The Stroop Report is a Forgery

What is the Stroop Report?

It is a leather-bound commemorative book, supposedly created by SS general Jürgen Stroop, chronicling the defeat of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was supposedly put together as a present to be given to Heinrich Himmler.

The book has three sections: it begins with a commentary and background of the ghetto; the next section is comprised of supposed copies of daily battle reports; and the final section offers around 50 photos--one of which is the famous photo of the little boy with his hands raised up:

The Stroop Report was a piece of evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trial.


A Fraudulent Commemoration Book

There was a Warsaw ghetto, and there was an uprising, but the Stroop Report is a fictionalization of that event. I have posted the Stroop Report with my comments here. If you want to read it without my comments, click here or here.

Suggestion: Read the Stroop Report and this essay at around the same time. Below are 12 reasons why it's a forgery.

1) Not enough Germans killed.

2) A misidentified gun used in an unintelligent way.

3) No deadly explosions.

4) Soldier scaring boy: an unlikely photo for a commemorative book.

5) Photo of man falling in mid-air.

6) A picture of scoliosis

7) A different Jewish strategy due to the Germans losing the Battle of Stalingrad.

8) A great piece of trial evidence.

9) The forger got a second gun wrong.

10) A willy-nilly assemblage of photos.

11) Over-the-top use of the word "bandit" and "subhuman."

12) Dug-outs in photos are much smaller than dug-outs described in text.

13) The real author is probably Rachel Auerbach.

14) Conclusion

15) The Stroop Report with this author's comments


1: Not Enough Germans Killed.

According to the Stroop Report, German troops rounded up 56,000 Jews who refused to leave the ghetto, and in the process they killed 13,000 via gun battles, executions, explosions, and flames from buildings being set on fire. But we're supposed to believe that during all this, the Nazi forces only had 16 men killed. The real author wanted sympathy for the Jews, so she had Jews killed in awful ways, but it either didn't occur to her to have enough Germans killed, or she omitted that since it didn't work with her Jewish sympathy goal.

What makes the German death toll even harder to believe is that the Jews are in fortified dug-outs and bunkers, and have an extensive underground network via the sewer system. So much so, that mid-point through the report, Stroop thinks most of the Jews are gone, but there's actually 25,000 Jews still left. They're mostly all hidden in underground dug-outs! The last half of the report has German forces opening dug-out after dug-out, with a contingent of Jews who refuse to be taken alive, yet no one can seem to point a gun at a German and pull the trigger.

As an example, let's take 5 days in the middle of the conflict, from April 25-29, 1943:

Jews killed: 1399
Jews captured: 9,594
Germans killed: 0

You might wonder: "Maybe the Jews didn't have weapons." Except during those 5 days the Germans captured 10 kilograms of explosives, 100 hand grenades, ammunition, 25 pistols, and 5 rifles. And these are just the weapons that were found.

Click here for data from my 5 day sample.


2: A Misidentified Gun Used In An Unintelligent Way.

It's unlikely a German General would misidentify his only large gun, but conceivable that a forger would. It's also improbable that a general would choose a photo for a book to be given to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, that shows an operation that is unintelligent from a military standpoint: an urban warfare scene that involves pushing a large old gun down the middle of a street, with soldiers on both sides oblivious to the possibility of sniper fire and hand grenades; to then shoot an already bombed-out building and shoot a basketball-sized chunk out of a wall in front of them.

Click and study the clock-wise sequence:

It's likely these are staged photos, put together by the Jewish underground resistance with people dressed-up as Nazis. That's why they are shooting aimlessly at a building that is merely a hollow bombed-out façade, possibly hit by a German bomber in 1939 or in the Warsaw-wide uprising in 1944. Here is another photo of the scene before the large gun was fired:


source: Yad Vashem website.

Notice the chair. Also seen in the last clockwise sequence. Perhaps someone was getting some sun two hours earlier in this *war zone.*

Notice the bombed out building. A simple grenade thrown into the the open roof could destroy what's inside. No need for a field gun that can shoot miles. And it's not the kind of building that would be a resistance stronghold.

Perhaps they are in an already demolished part of the city, and are trying to make propaganda photos. That might be why that grinning man has that stereotypical German face: he was a Pole or Jew picked for that look. If it's a staged photo, it would explain why they don't seem to be worried about sniper fire from the buildings on either side of them and why they are pointlessly shooting projectiles at the 5-foot high wall in front of them. Notice how the wall gets hit in the photo sequence.

Not to mention that the Stroop Report mentions that Stroop had a French tank in his arsenal, and that would have been better suited for this operation since it's impervious to sniper fire. However the Jewish underground staging photos wouldn't have had access to a tank.

German propaganda photographers might have staged photos for the masses also, but would these be the photos a German general would pick for a commemorative book to be given to Heinrich Himmler?

Now consider that the Stroop Report lists a howitzer in the short list of weapons, but it doesn't match what's seen in the photos.

In the list of weapons we read "1 10-cm-Howitzer."


source. Maybe it's a typo, except here it is again:


source

The problem is that the photos of the gun we're looking at is not a 10 cm. howitzer. It's a 75mm wz. 02-26 Polish divisional field gun, circa 1902.

Here are images of the gun in the Stroop Report. Click to enlarge:

 

Source

Below are images of the type of gun which it is. The last photo calls attention to details on the shield of the two guns which show they are variations of the same make of gun.

It's a 75 mm Polish field gun, not a 10 cm howitzer.

SOURCES:

Landships website
Tankmaster website
Wikipedia
Wikimedia
Life Magazine Feb. 17, 1941

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If you know what a howitzer is (I didn't) go on to #3, if you don't know what a howitzer is, keep reading:

A howitzer (or "haubitze" in German) is a type of gun that typically lobs an 8-20 pound bomb (projectile) at the enemy, usually landing 3-5 miles away. Howitzers are different from large guns because large guns shoot straight. In contrast the trajectory of a howitzer projectile would be similar to someone doing an overhead serve in a volleyball game. In other words, slightly lobbed. Because it's usually deployed in a field, firing off into the distance, there isn't a need for major armor around it in contrast to a tank which is more suitable for close-up warfare. And the beginning of the Stroop Report mentions that Stroop had a French tank which is what he would have used for shooting a large projectile in the middle of the street--not a howitzer on WWI-era wooden wheels. Even a panzerfaust shot from the concealment of a doorway would make more sense rather than walking down the middle of a street with a cannon.

 

Here are images of various howitzers:

 



A Life Magazine article on an American 75 mm Field gun. (Howitzer)

Special thanks to an Australian man who pointed out the howitzer issue, and who also pointed out that the forger got the caliber of the anti-aircraft gun wrong, which is mentioned later in this essay.


3: No Deadly Explosions.

In section IV of the Stroop Report we find a tabulation of the weapons that the Germans confiscated during the month long conflict:

•Several hundred hand grenades, including Polish and home-made ones .
•Several hundred incendiary bottles
•Home-made explosives
•Infernal machines with fuses

Yet the forger forgets to have the Jews ever using explosives to the extent that they kill somebody. Only one German dies via an explosive device and that's where the forger throws in some Hollywood action drama: a bullet hits a German officer's own grenade while it's still in his hand. Great action, but how likely is that?

Also in section IV we read:

"The number of destroyed dug-outs amounts to 631."

But never was a dug-out booby trapped with explosives.

Similarly, on the May 14, entry we read "183 sewer entrances were opened at 1500 hours." The Germans have been removing the lids of sewers for nearly a month, but never once was one booby trapped. How hard is it to tie a sewer lid to a string and attach that to the pin of a grenade? Moreover, the writer mentions how Jews work in factories where they deal with chemical explosives. So presumably they have materials and know-how.

Lack of the Jewish side using grenades and explosives in the story is something the writer forgot to include.


4: Soldier Scaring Boy: An Unlikely Photo For A Commemorative Book.

Above is most famous photo of the holocaust, and it comes from the Stroop Report. But would a German general choose such an un-chivalric, bullying photo for a commemorative book? The expression on the boy's face seems to say, "What did I do wrong? Don't shoot me." It creates a strong emotional impression against the Nazis. The viewer's reaction is "that's outrageous!" which is precisely why the forger chose to include this photo in the report.

To grasp the unlikelihood the Stroop would have chose this photo, try to imagine General Patton sending General Eisenhower a commemorative book about victory in Germany that included a photo of an American soldier herding 5-year old German children at gunpoint into some enclosure. It's not the kind of photo that would be chosen.

In the report the photo has the caption "Pulled from the bunkers by force ." Yet the boy appears way too dressed up for that. As Richard Raskin writes in his book "A Child At Gunpoint"

"There is no sign of any kind – such as disheveled or dust-covered clothing – to indicate that the captives in the photo of the boy with his hands raised were 'pulled by force' from anything that might rightfully be called a 'bunker.'" (pg. 17)

Yet it's not a staged photo. The forger who created the Stroop Report couldn't have predicted this photo becoming the world's most famous holocaust photo. Thus it was problematic when New York doctor, Tsvi Nussbaum, recognized himself as the little boy and said that he had never been in the Warsaw ghetto, but just outside of it, a few months after the uprising, at the Hotel Polski. This would have been the time the forger was working on creating the Stroop Report forgery. Nussbaum said that the people there weren't taken to their deaths.


Dr. Tsvi Nussbaum in the video "Tsvi Nussbaum A Boy From Warsaw"
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Still from "Tsvi Nussbaum A Boy From Warsaw": A collage on the wall of Nussbaum's doctor's office waiting room.
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Photo comparison in the video. On the right is a passport photo from a couple years later. One expert has said the ear lobes are different, but does the photo on the left offer enough detail of the ear?

Nussbaum's account would explain why the boy is dressed up, but his testimony is not without problems: While wanting the recognition of being the child in the photo, he also doesn't want to discredit the story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Afterall, his version of the event has the photo taken outside the ghetto, with the Jews not being herded to Treblinka to be killed. Thus in the video "Tsvi Nussbaum. A Boy from Warsaw"(1990, MTV/Finland) one sees footage of Nussbaum compensating for this, by telling unlikely tales of Nazi atrocities he's been directly involved with. To give two examples: he tells of how as a child he lived in a house in a suburb of Sandomierz, Poland. When the Germans occupied the area, one official, "possibly the the head of the gestapo" lived on the second floor of this very same house. The head of the gestapo lived on the second floor while his family lived on the first floor of the house (how likely is that!) One day his mom went upstairs to ask this official to release her brother-in-law from a concentration camp, and as she walked back down the stairs, the official shot her in the back and killed her.

And Nussbaum remembers a conversation he supposedly overheard between two German soldiers in front of the Hotel Polski around the moment of the famous photo. He was trying to get on a truck with his aunt and uncle, but there was a bureaucratic snag. The 8-year old Tsvi Nussbaum supposedly overheard two German soldiers discussing him and deciding to let him on the truck:

"what's the difference, we'll kill him there instead of killing him here."

Nussbaum wants his account to fit in with the holocaust story, not against it, so this video is peppered with not-believable stories of German brutality such as the two examples just mentioned.

Regardless of whether Nussbaum is the boy in the photo or not. And regardless of how the forgers obtained the photo, the key point is that it's evident to any perceptive person that this is an anti-Nazi photo. The forger understood that, and so has the public around the world. That Jürgen Stroop would have been clueless about that is hard to believe.

Ultimately you have to ask yourself which scenario is more likely:

1) The forger chose the photo for the anti-nazi emotional impression it conveys.

2) Stroop chose it thinking it would be a photo Himmler would like.


5: Photo Of Man Falling In Mid-Air.


We see a man falling mid-air. He has supposedly just jumped from the window above. I think it's probably a staged photo. What we can see of the falling body looks like it could be a dummy.

 


Photo source: Stroop Report. English translation 1979. Random House. The white blotch is actually on the building.

In a combat situation, how likely is it that someone would click the shutter at just the right moment to get a mid-air photo of a man jumping out of a 4 story building? Particularly since there might be someone else in the building who refuses to be taken alive and might shoot a gun or throw a grenade at the soldiers below.

Two copies of the Stroop Report exist today. One in Warsaw and one in the United States National Archives (NARA) in Maryland. Not all the photos in the two copies are the same. The following photo comes from the NARA version, but it's not in the Warsaw version. It's of the building.

First thing to notice is the white around the "falling man photo" is peeling paint on this building. The second thing to notice is that there really isn't a big fire that would warrant jumping from a window. One window on the left has smoke. A window which conveniently ends up in the top-middle of the "falling man photo." Besides that we see curtains in other units that haven't ignited. The area above the roof seems a bit hazy, but no black smoke billowing upward. From this it seems that the man could have taken the stairs.

We see 3 German soldiers (or people dressed as German soldiers) at the bottom. The smoke out the window looks about the same as in the falling man photo. So it's probably taken around the same time. Why would someone jump if German soldiers were below?

And if it's German propaganda (in other words staged by German propaganda photographers for the German masses) is it really a photo Stroop would pick for a book to be given to Himmler?

I think the photo is staged. Budget staged. Make a little smoke and throw a dummy out the window and have someone downstairs waiting with their finger on the camera button. If you don't take the photo at the split second required, just do it again.


6: A Picture Of Severe Scoliosis

This is likely a staged photo meant to imply an extreme version of Nazi racial ideology. Nazi philosophy had a racial component to be sure, but it didn't involve photographing someone with a medical problem in a conquered city. Afterall, the supposed intended recipient of the Stroop Report, Heinrich Himmler, would have been aware that scoliosis exists in Germany also. Anti-German propaganda often involved taking German positions to the extreme. Fitting in with that is the photo's caption: "dregs of humanity." This photo is consistent with the forger's frequent use of the terms "bandit" and "subhuman." The forger frames Stroop as writing this caption, which is conceptually the same as what British propagandist Sefton Delmer tried to do with the voice of "Der Chef" which you'll read about in #11.


7: A Different Jewish Strategy Due To The Germans Losing The Battle Of Stalingrad.

The Nazis and Zionists had a common interest: the Nazis wanted the Jews out of Europe, and the Zionists wanted Jews to leave Europe for a new homeland. There was some cooperation regarding this right up until it became evident that Germany was going to lose the war, at which time the holocaust myth, rather than cooperation, became the new Jewish strategy to get a homeland.

Cooperation/Collaboration

Above is a photo from the Stroop Report of a burned out, though at one time imposing building that had been the Judenrat, or the Jewish governing council of the Warsaw ghetto. The Judenrat ran the ghetto, complete with a Jewish police force, a Judenrat flag that had a Star of David on it (probably symbolizing the Zionist quest more than *this is where the Jews live*); and some Jewish ghettos, but not the Warsaw ghetto, even had a separate Jewish currency in order to prepare Jews for living in their own homeland.

Around 7 months before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (in July through September 1942), the Germans deported 300,000 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto with the help of the Judenrat, and there was no resistance. Rather, there was cooperation. The Jews went willingly because the Germans told them they were being deported to labor camps. It was the truth: The Germans, upon entering Warsaw, found Jews who were culturally different from German Jews. They were working-age Jews but with no visible means of income, and no apparent legitimate job. There was a lot of black market and street peddling. The Nazis stated that these Jews needed to learn to work before they could help found a new Jewish state, and more the real reason: the Germans needed labor for their war effort. The Jews were deported to Auschwitz (which was a labor camp with a massive factory complex for 200,000 workers) and to other labor camps.

Zionist Strategy Change
At the time that 300,000 Jews left the Warsaw ghetto, it appeared that Germany would soon defeat the Soviet Union. The Jews were thus cooperating with who they thought would be the winning side of the USSR/Germany conflict. The Battle of Stalingrad changed all that. A devastating German defeat, and occuring around the same time that American and British forces began advancing in Africa with German forces retreating. Within the space of a couple months, the tables turned and it became evident that Germany would eventually lose the war. The Jews wanted to collaborate with the winning side, not the losing side. Thus Zionist strategy changed to the promotion of the holocaust myth--a strategy that eventually led them to getting Israel as their homeland. The initial Nazi/Zionist cooperation was thus covered up and chalked up to Jewish naiveté. It's covered up because it's embarrassing and doesn't fit the later narrative of genocide. That's one reason why Auschwitz is presented today as an extermination camp rather than as a labor camp.

But it needs to be mentioned that "cooperation" is too strong of a word, nor is "collaboration" really right. Rather it was Jewish/Zionist strategy in face of wartime events.

A piece of evidence for the strategy change can be found in a February 1943 Reader's Digest article called "Remember Us," written by a member of the Irgun (a right-wing Zionist group) Ben Hecht. Hecht tells the vast middle America readership that the Germans might possibly kill up to six million Jews.

The Public Relations Appearance
The Stroop Report has to be seen in the context of the new Jewish strategy: It presents an image to the world that the Jews were being persecuted and actively resisting the Nazis. In this schema, the previous collaboration is only because the Jews didn't know what was really going on.

In reality, the Warsaw ghetto uprising was probably quite small. We get an inkling of this in the Stroop Report itself, when it's mentioned that throughout the Warsaw ghetto Jewish rebellion, German armaments factories contintued to run, manned by Jewish laborers. The revolt is happening and yet thousands of Jews are getting up and going to work every day in German armaments factories. The reader wonders "how in the world could this be the case?" Answer: because the forger is likely inflating the extent of the revolt. It was probably quite minor. Some terrorist activity while the Germans are trying to empty the ghetto, and people are still going to work.

Summary
The Stroop Report puts out the message that the Jews fought valiantly against the Germans who were deporting them to death camps. It's indicative of the new Zionist strategy move away from collaboration and toward the promotion of a holocaust myth. This strategy change came about after the Battle of Stalingrad, because it then became evident that Germany would lose the war. The Jews wanted to be on the winning side and parlay that into getting Israel. Which they did.


8: A Great Piece Of Trial Evidence.

At the beginning of the Nuremberg Trial, the American Chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, begins the trial's opening statement with the following, I'll put in blue-bold text the last sentence because it is an often repeated sentence that has come to be associated with what the trial was supposedly about:

"The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason."

The last sentence is very lofty, but what's not so lofty is that midway through his speech, Jackson holds up a copy of the Stroop Report, telling the court:

"I shall not dwell on this subject longer than to quote one more sickening document which evidences the planned and systematic character of the Jewish persecutions. I hold a report written with Teutonic devotion to detail, illustrated with photographs to authenticate its almost incredible text, and beautifully bound in leather with the loving care bestowed on a proud work. It is the original report of the SS Brigadier General Stroop in charge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and its title page carries the inscription, "The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists." It is characteristic that one of the captions explains that the photograph concerned shows the driving out of Jewish "bandits"; those whom the photograph shows being driven out are almost entirely women and little children."

The photo is most certainly the little Jewish boy photo, but Jackson is lying about the caption of this photo. That caption is the same in both the Warsaw version and the NARA version of the Stroop Report. It states "Pulled From The Bunkers By Force." In other words, it doesn't mention anything about Jewish bandits. The only other photo in the Stroop Report that shows a child is photo #7 (featured in section 10 of this essay) and it doesn't have a caption like Jackson describes either. The Stroop Report is already a forgery, but Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson has to lie about a photo caption, to make it look even worse.

Jackson then spends the next two minutes reading a Stroop Report excerpt to the court, reading what a German general supposedly freely admitted, even proudly attested to, regarding the Warsaw ghetto Jews: "They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire."

The leather-bound commemorative book theme works great as trial evidence for revenge against Nazis. So much so that similar items come up in in two other court cases: The trial of Ilse Koch, where a witness, Kurt Froboess, told the court that Koch had a photo album bound in tattooed human skin with a tattoo on the front cover.

Then there's the Kurt Franz trial: Around 1960, 15 years after the supposed fact, Kurt Franz was arrested and put on trial for his time at Treblinka. In his apartment, an incriminating photo album was found with a title that would anger any jury: "The Best Years Of My Life." It contained supposed pictures of Treblinka. Franz, who in various written witness accounts was accused of skimming millions of dollars, in addition to sadistically murdering Jews, lived in a modest apartment under his real name for 15 years prior to his arrest, and it evidently never occured to him to throw his supposed album away. The "Best Years of My Life" photo album was likely another planted fake document.

To summarize, the Stroop Report was a key piece of Nuremberg trial evidence, but it also fits in with other faked albums. The photo album theme made great copy for the press, and helped Jürgen Stroop get sentenced to death at his trial, and Kurt Franz and Ilse Koch sentenced to life in prison.


9: The Forger Got A Second Gun Wrong.

An Australian man who has studied WWII weapons for many years, brought to my attention that the type of anti-aircraft gun mentioned in the weapons list is a "2.28-cm A.A. Gun." The problem is that caliber doesn't exist. "2.28 cm" was not a caliber used by any military. It's a mix-up with an anti aircraft gun called the 2 cm. FlaK 28, which is named from the year 1928. Possibly the forger thought it was a reference to the caliber. 'FlaK' by the way, is a German abbreviation for anti-aircraft gun, not to be confused with 'flak' as in 'flak jacket.'

But that's not the only problem with this gun. We translate the full line:

Three 2.28-cm anti-aircraft guns 2/24

They have three guns and "2/24" means 2 officers and 24 enlisted men. 26 people. It would thus appear that 8 or 9 men operate each gun. The problem is that in the German army, there was a 4-man crew for this anti-aircraft gun. Not 8. We have a photo of an anti-aircraft gun in the Stroop Report:

We see 3 men, and it's hard to imagine what 5 or 6 more men are going to do in support of this gun.

Indeed, the gun in the photo looks like it could be a 2 cm FlaK 28. There's not a lot of photos of the 2 cm Flak 28 on the web but here are some I found:

Thus it's easy to see how the forger might have made the mistake of putting it down as 2.28 cm. thinking the 28 was a caliber reference. But we're supposed to believe that not only did a German general make this mistake, but didn't catch the mistake when putting a book together for the second most powerful man in Germany, Heinrich Himmler.

If you were a one-star American general and you were asked to put together a commemorative book for Dwight D. Eisenhower, would you bother proof-reading it?

To be fair, later in the 4-20-1943 entry, the gun caliber is mentioned properly. We read "The A.A. Artillery - 3 2-cm. guns used for this operation had two men killed."

The Stroop Report has sarcasm, irony, and action sequences that are written skillfully, but we find many military problems. The 2.28 cm caliber gun fits into that. From this one can surmise that the forger was an experienced writer but not an experienced military person. That would also explain why the daily reports which are supposedly one general communicating with another, never have a situation of generals "talking shop," I.e. the reports don't include difficult phrases to understand for the non-military layman. Rather, it's all very readable even many years later in the same way that a good short story is readable.


10: A Willy-Nilly Assemblage Of Photographs.

Imagine that you are general Stroop. You're putting together a commemorative album for Heinrich Himmler, and there will be 3 copies of the album altogether. Besides Himmler's, there will be one for your superior general, Friedrich Krüger, and one for yourself. Your camera people have taken photos of the uprising. You pick around 50 you like. You then order 3 prints to be made from the negatives, so that you can assemble your 3 copies of the report.

But that's not what happened.

There are two copies of the Stroop Report in existence today: One in Warsaw, and one in in the United States National Archives (NARA.) Many of the photos aren't even the same. Many of the same photos have different hand-written captions, and there are even examples where the duplication method is "click the camera button twice in order to have a copy of the photo."

Richard Raskin's book "A Child at Gunpoint" points this out:

"37 of the 53 photos in the Warsaw document are also in the NARA copy, though not necessarily in the same order nor of the same size. And in the case of three other photos, the 7th, 15th, and 41st in the Warsaw document, there is a NARA variant, taken of the same scene but a moment earlier or later and from another angle." (pg. 49)

To see a "variant", let's look at photo #7 in both albums:


From USA document. Title: "To the Transfer Station

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From Warsaw document. Title: "Pulled from the bunkers by force."

It's photo duplication by clicking the camera button twice. Notice where the man on the right is in both photos; or the direction the little girl is looking. Germans are known for working in a manner that exhibits exactitude, detail, precision and uniformity. A German military general is probably a hyperized version of all that.

The forger may have been assembling the albums when Warsaw was still occupied. To keep from being discovered, obtaining photos and duplicating them may have been a challenge.

It's hard to know what the situation was: Did Jews in the ghetto take the photos? Were some photos stolen from the Germans? Some real? Some staged? Photos taken out of context? Did the forger write the text and also assemble the photos?

Whatever the case, this isn't the "teutonic devotion to detail" which Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson mentioned regarding the Stroop Report in the opening statement of the trial.


11: Over-The-Top Use Of The Word "Bandit" And "Subhuman."

It's hard to believe, but the word "bandit" appears in the Stroop Report 99 times. Perhaps Stroop's superior general, Krüger, at headquarters might want to know who these bandits are. Polish Communists? Polish Home Army? Polish Soviet communists? Stroop obviously isn't working on the "know your enemy" principle! However, using derogatory names makes complete sense for a forger who is creating anti-nazi propaganda. Do a keyword search on "bandit" on the Avalon Project Stroop Report and see for yourself how often the word is used. At one point, the forger gets carried away to the point of not making sense, where near the end of the report, we read:

"180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence."

O.K. so we have the Jews mentioned. And the bandits must be the Poles, and the "subhumans" are?

The forger having Stroop use the term "subhuman" has parallels to a radio personality known as "Der Chef" --a character developed by British propagandist Sefton Delmer. "Der Chef" broadcast on a radio station called Gustav Siefried Eins which was claimed to be illegally run by right wing nazis inside Germany, but was in reality a British propaganda operation. On the station, Der Chef would call Churchill a "drunken old cigar-smoking Jew." The point being that anti-German propaganda sometimes involved taking German positions to the extreme. Which is what we're seing when the forger refers to people fighting in the ghetto as "subhumans."


12: Dug-outs In Photos Are Much Smaller Than Dug-Outs Described In Report.

Midway through the Stroop Report there are supposedly around 25,000 Jews still hiding in underground dug-outs. These dug-outs must be crowded and makeshift. However they would still look like a "facility" to some extent. Rows of bunk beds, something like that. But there are 5 photos of dug-outs in the Stroop Report and they all look like they're made for one or two people. Here they are:

 

Now let's look at the text to get a "people per dug-out" estimate:

"When the raiding parties combed out the area for remaining dug-outs in which Jews were hiding, they succeeded in discovering 30 dug-outs. 663 Jews were pulled out of them and 133 Jews were shot." (May 12th entry)

663 Jews/30 dug-outs = 22 Jews per dug-out
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"1,660 Jews were caught for evacuation, pulled out of dug-outs, about 330 shot. Innumerable Jews Swede (sic.) destroyed by the flames or perished when the dug-outs were blown up. 26 dug-outs were blown up and an amount of paper money, especially dollars was captured; this money has not yet been counted." (April 24th entry)

1,660/26 = 64 Jews per dug-out.
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"30 Jews evacuated, 1,330 Jews pulled out of dug-outs and immediately destroyed, 362 Jews killed in battle. Caught today altogether: 1,722 Jews. This brings the total of Jews caught to 29,186. Moreover, it is very probable that numerous Jews have perished in the 13 dug-outs blown up today and in the conflagrations." (April 26th entry)

1,330 Jews/13 dug-outs = 102 Jews per dug-out.
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"At another point an Engineer officer, attached by the Wehrmacht to the units with great trouble opened a dug-out situated about 3 meters below ground. From this dug-out, which had been ready since October of last year and was equipped with running water, toilet, and electric light, we pulled out 274 of the richest and most influential Jews." (April 28th entry)

274 Jews in one dug-out.
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Wouldn't Stroop want a photo of an impressive dug-out facility? A photo, perhaps, with rows of bunk beds? Isn't that the kind of photo he would want to show Himmler? It's likely these large dug-outs never existed. They were made-up by the forger, and the much more minor reality are what's seen in the photographs.


13: Who Wrote The Stroop Report?

My guess is the author is Rachel Auerbach. I suspect the author was a feminist and a zionist, and who was connected to a propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emmanuel Ringelblum. The one person who fits that mold is Rachel Auerbach. A passage in the Stroop Report that perhaps reveals the true voice of the author is the following passage from section II of the introduction:

"During this armed resistance the women belonging to the battle groups were equipped the same as the men; some were members of the Chaluzim movement. Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands. It happened time and again that these women had pistols or hand grenades (Polish "pineapple" hand grenades) concealed in their bloomers up to the last moment to use against the men of the Waffen SS, Police, or Wehrmacht."

Now consider that General Stroop never mentions the two main Jewish fighting groups, the ZOB and the ZZW. The forger makes the mistake of portraying Stroop as too ignorant. As if, with all the possible interrogation opportunities from the thousands of captured Jews, Stroop would never get up to speed on the specifics of who these people are, instead preferring to call them"Jews and bandits." The author poorly gauged how knowledgable she should make Stroop. But here's the kicker: we're supposed to believe he can just throw out the Hebrew word "Chaluzim." A term that means "Young Pioneers"-- A Jewish group centered around learning skills to take with them in their future immigration to Israel. Does that seem like Stroop's voice or a momentary revealing of the voice of the true author?

Secondly the passage promotes women as fighters alongside the men: "Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands." But it's an absurd notion that an SS general would admire the enemy for doing something as ridiculously "wild west" as firing pistols with both hands. Wouldn't it be better just to have one pistol and hold it with two hands to steady the aim? Considering the Resistance hardly ever killed a German, aiming is probably more of an issue than doubling your rate of fire with two guns. Would Stroop admire their brazen courage or wonder why they are so poorly trained by the ZOB and ZZW? The forger wants to make the women in the Resistance look courageous and attempts to convey this through Stroop's admiring voice, but it comes off poorly due to the forger's lack of military knowledge.

The last thing we look at in analyzing this paragraph is the heroic women hiding grenades and pistols in their bloomers (a loose-fitting pair of long shorts.) The problem is the Stroop Report doesn't include a single death by a grenade thrown by a Jew. The forger uses the phrase "time and again." Yet the German death rate contradicts this. Admittedly, there is one German who dies by an exploded grenade, but it's his own grenade in his hand that gets hit by a bullet. But with so few German deaths, what is the likelihood of that? The stories seem far-fetched and indulgent.

Stroop Report's sardonic style similar to works by Rachel Auerbach

In the Stroop Report we see that the author employs a sardonic style: juxtaposing a chummy camaraderie of cheerful troops with the deplorable killing of meek Jews who venture out at night with the humble goal of making contact with a neighbor or finding some food. It's the irony of doing a despicable deed with gusto:

"The longer the resistance lasted, the tougher the men of the Waffen SS, Police, and Wehrmacht became; they fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as models and examples of soldiers. Their duty hours often lasted from early morning until late at night. At night, search patrols with rags wound round their feet remained at the heels of the Jews and gave them no respite. Not infrequently they caught and killed Jews who used the night hours for supplementing their stores from abandoned dug-outs and for contacting neighboring groups or exchanging news with them.

Considering that the greater part of the men of the Waffen-SS had only been trained for three to four weeks before being assigned to this action, high credit should be given for the pluck, courage, and devotion to duty which they showed. It must be stated that the Wehrmacht Engineers, too, executed the blowing up of dug-outs, sewers, and concrete buildings with indefatigability and great devotion to duty. Officers and men of the Police, a large part of whom had already been at the front, again excelled by their dashing spirit."

In other words the common German soldier tirelessly perseveres at something so cruel. The idea being that the German people, not just the Nazis were the murderers. Would even three-four weeks of training be needed for this instinct to come out? That's the theme Auerbach is trying to convey and remarkably we can find her articulating that same idea using her sardonic style in an essay she wrote called "In The Fields of Treblinka." which is found in Alexander Donat's compilation book "Treblinka" (1979) Notice the stylistic similarities found in that essay:

"The catastrophe never touched them, (the Germans) and this alone was enough to give them a splendid self-confidence. Precisely in the face of this abyss of human degradation into which they watched masses of Jews drowning, they saw themselves as masterful and exalted." (pages 40 to 41)

"If one could prove that he was a particularly proficient and dedicated worker at the job of annihilation, then he could stay on and get promoted." (page 43)

"The specialists in this new profession were businesslike, practical and conscientious. The instructor in incineration at Treblinka was nicknamed by the Jews as 'Tadellos' (perfect); that was his favorite expression. 'Thank God, now the fire's perfect,' he used to say when, with the help of gasoline and the bodies of the fatter females, the pile of corpses finally burst into flames." (Page 38)

Again we see Auerbach's sardonic literary style married to a lack of knowledge about the subject. Sardonic literary style, but c'mon: fatter females are supposed to burn?


14: CONCLUSION

The forger had a number of aims:

1) Promoting the Zionist cause. The idea that the Jews of Warsaw can't even go back to Warsaw as their synagogue has been destroyed, and as she points out, many Poles collaborated and helped the Nazis. Zionists didn't want Jews to remain in Europe.

2) Revenge. On the Germans and Stroop via a bad portrayal of them. I.e. anti-German propaganda.

3) PR to other Jews and the outside world. A portrayal of Jews as heroic fighters and resisters, while at the same time sufferers.

The author uses a sardonic literary device: describing something that would seem awful, wrong, and unjust to any normal person; and then having the Germans doing it with enthusiastic indulgence. This concept isn't just found in the Stroop Report. It is the Stroop Report. The idea that with so many major events happening in the war. With the tide just turned so it appears Germany will eventually lose the war, that a general puts together a commemorative book that starts on 4-20-43, (Adolf Hitler's birthday and the beginning of Passover for that year) and ends with the triumphant blowing up of the Jewish synagogue, is over-the-top. A leather-bound book commemorating something terrible objectifies the author's literary style.

The Stroop Report is a fictionalization of something likely much smaller. We see this when certain things don't seem quite right. For instance that factories continue to run in the ghetto during the uprising, or that the dug-out photos are for holding one or two people. We can surmise that the real scope of the uprising was much smaller than what's described. The Warsaw Uprising the following year (not be be confused with the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising) is unknown to most, but was probably 100 times larger in scope.

The Stroop Report contains the names of 15 German soldiers killed, and a longer list of wounded, all with name and birth date. This author makes the prediction that these names, if ever researched, will not pan out. To see the names click the following. The first image is the list of dead, the next four are wounded:


15: Click Here To See The Stroop Report With This Author's Comments.


END

Originally posted in September 2007. Rewritten in October 2008.