) with his men observe the burning of
Warsaw Ghetto during the suppression of the
Warsaw Ghetto uprising, 1943
SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop was taken prisoner by the Allies in Germany under a false identity. He was tried by the
U.S. Military Tribunal at Dachau on unrelated charges. In late May 1947, Stroop was handed over for retrial to the People's Republic of Poland for the suppression of the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the methodical destruction of
the ghetto. His crimes resulted in the death of over 50,000 people. He was kept in jail for four years before the Criminal District Court in Warsaw put him on trial on July 18, 1951, for the war crimes committed in Poland. Stroop was executed on 6 March 1952, arrogant and unrepentant until the very end. Moczarski spent nine months (or 255 days) with Stroop, locked in his cell from March 2, 1949, until November 11, 1949. The Stalinists falsely accused Moczarski of being a Nazi, which in turn allowed Stroop to relax in his presence, his every word a form of confession with nothing held back. Moczarski himself was sentenced to death on November 18, 1952. The following October, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, but he was not informed about the change. In December 1956, at the end of Stalinist terror in Poland, he was retried for the last time, pronounced innocent, and rehabilitated. The courts declared that the charges against him were utterly falsified by
the ministry under
Roman Romkowski who ordered his brutal treatment. Some 15 years after his torturous ordeal had ended, Moczarski began writing his book in 1971 using notes collected since 1956 and published parts of it soon thereafter. Some of his Polish followers asked how he could remember it so well. It was due to his heightened state of alertness that only death row could bring, he said. In the
Annex to his book Moczarski explained that also Stroop, seemingly unable to remember any Polish word learned a day earlier, was happy to recite every single line from his reports to Hitler. ==Conversations==