Conversations with an Executioner

A remarkable firsthand account of the rise and fall of the Nazis told from the inside of a prison cell.

The first complete English translation of the international classic work of World War II literature and investigative journalism.

Warsaw, 1949: freedom fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski is being held in a maximum-security prison, accused of being an enemy of the state by the Polish secret police. A survivor of the Warsaw Uprising, he is horrified to find himself locked up in a cell with the notorious Nazi official responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto and the death of over 50,000 people: Jürgen Stroop.

For 255 days, Stroop talks to Moczarski of his life, entirely unrepentant of the crimes for which he would soon be executed himself. Conversations with an Executioner is Moczarski’s firsthand account of these extraordinary exchanges, giving disturbing insight into the mind of one of history’s most brutal war criminals.

Through his conversations with Stroop, Moczarski details the opportunities that the rise of the Nazi party in Germany presented for marginalized, mediocre characters like Stroop to gain prestige and power under the new regime—and the consequences that came for them after its fall. Unflinchingly examining some of humanity’s darkest moments, his work is a towering literary achievement, steeped in keen journalistic enterprise and psychological insight.

Widely translated and adapted for stage and screen in over 15 languages, this lost classic of World War II literature is now available in its first ever complete English translation.I. Eye-to-Eye with Stroop
II. At the Foot of Bismarck’s Cheruscan
III. Under the Kaiser’s Standard
IV. Journalist
V. Revelation in Munich
VI. Lippe ‘Expresses the Will of the Nation’
VII. Obedient, Satiated and Dignified
VIII. At the Head of the Block-Standarte
IX. Dachau, Beneš’s Villa and Churchill’s Bath
X. An Owl of Ill Omen
XI. On the ‘Rear’ Front
XII. A Motorway and Ukrainian Dreams
XIII. ‘So near…’ in the Caucasus
XIV. Exercises and Overture to the Grossaktion
XV. Flags Over the Ghetto
XVI. The Grand Hunt
XVII. The Cross of Valour
XVIII. Aber ein guter Mann!
XIX. In Germanic Seventh Heaven
XX. A Marble Embassy and Jewish Carpets
XXI. An Eight-Year-Old SS-man
XXII. ‘I Held the Population in the Palm of my Hand!’
XXIII. Stroop Liquidates a Field Marshal
XXIV. Werwolf – The Last Redoubt
XXV. Murder of the American Pilots
XXVI. The ScaffoldKazimierz Moczarski was born in Warsaw in 1907, and studied law at Warsaw University and the Sorbonne. During the Nazi Germany occupation of Poland, he fought as an officer in the Polish Resistance. In 1945, he was arrested by the new Communist regime as an enemy of the state, and was sentenced to ten years in prison. It was during this time that he was locked up with the Nazi war criminal, Jürgen Stroop. After his release, Moczarski worked as a journalist, and began writing his masterpiece, Conversations with an Executioner. Moczarski died in 1975, weakened by years of torture during his time in prison.

Sean Gasper Bye is a translator from Polish. His translations have won the EBRD Literary Prize and the Asymptote Close Approximations Prize; and been shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, a National Jewish Book Award, the Sami Rohr Prize, and the National Translation Award. He has been a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellow and Translator-in-Residence at Princeton University. He is a Senior Consultant for the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA), having previously served as Interim Executive Director. He lives in Philadelphia.The 2nd March 1949. Unit XI of Mokotów Prison, in Warsaw. They’ve just transferred me to another cell, where two men are being held. The door’s barely been bolted shut before we’ve started ‘sniffing each other out’ – as prisoners do. For a moment, these two have the upper hand in the cell hierarchy, since I’m the one who has moved in with them. The fact is, I have defences of my own. To fully protect myself, I could turn myself into a ‘pillar of salt’ or pretend to be ‘a man from the moon’, for instance. They can’t resort to such tricks, because the two of them are an established cast of characters, in motion.

‘Sind Sie Pole?’ Are you Polish? asks the older one: short, slim, with veiny arms, a paunch, and numerous missing teeth. Feldgrau jacket, prison trousers, wooden clogs. Shirt unbuttoned.
‘Yes. And you two?’

‘German. We are sogennante Kriegsverbrecher.’ So-called war criminals.

I unpack my things, cramming the rickety shelves. The older man lends a hand, with no encouragement from me. We don’t talk. Everyone’s on edge. What’s running through my mind at that moment is, more or less: ‘Germans. I’ve never been so close to them in my life. I remember Nazis like these from the occupation years as if it were yesterday. A tricky situation, but in Mokotów they occasionally put prisoners together without checking their nationality on the register. Germans. Everything separates them from me – both the weight of the past and the way I see the world. But what connects us is the business of sharing a cell. Could a bond like this, circumstantial rather than forged from goodwill, be like a footbridge over an abyss?’
I interrupt my rapid thoughts because the alertness I’ve learned to maintain sounds an alarm: why is the other Nazi passive, nestled into the window? Is he dangerous, or scared?

The one helping me settle in is Gustav Schielke from Hanover, a long-serving professional non-commissioned officer of the criminal vice police (Sittenpolizei). During the war, he was an SS-Untersturmführer,[1] a low-ranking archive worker for the Kraków office of the commander of the Security Police (Sicherheitspolizei) and Security Service (Sicherheitsdienst) in the part of Poland under German military occupation, known as the ‘General Government’.

‘You post-trial?’ I ask.

‘No.’

‘Inside long?’

‘In Poland: one year, nine months and twenty-seven days. Before that I was in Allied camps in West Germany.’

He’s still counting the days, I think, probably drawing little lines on the wall, hoping he’ll be able to tell his grandkids about prison in Poland.

The second man, worryingly, is tall and seems to be strongly built. He’s placed himself under the light, blocking part of the window, making it hard to observe him. I know these techniques. I can tell he’s got neuroses from interrogation, from prison, but he’s acting like an old hand.
‘Stroop,’ he finally introduces himself. ‘Mein Name is Stroop, durch zwei “o”. Vorname: Jürgen. Ich bin General-Leutnant. In Polish: division-general… Enchanté, Monsieur.’[2]

He’s agitated, his ears red. I am too, I think. Arriving in a new cell or meeting a fellow prisoner is very unsettling.

I’ve barely got my own name out when in rolls the pot and the smell of lunch. The working prisoners bringing it in, who are also Germans, signal to my companions that I’m not a grass. They’ve known me for a long time through various aspects of Mokotów life.

Stroop is officially entitled to a double portion. He eats with relish, methodically. Lunch in silence. I force myself to swallow calmly, so my new comrades don’t cotton on to how unsettled I am.

So this is Stroop himself, Himmler’s confidant, the Warsaw SS- und Polizeiführer,[3] liquidator of the capital’s ghetto and the predecessor of a man we’d punished, Kutschera.[i] He’s sitting a metre away and tucking into his lunch. About fifty. Neatly dressed, by prison standards. A thin dark-crimson jacket and, at his throat, a white hunting stock made of an artfully done-up handkerchief. Beige trousers. Brown ankle boots, slightly worn, polished to a gleam.

Schielke spoons up his food. He finishes quickly, hums ‘In Hannover an der Leine, haben Mädchen dicke Beine…’,[4] and looking a little reluctant, asks: ‘Have you been inside long?’
I reply. Then he offers to wash up my mess tin. I have to refuse, because such services are accepted only out of urgent need or friendship.

Stroop eats his lunch slowly. Finally, he gives Schielke two bowls to wash up. Before that, he lets out his trousers, fastening them on one of the extra buttons at the waist that he’s sewed on for a ‘medium’ or ‘large’ full belly.

Schielke scrubs the crockery. Stroop sits silently at the little table by the window, leaning on his elbows, face in his hands. His fleshy nose sticks out between his fingers. The posture of a tragic sage.

This thoughtfulness piques my interest. I suppose it must have to do with the photographs on Stroop’s little tabletop ‘altar’. There, next to a Bible, lie two parcels of letters from West Germany, a few books, a notepad, pencils. But the main thing that strikes me are the photographs, arranged in one frame, of Stroop’s family. On the cardboard under each photo, their relationship to him is written in Gothic calligraphy: ‘Unsere Mutter’, ‘Unsere Tochter’, ‘Unser Sohn’, and ‘Meine Frau’.[5] In the nooks and crannies of the ‘altar’ are little mementoes, including a feather of a roller bird with a streak of blue, and a small leaf. A dried birch leaf. Stroop looks melancholy in his contemplation, so I ask what’s on his mind. He could very well have retorted: ‘Mind your own business’, meaning his mind is on his family and he doesn’t want me to bother him. But Stroop says:

‘I’ve forgotten the Polish word for the little bird whose name you can also use to describe young women. Sort of like: shi… shi… shibka or something like that?’

‘Where did you hear this word?’

‘On my walk, when the criminal prisoners in the general cells were chatting up a detainee with first-class breasts who works in the laundry. I can’t remember the word. I’ve repeated it every day. It sounds like: shibka, shchirka…’

‘Maybe they said “ścierka”? A tramp? But that’s not a bird.’

‘I’m sure it was a bird. And I’m sure it wasn’t “shcherka”,’ he said, his German accent distorting the word.

‘If it was definitely a bird, then maybe “sikorka”? A tit?’

‘Yes,’ he lit up. ‘Shikorka, shikorka, “die Meise”. That little lady from the laundry kept bobbing her head like a tit.’

‘Once the general’s had a decent meal,’ cackled Gustav Schielke, ‘he turns into a dog for the girls. It’s not like the old days, Herr General! Besides, I swear I’ve never seen a tit with tits!’
The general shot a withering glance at Schielke. For the first time, I saw lead in Stroop’s eyes.

[1] The lowest rank of officer in the SS or Waffen-SS, second lieutenant. [2] ‘My surname is Stroop, with two o’s. First name: Jürgen. I’m a lieutenant general. In Polish: divisional general… Nice to meet you, sir.’ [3] Commander of the SS and police in the Warsaw District. [4] ‘In Hanover on the River Leine, girls have thick legs.’ [5] ‘Our mother, our daughter, our son, my wife’.
Chapter I
[i] SS-Brigadeführer and Police Major General/Brigadier General Franz Kutschera (1904–1944), organiser of the mass public executions that the Germans committed in Warsaw from 16 October 1943. Assassinated on 1 February 1944 by the Home Army.