Publisher's Synopsis
A dramatic eye-witness account of the German suppression and destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto from April to May 1943, prepared by the Commanding Officer of the operation, SS-Brigade Leader Jürgen Stroop. The hand-compiled report, of which only three copies were ever made, contains three sections: an executive summary of the entire operation, copies of the official day-to-day combat reports, and 72 photographs, many of which have never before been published. The Ghetto uprising started in April 1943 after the Germans attempted to remove the remaining 40,000 Warsaw Jews-and the factories in which they worked-to Lublin. The Jews, aided by the underground Polish Communist Party, had prepared an extensive network of bunkers to stage an armed uprising. As vividly described in his report, Stroop systematically cleared the Jewish residential area, block by block, using artillery, Waffen-SS troops, Ukrainian and Russian SS-auxiliaries, and large numbers of Polish police. Despite the fanatic resistance, the overwhelming forces deployed by the German authorities-combined with Stroop's policy of first and foremost closing down and moving all the factories which had, inadvertently, been supplying the Jewish resistance with physical means of defending themselves-meant that it was inevitable that the Ghetto would be cleared. Once this mission was accomplished, Stroop leveled what remained of the Jewish residential area and then symbolically blew up the main synagogue in Warsaw-up to that time, one of the largest in the world-to mark the formal end of the clearing of the Ghetto. The one and a half month conflict resulted in the deaths of 14,000 Jews, twelve SS men, two Russian/Ukrainian SS-auxiliaries, and one Polish policeman. Stroop estimated that of the Jewish deaths, some 7,000 had died during the course of the battle, and that a further 6,929 had died while being transported to Treblinka. This edition contains all the original German pages alongside full English translations.
