, which is difficult to bear from today’s perspective, could lead readers to interpret Stroop’s report as a shameful attempt to pass off mass murder as a heroic struggle. However, this would not consider the ideological relevance of National Socialist ‘redemptive antisemitism’ with its resultingly consistent dehumanisation of Jews, which ultimately culminated in the Shoah using precisely such language. Like Stroop, countless Nazis believed themselves to be in a war against Jewry, with the Jewish side supposedly posing an existential threat to Germany. Consequently, Stroop expressed his participation in the Shoah in the report in the logic of precisely this constructed struggle for survival, which regularly earned military decorations for men like him. It is therefore necessary to take seriously the fact that murderous hatred of Jews not only functioned as a central element of Nazi ideology and incessantly repeated propaganda, but also determined the thinking and actions of many Germans. The report is thus by no means exceptional in terms of language; rather, it is a corollary of National Socialist extermination policy, and in this it does not differ from other surviving documents.³⁹

Final report and list of losses

Stroop placed the twelve-page final report, preceded by a casualty list of the killed and wounded, as well as a list of the units used, at the beginning of his overall report. This allowed his subsequently embellished description of the events to dominate the overall account. In fact, the final report is a more elaborately edited, abridged, and clearly polished version of his own daily reports. For the pseudo-historical introduction, which actually seems superfluous, Stroop drew on the report by the head of the resettlement staff in the Warsaw district, Waldemar Schön, which had already been written in January 1941. Stroop resorted to largely copying passages from it.⁴⁰ He also omitted many of the problems alluded to in the original daily reports, instead emphasising his successes all the more strongly. Although there is no conclusive evidence of his direct authorship, both syntax and style, as well as his prior responsibility for formulating the daily reports, suggest that Stroop also wrote or dictated the final report himself.

The SS leader paid particular attention to the problem of how he was supposed to present both the massive Jewish resistance and the unexpectedly protracted operation to his superiors. Simply comparing it with the daily reports reveals many contradictions in this regard. For example, Stroop claimed in his final report that he had succeeded in breaking the resistance in the remaining ghetto to such an extent that it was no longer possible to speak of ‘major and substantial resistance within these building complexes’ by 21 April at the latest, and thus on the third day. The two flags, the widely visible symbol of the uprising had also been ‘captured’ by 20 April. However, a look at the daily reports shows that the fighting at Muranów Square mentioned by Stroop, in the course of which SS-Untersturmführer Dehmke was also killed, only took place on 22 April and thus on the fourth day of the Jewish uprising. Stroop also reported further intense fighting in his daily reports on 27 and 28 April. Thus, he seems to have deliberately changed the dates in his final report to counteract the fairly unflattering impression that he could hardly demonstrate any real control over the ghetto even days after taking command.

A crucial piece of information is contained in the summary final report with the specially underlined mention of Himmler’s order, issued on 23 April, to carry out the further deployment ‘with greater severity and unrelentingly [sic] tenacity’. Stroop must have interpreted the intervention, which was only reported here but not in the daily reports, as a criticism of his previous strategy, which would promptly lead to barbarous consequences. From that point on, the SS and police leader had the ghetto systematically burned down. In this context, the mention of Himmler’s order is, on the one hand, a vivid example of the direct communication that even the Reichsführer-SS maintained with Stroop. On the other hand, it also indicates the pressure to succeed that Stroop was under in Warsaw given the completely underestimated Jewish resistance.⁴¹

The casualty list positioned before the final report lists the names of the 16 dead and 85 wounded on the German side. In view of the duration and intensity of the uprising, and knowing that Jewish sources suggest much higher German casualty figures, Stroop’s figures are very low. Historical researchers have therefore repeatedly suggested that the figures are too low and thus likely manipulated.⁴² And, indeed, there are contradictions between the daily reported casualties and the later total list, but these cannot resolve the fundamental discrepancy between the assumptions on the Jewish side and this list of German casualties. While in custody in Warsaw, Stroop remained silent on the question, although he could have given higher German losses for the first day of the counterinsurgency, for which his forerunner Sammern-Frankenegg was initially responsible, without any loss of prestige of his own, insofar as they had been recorded. Yet even for this first operation, Stroop tallied low losses of six wounded SS soldiers and six wounded Trawniki men. Thus, according to the German account, there had not been a single death on the first day of the uprising, though with 24 wounded in their own ranks. This number, which was never reached on a single day afterwards, at least gives an idea of the intensity of the fighting.⁴³

It is unlikely that Stroop greatly adjusted his own losses downwards. The risk alone that such manipulations would be discovered must have seemed too high, since the units deployed in the ghetto also reported their own losses to their superiors, so that a fraud on Stroop’s part could have quickly become know. In additional, the post-war legal investigations into German crimes in the Warsaw Ghetto did not reveal any evidence that the German losses there had been significantly higher than those reported by Stroop.

With all due respect for the perception of the Jewish fighters, the basic starting conditions during the ghetto uprising should be considered in this context. The barely more than 600 armed Jews were confronted by a superior German force more than three times as large, professionally trained and, above all, incomparably better armed. Nevertheless, the Jewish fighters were able to beat them back at the beginning and successfully attack them again and again over a period of weeks. However, the extremely unequal balance of power could only ever have led to the SS and police suffering relatively few casualties and ultimately being able to militarily prevail. No one on the Jewish side had any illusions about this. The fact that specially trained Germans instinctively took cover in combat situations and only rose again when the Jewish fighters had retreated was probably a recurring scenario, which may plausibly explain some misjudgements of German losses. In general, however, it would probably be a mistake to make German casualty figures, rather than the dimension and duration of the ghetto uprising, the yardstick of any historical judgement.

As a complement to the list of casualties, Stroop listed the forces under his command in another overview. First on the list are two Waffen SS replacement battalions stationed in Warsaw with a total of more than 800 SS soldiers. Also deployed were several hundred police officers, members of the security police and SD, a unit of the notorious Trawniki men, as well as Polish police and fire brigade. All in all, Stroop’s list adds up to a personnel tableau of more than 2,000 men marauding through the ghetto at least some of the time. The more than threefold advantage over the fighting strength of the Jewish camp organisations does not take into account the disproportionately heavier armament, including tanks and artillery, with virtually unlimited ammunition reserves.⁴⁴

The daily reports

The 31 daily reports sent by teletype to the superior Higher SS and Police Leader Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger from 20 April 1943 onwards are a clear second focus of the Stroop report, given its length of 54 pages. They represent a continuous, promptly produced, and clearly dated report format that, in contrast to the later final report and attached photos, offered much more limited possibilities for subsequent manipulation. Post-war statements illustrate how the daily reports, which were usually transmitted once a day in the evening, were created. On 20 April there were two, and on 22 April even three individual reports. During the day, Stroop received reports on site from his subordinate units himself and noted down anything worth reporting in his notebook. Later, in the office outside the ghetto, he dictated a summary of the day’s events to his chief of staff, Max Jesuiter. Jesuiter then gave Hildegard Gräßler, who was usually available as a typist, a clean form of the daily report based on his shorthand notes, which was then sent by teletype from Warsaw to Krüger in Krakow.⁴⁵

The teletype transcripts are rich in detail and convey the fundamental tension between Stroop’s unmistakable desire to prove himself to his superiors in his new assignment and the intensity of the Jewish uprising, which surprised even him. Unintentionally, the entire volume of daily reports reveals how ill prepared the SS actually was for the scale of the Jewish resistance. In light of this, Stroop was forced to abandon part of a strategy temporarily considered promising the very next day to follow it up with a new, more radical variant, which itself lasted only a few days. It is true that the Warsaw commander of the Security Police and SD, Ludwig Hahn, stated after the war that ‘heavy resistance by the Jews had been expected from the experiences of the attempted ghetto liquidation in January’.⁴⁶ The actual scale, however, caught the Germans unprepared, as Stroop himself confirmed in custody in Warsaw. ‘We completely underestimated the Jews,’ he admitted, then continued:

‘They surprised us at six o'clock in the morning on the nineteenth of April and not the other way round. This repeated itself every day thereafter. Our reconnaissance did not give us a correct assessment of the initial position, nor did it give us corresponding indications for daily combat in practice.’⁴⁷

In accordance with Stroop’s late oath of disclosure, his daily reports unintentionally convey, upon closer inspection, how efficient the Jewish resistance really was despite its modest means, and what great problems the SS faced as a result. At the end of the first of what was supposed to be only three days for the total clearance of the ghetto, Stroop was able to report just 580 ‘captured’ Jews, and only 533 people the next day. The disastrous result tellingly underlines the unity of the Jewish resistance, which Stroop had to admit in his report to his superiors.⁴⁸ The further daily reports make clear how he escalated the deployment of his SS and police units with the temporary support of Wehrmacht artillery and other specialists.

However, it is only the inclusion of testimonies from the entire spectrum of Jewish resistance that provides an indication of what distinguished the ghetto uprising and what Stroop’s action really meant. Benjamin Gruszka, who worked as an undertaker, experienced the beginning of the uprising, and in 1961 recalled how that event was also the signal to flee for some like him:

‘When the tank burned, we drove out of the ghetto with the car full of corpses and did not return. I then joined Polish partisans together with other Jews. We operated in the area between Warsaw and Lublin until the Russians came. Then I went behind the front with several Jews to look for relatives in various concentration camps.’⁴⁹

While Stroop reported intense fighting on the second day of the uprising, Sam Henry Hoffenberg recalled the effect of the Jewish attacks on the Germans, ‘We could see in our observations how the SS people, who had always moved very safely and confidently through the ghetto in the past, now pressed themselves against the walls, frightened and intimidated, because they feared for their lives’.⁵⁰

On 22 April, Stroop had to include in his daily report the loss of SS-Untersturmführer Dehmke from the SS-Cavalry-Replacement Unit, who was killed by a shot through his own hand grenade during fighting with the ZZW at Muranów Square. Shocked by the death of the SS officer, who he knew personally, Stroop took to cruel revenge, which he hinted at in the same daily report. He even saw it necessary to mention the unbroken spirit of his victims when he reported, ‘During shootings necessary today, it has repeatedly happened that the bandits collapsed shouting “Long live Poland”, “Long live Moscow”.’⁵¹ At the time, the ZOB fighter Israel Gutman was also injured:

‘I took part in the fighting during the action in April 1943 and was wounded on the third or fourth day of the uprising. I was then in the shelter and had a series of terrible days. On 5 May 1943, the Germans discovered the shelter where I was. After the shelter was discovered, the Germans threw gas bombs into the room (I felt the gas). I was half unconscious and when I regained consciousness I was in the hands of the Germans.’

Gutman went on to survive the concentration camps Majdanek, Auschwitz, and Mauthausen, then emigrated to Israel. Decades later, he would write one of the essential standard works on the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto.⁵²

Information from SS men deployed there provide clues about some gaps in Stroop’s reporting. For example, a soldier from the Warsaw SS-Tank Infantry Training and Replacement Battalion 3, which was deployed daily, stated during his interrogation in 1962 that he had been attacked in his infantry armoured vehicle even days after the uprising had begun. In the process, the armoured vehicle was shot by the Jews until it caught fire, with even the SS uniforms of the occupants catching fire. In the end, however, they were able to extinguish the fire. In order not to document too clearly the continuing armed resistance, and thus his own inability to regain control of the ghetto, Stroop wisely refrained from describing such concrete incidents after the first day of the uprising.⁵³

Maurice Markus provided another report, twenty years later, on how hidden Jews adapted their resistance to the constantly changing German strategies:

‘We noticed that when the SS searched the houses, they made a cross with chalk on the pane of each window of a room they had searched, so that one could see from below which rooms had been searched. When we saw this, we also made white crosses with chalk on the windows of our rooms.’⁵⁴

Records such as those by a Jewish woman with the first name Maryla convey what the people holding out in the hundreds of ‘bunkers’ felt in the face of Stroop’s actions. She noted in her hiding place on 27 April:

‘We are immersed in the perception of these ever-increasing sounds of battle, and fear begins to paralyse us. We stop being human, become trembling bundles of nerves, almost to the point of losing our minds. We bury ourselves in silence, and every slightest rustle from inside, a whisper or a cough, seems like a hurricane that can lead the enemy straight to us at any moment.’⁵⁵

Such testimonies and recollections, which are often precisely dated, provide a decisive counter-perspective to Stroop’s daily reporting, complementing it quite decisively. In this way, the weeks of Jewish resistance and German countermeasures in the Warsaw Ghetto can be traced more systematically, more densely, and more richly layered than has been attempted so far.

The ‘Picture Report’

In the end, Stroop's compilation of undated and, with a few exceptions, unlocalizable photos is meant to suggest a representative insight into the operation in the ghetto that corresponds to its weeks-long duration. But the – certainly intended – impression that the photos also correspond chronologically to the actual events is false. In reality, all the photos were taken on just a few individual days and at only in a few locations. Some of the photos, which show Stroop, among others, in the area of the ghetto, or photos in which Jews seem to be depicted in an almost clichéd antisemitic manner in the National Socialist projection of the time, seem staged. Post-war statements by the photographers, however, indicate that these photos were also candid snapshots. Although both the Jewish victims and the German perpetrators were aware of the presence of a camera, and Stroop may have taken a special position in view of it, the photos are by no means staged. Rather, they show momentary and very selective views of the events of the counterinsurgency and ghetto clearance in spring, 1943.⁵⁶

Franz Wild, the photographer from the office of the commander of the security police and the SD, can be identified with certainty as the one who took most of the Stroop photos. During his interrogation he admitted ‘that quite a lot of the photographic material came from me’. He only explicitly denied being responsible for the series taken inside a ‘bunker’. The photographer also stated that he had been in the ghetto area several times during the uprising to take pictures, that he had then developed the photos himself, and that he had finally handed them over to his superiors as ordered. The prints must have reached Stroop via the office leadership. Two photos that Wild expressly recognised as his own have the same format of 13 x 18 cm. This format, with an identical white border, is found in 38 other photos, which also show strong similarities in contrast, grain, and preferences in the choice of motif. Wild thus seems to have been responsible for 40 of the 53 Stroop photos in the bound version, including the best-known and most frequently published illustrations.⁵⁷

Franz Konrad, the notorious head of the ‘recording of valuables’ in the ghetto, also admitted during his trial in Warsaw to having taken some of the Stroop photos. Probably accurately characterised by a survivor as a ‘hyena who followed the murderers and collected loot’, the corrupt Konrad stood trial as Stroop’s co-defendant in Warsaw in 1951. There he was specifically accused of photographing victims in burning houses. Probably not coincidentally, these were the buildings at 23 and 25 Niska Street, which were exactly opposite Konrad's office of the Warsaw agency for the 'recording of valuables'. Apart from that, he admitted to having often spent time at the nearby transfer point.⁵⁸ Both of these facts suggest that Konrad took several photos of the burning Niska Street and the people jumping to their deaths there during the uprising, and that he also photographed Stroop with some subordinate Trawniki men at the transfer point. The pictures, corresponding in their clearly smaller 9 x 12 cm format as well as in their weaker contrast, are part of a second, much smaller series, from which five photos each can be found in both versions of the Stroop report.⁵⁹ The only thing that remains unclear is who took the five photos from the interior of a subterranean hiding place as well as three other photos taken on darker photographic paper and in a different format, which were also taken in the peripheral area of the ghetto.⁶⁰

After sorting through the available prints, Stroop, possibly in the presence of other members of his staff, most likely selected the photos he thought suitable. Only a few prints were chosen that showed corpses as visible evidence of the mass murder organised in the ghetto, although many such photos were available. Instead, preference was given to images showing Stroop in the circle of his men, arrested groups of people in the ghetto, and the fires and destruction.⁶¹ The SS leader had the selected photos placed according to his personal preference, thus replacing the original chronological order with the deliberately suggestive effect of his ‘picture report’. Three fictional chapters of the photo section emerge in this way, each of which seeming to obey a guiding concept. In today’s diction, the first part could be entitled ‘Jews in the Ghetto and their Deportation’, a second ‘Jewish Resistance and Fighting’, and the third and final as ‘Successful Leadership, Conclusion, and Result’.