A most peculiar role model

Kazimierz Moczarski's 'Conversations With an Executioner,' now fully translated into English, recounts eight and a half months Moczarski spent as a Soviet prisoner sharing a cell with SS General Jürgen Stroop, who directed the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943, killing at least 56,000 people. Moczarski, a Home Army veteran unjustly imprisoned by Soviet occupiers, documented Stroop's absolute self-certainty, contempt for anyone he outranked, and fury at correction. Stroop was hanged in 1952 after being tried by both the US and Poland; he expressed no regret for the ghetto's destruction because, he said, its victims were Jews.

The book, censored on first publication in 1977 and only now available complete in English, catalogs the psychological anatomy of a man who obeyed orders from Himmler and Hitler while demanding obedience from everyone beneath him. The review draws a portrait of blind loyalty, contempt for minorities, and total absence of remorse as through-lines of the personality type, not merely a historical curiosity.

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