Conversations with an Executioner [Hardcover]

Kazimierz Moczarski (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Language Notes

Text: English, Polish (translation)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 282 pages
• Publisher: Prentice-Hall; 1St Edition edition (1981)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0131719181
• ISBN-13: 978-0131719187
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,284,062 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mass Murder Without Convictions, November 30, 2001

By 

Markian Pelech (NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Conversations with an Executioner (Hardcover)

The author, Kazimierz Moczarski, was a member of the Polish Home Army, the Polish resistance to the German occupation during World War II. After the war, the Communist authorities imprisoned Moczarski because he was not a Communist. Ironically, he was held in a cell with Jurgen Stroop, the SS general who commanded the German forces that destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto, and with another German, a member of the SD (Sicherheitsdienst - Security Service). At one time, Moczarski had been ordered to assassinate Stroop, who was also a police official in Warsaw.
During several months, Moczarski had daily conversations with Stroop about his life and especially his role in the destruction of the Ghetto. After his release, Moczarski conducted further research about Stroop. What emerged is this book, partly biography and partly Stroop's account of his career.
The picture of Stroop is that of a shallow man with few convictions, whose SS superiors considered undistinguished, "but a good man!", presumably because he would be willing to do what ordered.
Trained in SS Leadership courses, Stroop could recite long lists of long-gone Germanic tribes of the Roman era. Knowing racial types, he plucked the hair on his head to give himself a higher, "more Aryan" forehead, and the hair on his chest, to remove any "ape-like hairiness." He changed his name from the original Josef, which was too Jewish, to Juergen, which "suited his Weltanschaung". Aware to some degree that he himself did not fit the Nazi mold, he nonetheless willingly murdered others who did not fit the same mold.
In his conversations with Moczarski, Stroop admitted that material things were his primary interest - opportunistic advancement, how much he earned, and how many uniforms and pairs of boots he had. Even after his arrest by the Allies, Stroop was puffed up by the fact that he was given a red Eisenhower jacket, until he learned that it was used to mark him as being sentenced to death by the Americans, who used his actions as police general of Wiesbaden in the killing of Allied fliers to try him in the so-called "chain of command" case. He was then sent to Warsaw, where the Poles tried him for his role in the Warsaw Ghetto - using a picture album and copy of a report that he had kept with him till his arrest. Stroop was hanged on the terrain of the former Warsaw Ghetto.
Moczarski has created a portrait of a totally bland evil-doer who in another time may have lived out his live as an uninteresting policeman in Detmold, his home town.
This is must reading for historians of the criminal types that came to the fore in the Third Reich.

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The portrait of the twentieth century, April 2, 2002

By 

Panu Höglund - See all my reviews

This review is from: Conversations with an Executioner (Hardcover)

Kazimierz Moczarski's book is a compelling portrait of the totalitarian personality, the "banality of evil": the SS killer Stroop is above all a person bereft of real personality or character - actually, although speaking about toughness and hardness all the time, a spineless, repulsing, soulless coward at heart. It is also a portrait of twentieth century totalitarianism and its cynicism, because Moczarski actually was a resistance fighter himself, but belonging to the "wrong" (non-Communist) resistance, was equated and put in the same cell with this Nazi criminal after the war. This should be compulsory reading both for unreconstructed communists and right-wing holocaust deniers.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nazi Juergen Stroop Confirms Direct Polish Participation in the Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, October 18, 2008

By 

Jan Peczkis "Scholar and Thinker" (Chicago IL, USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Conversations with an Executioner (Hardcover)

The Communist stooges installed by the Soviet "liberators" labeled Polish freedom fighters "fascist", forcing them to share prison cells with German war criminals in order to humiliate them. Former AK (Home Army) member Moczarski turned this travesty around, gaining priceless insights into the ideas and policies of his cellmate, soon-to-hang Juergen Stroop. (For background, see the Peczkis review of The Stroop Report The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More!).

Stroop had long abandoned Christianity (pp. 33-34) in favor of Wotan-worship (e. g., p. 221)--a common Nazi practice openly condemned by Bishop von Galen (p. 56), famous for his opposition to the euthanasia program. Nazis had many scapegoats besides Jews. (p. 45, 210).

Another reviewer asserted that Moczarski doesn't show how he verified Stroop's statements. In fact, he did. (e. g., p. 11, 16, 104, and Bibliography, e. g., p. 270).

Stroop contended that the Czechs were not a Slavic people, but a Germanic-Celtic one that had become Slavicized. (p. 76). He hoped to eventually settle in the Ukraine, at which time the Ukrainians would experience a falling birth rate owing to having become converted into a nation of alcoholics. Of course, the same applied to Poles--since 1939. (p. 104).

Alluding to his earlier work in the destruction of the Lwow (Lviv) Ghetto, Stroop complained that local Poles, and to a lesser extent, Ukrainians, were interfering with the operation by hiding fugitive Jews on a significant scale. (pp. 111-112). He also paid grudging compliments to the sophistication and effectiveness of the Polish Underground movement (e. g., pp. 115-116, 146, 210), while scorning Polish individualism. (p. 261).

Unlike virtually all modern Holocaust materials, Warsaw-Ghetto-Uprising-suppressor Stroop wasn't in denial about Polish participation in it. In discussing the Grossaktion, he repeatedly mentioned Poles fighting alongside the Jews (pp. 131-133, 151, 169), even disguised as Germans (p. 146, 272), and commented: "Those Jews weren't just resisting, Herr Moczarski, they attacked us. And they weren't fighting alone. They had Polish snipers with them...Incidentally, Herr Moczarski, according to information we got from the Abwehr, the Jews got their `cocktail recipe' from your own Home Army. Our armored forces were terrified of those gasoline-filled bottles. They caused lethal explosions on contact." (p. 119).

Stroop didn't mince words about the scale of Polish aid to the Ghetto Uprising: "And don't think that Hahn hadn't been told which organizations supplied the ZOB in late 1942 and early '43 with over seventy pistols, about a dozen rifles, several sub machine-guns, a light machine gun, ammunition, eight hundred grenades, hundreds of pounds of explosives and sixty-six pounds of the newest British-made `plastic' and the detonators to go with them...several hundred additional detonators for mines, bombs, and grenades, as well as potassium, saltpeter, and other materials used in making explosives...They [Home Army] furnished the insurgents with detailed instructions in the manufacture of weapons and the construction of fortified positions." (p. 161). The Polish-developed system of moving men and materials through sewers was used in both the Jewish (1943) and Polish (1944) Uprisings. Stroop admitted that the Germans couldn't effectively counter it. (p. 131).