In the Company of Nazi Evil

‘Conversations with an Executioner’By Kazimierz MoczarskiSteerforth Press, 446 pagesKazimierz Moczarski was a Warsaw journalist who became involved in the Polish Home Army resistance movement and fought alongside Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. After the war, Poland’s new Soviet-backed Communist regime, seeing the Home Army as a threat, designated it a quasi-fascist organization that had supported the Nazis. Many falsely accused veterans were subsequently tortured, imprisoned, and murdered. Moczarski was imprisoned on the grounds of collaboration. In a cruel twist of fate — or, more likely, Communist sadism — he ended up in a Mokotów prison cell with Gustav Schielke, a former policeman turned low-ranking SS officer, and Jürgen Stroop. Nicknamed the Butcher of Warsaw, Stroop had overseen the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and was responsible for other mass murders and brutal executions, including those of American prisoners of war. He was also implicated in in the executions of German military officers implicated in the July 20 plot to assassinate Hitler.255 days shared in captivity with these men granted Moczarski, a first-class writer and perceptive listener, a remarkable opportunity to fathom the motives and mechanics of a notorious high-ranking Nazi. The result is one of the most extraordinary insights into the Nazi mind that has ever been penned. Sean Gasper Bye’s fluent, readable translation is the first complete one in the English language.Moczarski’s portrait of Stroop is finely etched. Details of his childhood, his loves and early career become the ground upon which the picture of a monster emerges. Moczarski is a great listener and allows Stroop to hang himself figuratively, with his own words, before he is carted off to be hanged for real. A man of no culture who believes stones grow underground and that Christ was the result of an encounter between Mary and a passing blond German soldier, Stroop’s lack of education left him qualified only for the most menial clerical work.Stroop was the sort of failed, talentless man the Nazi Party was tailor-made for. “Faithfulness, faithfulness, faithfulness – that’s the quality of a true man,” he declares. “Meine Ehre heisst Treue – my honour means faithfulness, the words engraved on the honorary dagger and honorary sword of the SS, have the noblest human and civic meaning of all.”Faithfulness to the party was the key to Stroop’s success. From Lippe, in the heart of the ancient Cherusci country where Arminius famously annihilated three Roman legions, Stroop proudly saw himself as a descendant of the purest Germans, eschewing Christianity for the pagan hodgepodge touted by Mathilda Ludendorff, who “brought the true Germanic gods back to us.” Stroop claimed it was essential all Germans encounter the Führer personally for ‘the spiritual support that came from their eyes meeting his, from mystical contact with Adolf Hitler, the aura his person gave off, his gestures, his eyes.” Stroop described Jews as subhuman and reveled in their sadistic destruction. Jews, who had jumped from windows to escape the fires he had set, are called “paratroopers,” special awards are given for shooting “paratroopers” in flight. Stroop even manages to turn the total figure of murdered Warsaw Ghetto Jews into a mystical number associated with ancient German astrology.Moczarski only occasionally interrupts or upbraids Stroop in his monstrous accounts:“Children too. There was one case I saw: first we pulled out the mother. Semi-conscious, dirty, pale, with the complexion of someone who had been in a cellar, staring as if hypnotized into the opening of the bunker where her son had been left behind, a little baby boy …”“That’s enough. Be quiet!” I suddenly cry.”Stroop’s narratives are sometimes laced with sentimentality but never humor, something his subordinate, Schielke, a more sympathetic figure, uses to deflate him. Too afraid to commit suicide, happy to blame subordinates he has tasked with murdering American POWs to escape execution himself, Moczarski attributes Stroop’s descent into decadence to “the rapid process of deformation that can occasionally be seen when a sudden improvement in material conditions befalls a man of weaker intellect, flimsy intellect and not the toughest character.”“Conversations with an Executioner” is essential reading for anyone both with an interest in Nazism and the Holocaust and the mechanics through which totalitarian ideologies gain a hold. Moczarski’s direct involvement with the events he describes and his close connection with Stroop grant him keener insights than Hannah Arendt’s in her deeply problematic “Eichmann in Jerusalem.”Stroop, like Eichmann, began life as an ill-educated functionary. But are we posing the right question when we ask whether evil is banal? Moczarski relates an early episode where Stroop beats his weaker younger brother to a pulp on some petty pretext, with the full approval of his father. Is it any old person who would enjoy watching people jump from the burning flames of the Warsaw Ghetto or the World Trade Center, or just an evil one?

In the Company of Nazi Evil

In the Company of Nazi Evil

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