The Stroop report : the Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no more! /

This is a facsimile and a translation of the report produced by the overseer of the final stages in the Nazi annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto (April 20-May 16, 1943), SS Major General Juergen Stroop, which Stroop preserved as a memento for a pleased and grateful Heinrich Himmler. It includes Stroop's overview and summary of the operation, a complete collection of his reports to headquarters throughout the destruction, and a series of photographs appropriately labeled to support the Nazi's interpretation of the event--all in all a unique and chilling historical document. The usefulness of the collection, which otherwise might lose some of its impact in the tedious repetition of military details and phraseology, is assured by the excellent, though brief, introduction by Andrzej Wirth, a Polish literary critic now living in the West. Wirth emphasizes the Stroop Report's value as ""the classical product of an obsession with documentation,"" and, more importantly, he deftly calls the reader's attention to the layers of meaning locked in the language of the report--""the language of fascism,"" ""the lingua of the the technological age,"" so closely tied by the Naxis to mass murder. In particular, he underlines how clearly the content of the photographs denies their fascist captions--thus, apropos of a photo of Jewish resisters labeled ""bandits,"" he writes that ""the dignity and beauty of the 'bandits' faces points up the ugliness of their persecutors."" This is, of course, a modern reading; for a ""good Nazi,"" there was no contradiction. The text is printed with the facsimile pages on the left and the translation on the right, allowing the reader to get a first-hand sense of the brutalities preserved forever in Stroop's German. An exceptional publication altogether. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.