This is an article from The Chicago Sentinel regarding the upcoming trial of General Jurgen von Stroop for war crimes relating to the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto. The article, dated September 2, 1948, states that Stroop will be tried in Warsaw along with a Nazi policeman S. Sporrenberg, and Gestapo officer Gen. L. Geibel. The article explains that the American war crimes prosecutor in Nuremberg had turned over reports of von Stroop's actions to the British government.
General Jurgen von Stroop was the SS commander of the troops who liquidated the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943. An uprising was led by Mordecai Anielewicz which resulted in the deaths of 300 Germans. Eventually, the larger and better armed German army burned down the ghetto, deported 7,000 Jews to Treblinka, and killed approximately 7,000 Jews in the fighting. Only about 100 Jews survived the Warsaw ghetto uprising.
After the war, Stroop was arrested by the American Army, tried, and sentenced to death by the US Military Tribunal at Dachau for the deaths of nine American POWs. The sentence was never carried out as Stroop was extradited to Poland to stand trial. He was tried in Warsaw in 1951, sentenced to death, and executed on September 9, 1951. Stroop had kept extensive records about the events that occurred during the Warsaw ghetto uprising, and these were used against him at his trials. He remained unrepentant throughout the trial and sentencing. When sentencing Stroop, the Polish court said:
"Since the character and magnitude of Stroop’s crimes, his attitude and his twisted explanations not only indicate a total lack of repentance but actually confirm that he retains his Nazi view of the world, the Court is unable to find the slightest extenuating circumstance in the accused Stroop’s conduct. His actions show that he is a being devoid of human feeling, a Fascist hangman who tracked his victims with cold and relentless cruelty, an executioner who must be removed from the society of man."
Would You Like to Know More?
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising – Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. A year later the Germans outlined their plans for creating a Jewish ghetto in Warsaw by October 31, 1940. The Jews of Warsaw and other regions in Poland were sent to live in a small section of the city, resulting in over-crowded conditions and tremendous food scarcity and sickness. In 1942, the decision was made to liquidate the ghetto and to deport over two million Polish Jews to the death camps. After eighteen months of deportations, approximately 55,000-60,000 Jews still lived in the ghetto. In April 1943, the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto learned of a planned deportation of the remaining inhabitants of the ghetto to Treblinka. Under the leadership of 23-year-old Mordecai Anielewicz, the Jews resisted and fought against the Germans. After several days of fighting, the German commander, General Jurgen Stroop, burned the ghetto down, but the Jewish resistance continued for another twenty-seven days. On May 8, Mordecai Anielewicz’s headquarters were discovered and captured. Anielewicz, along with many of his fighters, were killed, although several dozen fighters escaped through the sewers. On May 16, Stroop declared the fighting was over and blew up the Great Synagogue. Approximately 7,000 Jews and 300 Germans were killed during the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. Another 7,000 Jews were subsequently deported to Treblinka. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising remains a powerful example of resistance during the Holocaust.
Holocaust – The Holocaust, also known as the Shoah, was the genocide and persecution of European Jewry by the German Nazi regime and its collaborators in Europe and North Africa during World War II. The Holocaust was implemented in stages from Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party’s first rise to power. From 1933 anti-Jewish laws were passed in Germany which excluded the Jews from German society. The Nazis also began to create a network of concentration camps where Jews and other “undesirable elements” of society were imprisoned in inhumane conditions. With the Nazi occupation of Europe during World War II, which started in 1939, the formal persecution of Jews was implemented in all the occupied countries. Jews were sent to ghettos, made to work in forced labour, and lived in appalling conditions. In 1942 the Nazis held the Wannsee Conference where they decided on the Final Solution which detailed the extermination all the Jews of Europe. Initially, more than one million Jews were exterminated by death squads named Einsatzgruppen, who were assisted by local collaborators. As of 1942 Jews were deported from the ghettos to death camps in Poland, including Auschwitz-Birkenau, Majdanek, Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka, where millions were murdered in gas chambers on arrival. Jews who were not immediately murdered were sent to force labour, and many died as a result of the harsh conditions, starvation, and disease. Jewish resistance was extremely difficult, but attempts to fight the Nazis were made by Jewish partisans and fighters in uprisings such as, most famously, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the Sobibor Uprising. In 1944, as it became clear that the Nazis were losing the war, Nazi camp commanders began to close the camps and forced the survivors to march towards Germany. Already sick and weak from the years of violence, more than 250,000 Jews died on these death marches. The Holocaust came to an end with the defeat of the Nazis in May 1945. Six million Jews, two thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, were murdered with millions more experiencing tremendous suffering, violence, and loss. In addition to the Jews, millions of Roma (gypsies), homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disabled people, and Soviet and Polish prisoners of war were also murdered during the Holocaust.
Jewish Community of Warsaw – The first Jews to live in Warsaw arrived in the fourteen century. Not long after, Jews were expelled from the city and not officially allowed to live there again until 1768. Thereafter, the Jewish population of Warsaw grew, despite periodic anti-Semitic incidents. Hasidism spread to Warsaw in the late eighteenth century, and by the late eighteenth century, almost two-thirds of Warsaw’s 300 synagogues were Hasidic. The Jewish population of Warsaw grew in the late nineteenth century as a result of immigration from Russia, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belorussia following pogroms. The late 1800s and early 1900s were a time of great growth in the Jewish community of Warsaw: synagogues were built and almost ninety percent of Jewish children received a Jewish education. The large community in Warsaw included different social groups, with orthodox Jews living alongside secular and assimilated Jews. Zionist organisations were established as was the anti-Zionist Bund organisation, a Jewish socialist group which stressed Yiddish culture. Jewish newspapers, literature, and theatre also thrived. By 1939, almost 400,000 Jews lived in Warsaw, comprising approximately one-third of the total population. When Germany entered Poland, the Jews were required to wear the yellow star, barred from public transportation, and taken into forced labour. In 1940, the Jews of Warsaw and Jews from other parts of Poland were forced to move into the very small area of the Warsaw ghetto. The population of the ghetto reached more than 500,000. Living conditions were harsh, and hunger and illness were rampant. In the summer of 1942, the first deportations of Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to Treblinka began and thousands of people were deported each day. On January 18, 1943, when a second round of deportations began, the Germans faced resistance from the Jews in the ghetto. Mordechai Anielewicz became the leader of the resistance, and when the Germans returned on April 19, 1943 to resume deportations, they were met by 750 poorly equipped but tenacious Jewish fighters who held them off until the Germans finally burned down the ghetto and killed 60,000 Jews. Today, there are an estimated 3500 Jews living in Warsaw, with about 700 belonging to the official Jewish community of Warsaw. The community has a Jewish school, a youth movement, and cultural and academic institutions. POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews was opened in Warsaw in 2013 on the site of the Warsaw ghetto.
The Chicago Sentinel - The Chicago Sentinel, a weekly newspaper for the Chicago Jewish community, was one of the longest continuously published Jewish weeklies in the United States. The first issue of the Sentinel was published on February 4, 1911. The newspaper focused on cultural events and included many eye-catching illustrations and photographs. It also published short stories and reports about events in the various Jewish communities. The Sentinel differed from many other English-language, often highbrow, Jewish weeklies, because it reached out to the Zionist immigrants who preferred to read in English and not Yiddish. The Sentinel is a treasure trove for social, cultural, and religious historians who are interested in American Jewish life outside of New York during the twentieth century.
