Stroop Report Forgery

Gothic script with an exclamation point at the end, stating in German "The Warsaw Ghetto Is No More!"... A man (or dummy, see above center) photographed mid-air jumping to his death from an apartment... A soldier pointing a gun at a bewildered and scared little boy... A story of a German soldier holding a grenade which is then hit by a bullet while still in his hand which detonates it, killing him. Could all this be black propaganda?

The standard story of the Stroop Report is that it is a leather-bound commemorative book created by SS General Jürgen Stroop, using photos and text to chronicle and celebrate the defeat of the Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. It was put together to be given as a present to Heinrich Himmler.

In reality the Stroop Report is what's called "black propaganda" -- a book made by the Warsaw Jewish Underground but meant to look like it was made by the Germans. This essay points out the many mistakes the forger made, and discusses the motivation of the Jewish Underground to make the book.

Of huge import is the following: if the Stroop Report is black propaganda, then that means the famous little boy with hands raised photo, is also black propaganda, for it comes from the Stroop Report. That photo is the most well-known document of the holocaust. Besides a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting that, the suspicion is there simply on face value: The photo pulls on your heart strings in sympathy for the little Jewish boy and anger toward the soldier: exactly what black propaganda is supposed to do.

Your investigation into the Stroop Report should take about 3 hours, and should include reading two other essays in addition to this one. Please read the actual Stroop Report with this author's comments. And also read a separate essay about the famous little boy photo and all the aspects of it including who the photographer probably is, and who the boy probably is. That essay will some overlap with this essay. Once you read the Stroop Report itself and the two essays, you'll have a complete picture of the forgery.

Though it's known as "The Stroop Report" it's more accurate to say it's a homemade assemblage notebook with the title "The Warsaw Ghetto is No More!" And that title is written in (propaganda-ish) over-the-top Germanic gothic script with an exclamation point at the end (see image above-right.) But what is underwhelming is that the title isn't even embossed on the leather front cover as one would expect for a present for Heinrich Himmler; it's just written on a piece of paper inside--our first of many clues of the limited technical ability of the forgers. And the title page is one of many pages that appear dirty. For another page that is dirty and doesn't even have a heading which is centered properly, click here. But dirty pages is the least of our problems as you'll see.

The book has three sections: it begins with a commentary and background of the ghetto; the next section is comprised of supposed copies of daily battle reports; and the final section offers 53 photos--one of which is the famous photo of the little boy with his hands raised up:

But on face value, what impression does this photo give you? Perhaps that it's not very nice for a grown man to point a gun in the direction of a little boy and make him put his hands up. Considering that, which scenario seems more likely:

A) A German general thought this would be a good photo for a commemorative album, a photo that Heinrich Himmler would like.

B) The Jewish Underground chose the photo because it makes the Germans look bad.

It's an issue discussed in #4 below, and is the sort of thing this essay brings up.

Besides providing the most well-known holocaust photo, the Stroop Report was also the first piece of evidence presented at the Nuremberg Trial. USA Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson lifted it up for everyone in the courtroom to see, and read excerpts from it when he opened up the trial with the first prosecution speech. It was also used as evidence to get Juergen Stroop executed in his trial in Stalinist Poland.

There was a Warsaw Ghetto, and there was an uprising, but the Stroop Report is a fictionalization and fraudulent log of that event. As mentioned, it is a work of anti-Nazi propaganda made by the Jewish Underground. I have posted the Stroop Report with my comments here. If you want to read it without my comments, click here or here.

Suggestion: Read the Stroop Report and this essay at around the same time. Below are 13 aspects that point to it being a forgery.

According to the Stroop Report, German troops rounded up 56,000 Jews who refused to leave the ghetto, and in the process they killed 13,000 via gun battles, executions, explosions, and flames from buildings being set on fire. But we're supposed to believe that during all this, the Nazi forces only had 16 men killed. The real author wanted sympathy for the Jews, so she had Jews killed in awful ways, but it either didn't occur to her to have enough Germans killed, or she omitted that since it didn't work with her Jewish sympathy goal.

What makes the German death toll even harder to believe is that the Jews are in fortified dug-outs and bunkers, and have an extensive underground network via the sewer system. So much so, that mid-point through the report, Stroop thinks most of the Jews are gone, but there's actually 25,000 Jews still left. They're mostly all hidden in underground dug-outs! The last half of the report has German forces opening dug-out after dug-out, with a contingent of Jews who refuse to be taken alive, yet no one can seem to point a gun at a German and pull the trigger.

As an example, let's take 5 days in the middle of the conflict, from April 25-29, 1943:

You might wonder: "Maybe the Jews didn't have weapons." Except during those 5 days the Germans captured 10 kilograms of explosives, 100 hand grenades, ammunition, 25 pistols, and 5 rifles. And these are just the weapons that were found.

It's unlikely a German General would misidentify his only large gun, but conceivable that a forger would. It's also improbable that a general would choose a photo for a book to be given to the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, that shows an operation that is unintelligent from a military standpoint: an urban warfare scene that involves pushing a large old gun down the middle of a street, with soldiers on both sides oblivious to the possibility of sniper fire and hand grenades; to then shoot an already bombed-out building and shoot a basketball-sized chunk out of a wall in front of them.

It's likely these are staged photos, put together by the Jewish underground resistance with people dressed-up as Nazis. That's why they are shooting aimlessly at a building that is merely a hollow bombed-out façade, possibly hit by a German bomber in 1939 or in the Warsaw-wide uprising in 1944. Here is another photo of the scene before the large gun was fired:

Notice the chair. Also seen in the last clockwise sequence. Perhaps someone was getting some sun two hours earlier in this *war zone.*

Notice the bombed out building. A simple grenade thrown into the the open roof could destroy what's inside. No need for a field gun that can shoot miles. And it's not the kind of building that would be a resistance stronghold.

Perhaps they are in an already demolished part of the city, and are trying to make propaganda photos. That might be why that grinning man has that stereotypical German face: he was a Pole or Jew picked for that look. If it's a staged photo, it would explain why they don't seem to be worried about sniper fire from the buildings on either side of them and why they are pointlessly shooting projectiles at the 5-foot high wall in front of them. Notice how the wall gets hit in the photo sequence.

Not to mention that the Stroop Report mentions that Stroop had a French tank in his arsenal, and that would have been better suited for this operation since it's impervious to sniper fire. However the Jewish underground staging photos wouldn't have had access to a tank.

German propaganda photographers might have staged photos for the masses also, but would these be the photos a German general would pick for a commemorative book to be given to Heinrich Himmler?

Now consider that the Stroop Report lists a howitzer in the short list of weapons, but it doesn't match what's seen in the photos.

source

The problem is that the photos of the gun we're looking at is not a 10 cm. howitzer. It's a 75mm wz. 02-26 Polish divisional field gun, circa 1902.

Below are images of the type of gun which it is. The last photo calls attention to details on the shield of the two guns which show they are variations of the same make of gun.

If you know what a howitzer is (I didn't) go on to #3, if you don't know what a howitzer is, keep reading:

A howitzer (or "haubitze" in German) is a type of gun that typically lobs an 8-20 pound bomb (projectile) at the enemy, usually landing 3-5 miles away. Howitzers are different from large guns because large guns shoot straight. In contrast the trajectory of a howitzer projectile would be similar to someone doing an overhead serve in a volleyball game. In other words, slightly lobbed. Because it's usually deployed in a field, firing off into the distance, there isn't a need for major armor around it in contrast to a tank which is more suitable for close-up warfare. And the beginning of the Stroop Report mentions that Stroop had a French tank which is what he would have used for shooting a large projectile in the middle of the street--not a howitzer on WWI-era wooden wheels. Even a panzerfaust shot from the concealment of a doorway would make more sense rather than walking down the middle of a street with a cannon.

Special thanks to an Australian man who pointed out the howitzer issue, and who also pointed out that the forger got the caliber of the anti-aircraft gun wrong, which is mentioned later in this essay.

In section IV of the Stroop Report we find a tabulation of the weapons that the Germans confiscated during the month long conflict:

•Several hundred hand grenades, including Polish and home-made ones.
•Several hundred incendiary bottles
•Home-made explosives
•Infernal machines with fuses

Yet the forger forgets to have the Jews ever using explosives to the extent that they kill somebody. Only one German dies via an explosive device and that's where the forger throws in some Hollywood action drama: a bullet hits a German officer's own grenade while it's still in his hand. Great action, but how likely is that?

Similarly, on the May 14, entry we read "183 sewer entrances were opened at 1500 hours." The Germans have been removing the lids of sewers for nearly a month, but never once was one booby trapped. How hard is it to tie a sewer lid to a string and attach that to the pin of a grenade? Moreover, the writer mentions how Jews work in factories where they deal with chemical explosives. So presumably they have materials and know-how.

Lack of the Jewish side using grenades and explosives in the story is something the writer forgot to include.

4: Soldier Scaring Boy: An Unlikely Photo For A Commemorative Book.

Above is most famous photo of the holocaust, and it comes from the Stroop Report. But would a German general choose such an un-chivalric, bullying photo for a commemorative book? The expression on the boy's face seems to say, "What did I do wrong? Don't shoot me." It creates a strong emotional impression against the Nazis. The viewer's reaction is "that's outrageous!" which is precisely why the forger chose to include this photo in the report.

To grasp the unlikelihood the Stroop would have chose this photo, try to imagine General Patton sending General Eisenhower a commemorative book about victory in Germany that included a photo of an American soldier herding 8-year old German children at gunpoint into some enclosure. It's not the kind of photo that would be chosen.

In the report the photo has the caption "Pulled from the bunkers by force." Yet the boy appears way too dressed up for that. As Richard Raskin writes in his book "A Child At Gunpoint"

"There is no sign of any kind – such as disheveled or dust-covered clothing – to indicate that the captives in the photo of the boy with his hands raised were 'pulled by force' from anything that might rightfully be called a 'bunker.'" (pg. 17)

Yet it's not a staged photo. The forger who created the Stroop Report couldn't have predicted this photo becoming the world's most famous holocaust photo. Thus it was problematic when New York doctor, Tsvi Nussbaum, recognized himself as the little boy and said that he had never been in the Warsaw ghetto, but just outside of it, a few months after the uprising, at the Hotel Polski. This would have been the time the forger was working on creating the Stroop Report forgery. Nussbaum said that the people there weren't taken to their deaths. The Nazis allowing the evacuation of some Jews from the Hotel Polski is a known wartime event.

Dr. Tsvi Nussbaum in the video "Tsvi Nussbaum A Boy From Warsaw"
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Still from "Tsvi Nussbaum A Boy From Warsaw": A collage on the wall of Nussbaum's doctor's office waiting room.
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Photo comparison in the video. On the right is a passport photo from a couple years later. One expert has said the ear lobes are different, but does the photo on the left offer enough detail of the ear?

But Richard Raskin points out something amazing that would be hard for Nussbaum to make up or get right if he were lying: the front of the Hotel Polski resembles the background of the famous photo.

It's hard to imagine how an ear, nose and throat specialist in New York City could pull off this background similarity if he were making up a story. Richard Raskin, weighing the evidence of whether Nussbaum might be the boy writes:

"However, one additional factor that counts on the other side of the balance sheet, concerns the location at Dluga Street 29. I have visited the address, no longer the Hotel Polski, and - making allowances for whatever rebuilding and renovations were done in the sixty intervening years - I found the physical layout of the gateway consistent with that of the 1943 photgraph." (pg. 91)

Nussbaum's account would explain why the boy is dressed up, and why the crowd doesn't have a look of fear in their faces, but his testimony is not without problems: While wanting the recognition of being the child in the photo, he also doesn't want to discredit the story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising. Afterall, his version of the event has the photo taken outside the ghetto, with the Jews not being herded to Treblinka to be killed. So in the video "Tsvi Nussbaum. A Boy from Warsaw"(1990, MTV/Finland) one sees footage of Nussbaum compensating for this, by telling unlikely tales of Nazi atrocities he's been directly involved with. To give two examples: he tells of how as a child he lived in a house in a suburb of Sandomierz, Poland. When the Germans occupied the area, one official, "possibly the the head of the gestapo" lived on the second floor of this very same house. The head of the gestapo lived on the second floor while his family lived on the first floor of the house (how likely is that!) One day his mom went upstairs to ask this official to release her brother-in-law from a concentration camp, and as she walked back down the stairs, the official shot her in the back and killed her.

And Nussbaum remembers a conversation he supposedly overheard between two German soldiers in front of the Hotel Polski around the moment of the famous photo. He was trying to get on a truck with his aunt and uncle, but there was a bureaucratic snag. The 8-year old Tsvi Nussbaum supposedly overheard two German soldiers discussing him and deciding to let him on the truck:

"what's the difference, we'll kill him there instead of killing him here."

Nussbaum wants his rightful recognition as the boy in the photo, but Nussbaum also wants his account to fit in with the holocaust story, not against it, so this video is peppered with not-believable stories of German brutality which he himself was involved with, such as the two examples just mentioned.

Regardless of whether Nussbaum is the boy in the photo or not. And regardless of how the forgers obtained the photo, the key point is that it's evident to any perceptive person that this is an anti-Nazi photo. The forger understood that, and so has the public around the world. That Jürgen Stroop would have been clueless about that is not believable. Ultimately you have to ask yourself which scenario is more likely:

1) The forger chose the photo for the anti-nazi emotional impression it conveys.

2) Stroop chose it thinking it would be a photo Himmler would like.

5: Photo Of Man Falling In Mid-Air.

We see a man falling mid-air. He has supposedly just jumped from the window above. I think it's probably a staged photo. What we can see of the falling body looks like it could be a dummy.

Photo source: Stroop Report. English translation 1979. Random House. The white blotch is actually on the building.

In a combat situation, how likely is it that someone would click the shutter at just the right moment to get a mid-air photo of a man jumping out of a 4 story building? Particularly since there might be someone else in the building who refuses to be taken alive and might shoot a gun or throw a grenade at the soldiers below.

Two copies of the Stroop Report exist today. One in Warsaw and one in the United States National Archives (NARA) in Maryland. Not all the photos in the two copies are the same. The following photo comes from the NARA version, but it's not in the Warsaw version. It's of the building.

First thing to notice is the white around the "falling man photo" is peeling paint on this building. The second thing to notice is that there really isn't a big fire that would warrant jumping from a window. One window on the left has smoke. A window which conveniently ends up in the top-middle of the "falling man photo." Besides that we see curtains in other units that haven't ignited. The area above the roof seems a bit hazy, but no black smoke billowing upward. From this it seems that the man could have taken the stairs.

We see 3 German soldiers (or people dressed as German soldiers) at the bottom. The smoke out the window looks about the same as in the falling man photo. So it's probably taken around the same time. Why would someone jump if German soldiers were below?

And if it's German propaganda (in other words staged by German propaganda photographers for the German masses) is it really a photo Stroop would pick for a book to be given to Himmler?

I think the photo is staged. Budget staged. Make a little smoke and throw a dummy out the window and have someone downstairs waiting with their finger on the camera button. If you don't take the photo at the split second required, just do it again.

6: A Picture Of Severe Scoliosis

This is likely a staged photo meant to imply an extreme version of Nazi racial ideology. Nazi philosophy had a racial component to be sure, but it didn't involve photographing someone with a medical problem in a conquered city. Afterall, the supposed intended recipient of the Stroop Report, Heinrich Himmler, would have been aware that scoliosis exists in Germany also. Anti-German propaganda often involved taking German positions to the extreme. Fitting in with that is the photo's caption: "dregs of humanity." This photo is consistent with the forger's frequent use of the terms "bandit" and "subhuman." The forger frames Stroop as writing this caption, which is conceptually the same as what British propagandist Sefton Delmer tried to do with the voice of "Der Chef" which you'll read about in #11.

7: A Different Jewish Strategy Due To The Germans Losing The Battle Of Stalingrad.

The Nazis and Zionists had a common interest: the Nazis wanted the Jews out of Europe, and the Zionists wanted Jews to leave Europe for a new homeland. There was some cooperation regarding this right up until it became evident that Germany was going to lose the war, at which time the holocaust myth, rather than cooperation, became the new Jewish strategy to get a homeland.

Cooperation/Collaboration

Above is a photo from the Stroop Report of a burned out, though at one time imposing building that had been the Judenrat, or the Jewish governing council of the Warsaw ghetto. The Judenrat ran the ghetto, complete with a Jewish police force, a Judenrat flag that had a Star of David on it (probably symbolizing the Zionist quest more than *this is where the Jews live*); and some Jewish ghettos, but not the Warsaw ghetto, even had a separate Jewish currency in order to prepare Jews for living in their own homeland.

Around 7 months before the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (in July through September 1942), the Germans deported 300,000 Jews out of the Warsaw ghetto with the help of the Judenrat, and there was no resistance. Rather, there was cooperation. The Jews went willingly because the Germans told them they were being deported to places where they'd be given a job. It was the truth: The Germans, upon entering Warsaw, found Jews who were culturally different from German Jews. They were working-age Jews but with no visible means of income, and no apparent legitimate job. There was a lot of black market and street peddling. Rightly or wrongly, the Nazis stated that Jews needed to learn skilled manual labor before they could found a new Jewish homeland. And learning new manual labor skills melded with Zionist efforts to teach Jews industrial and agrarian vocations not traditionally done by Jews. In turn the Germans wanted the Jews out of the general population and they needed labor for their war effort. The Jews were deported to Auschwitz (which was a labor camp with a massive factory complex for 200,000 workers) and to other labor camps.

Zionist Strategy Change
At the time that 300,000 Jews left the Warsaw ghetto, it appeared that Germany would soon defeat the Soviet Union. The Jews were thus cooperating with who they thought would be the winning side of the USSR/Germany conflict. The Battle of Stalingrad changed all that. A devastating German defeat, and occuring around the same time that American and British forces began advancing in Africa with German forces retreating. Within the space of a couple months, the tables turned and it became evident that Germany would eventually lose the war. The Jews wanted to collaborate with the winning side, not the losing side. Thus Zionist strategy changed to the promotion of the holocaust myth--a strategy that eventually led them to getting Israel as their homeland. The initial Nazi/Zionist cooperation was thus covered up and chalked up to Jewish naiveté. It's covered up because it's embarrassing and doesn't fit the later narrative of genocide. That's one reason why Auschwitz is presented today as an extermination camp rather than as a labor camp.

But it needs to be mentioned that "cooperation" is too strong of a word, nor is "collaboration" really right. Rather it was Jewish/Zionist strategy in face of wartime events.

A piece of evidence for the strategy change can be found in a February 1943 Reader's Digest article called "Remember Us," written by a member of the Irgun (a right-wing Zionist group) Ben Hecht. Hecht tells the vast middle America readership that the Germans might possibly kill up to six million Jews.

The Public Relations Appearance
The Stroop Report has to be seen in the context of the new Jewish strategy: It presents an image to the world that the Jews were being persecuted and actively resisting the Nazis. In this schema, the previous collaboration is only because the Jews didn't know what was really going on.

In reality, the Warsaw ghetto uprising was probably quite small. We get an inkling of this in the Stroop Report itself, when it's mentioned that throughout the Warsaw ghetto Jewish rebellion, German armaments factories continued to run, manned by Jewish laborers. The revolt is happening and yet thousands of Jews are getting up and going to work every day in German armaments factories. The reader wonders "how in the world could this be the case?" Answer: because the forger is likely inflating the extent of the revolt. It was probably quite minor. Some terrorist activity while the Germans are trying to empty the ghetto.

The Jewish Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in April 1943 occured just after the Battle of Stalingrad, with the Stroop Report presumably being made in the subsequent months. There were a lot of major battles going on at this time, which makes the notion of "let's stop and make a 'savor the victory' album" of a relatively minor conflict against an ill-equipped group, all the more doubtful. Rather, it was a piece of propaganda that the Jewish Underground could make while under occupation, to put forth an image of Jewish/Nazi un-cooperation while at the same time vilifying the Germans.

Summary
The Stroop Report puts out the message that the Jews fought valiantly against the Germans who were deporting them to death camps. It's indicative of the new Zionist strategy move away from collaboration and toward the promotion of a holocaust myth. This strategy change came about after the Battle of Stalingrad, because it then became evident that Germany would lose the war. The Jews wanted to be on the winning side and parlay that into getting Israel.

8: A Great Piece Of Trial Evidence.

At the beginning of the Nuremberg Trial, the American Chief prosecutor, Robert Jackson, begins the trial's opening statement with the following, I'll put in blue-bold text the last sentence because it is an often repeated sentence that has come to be associated with what the trial was supposedly about:

"The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to reason."

The last sentence is very lofty, but what's not so lofty is that midway through his speech, Jackson holds up a copy of the Stroop Report, telling the court:

"I shall not dwell on this subject longer than to quote one more sickening document which evidences the planned and systematic character of the Jewish persecutions. I hold a report written with Teutonic devotion to detail, illustrated with photographs to authenticate its almost incredible text, and beautifully bound in leather with the loving care bestowed on a proud work. It is the original report of the SS Brigadier General Stroop in charge of the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, and its title page carries the inscription, "The Jewish ghetto in Warsaw no longer exists." It is characteristic that one of the captions explains that the photograph concerned shows the driving out of Jewish "bandits"; those whom the photograph shows being driven out are almost entirely women and little children."

The photo is most certainly the little Jewish boy photo, but Jackson is lying about the caption of this photo. That caption is the same in both the Warsaw version and the NARA version of the Stroop Report. It states "Pulled From The Bunkers By Force." In other words, it doesn't mention anything about Jewish bandits. The only other photo in the Stroop Report that shows a child is photo #7 (featured in section 10 of this essay) and it doesn't have a caption like Jackson describes either. The Stroop Report is already a forgery, but Nuremberg Chief Prosecutor Robert Jackson has to lie about a photo caption, to make it look even worse.

Jackson then spends the next two minutes reading a Stroop Report excerpt to the court, reading what a German general supposedly freely admitted, even proudly attested to, regarding the Warsaw ghetto Jews: "They then tried to crawl with broken bones across the street into buildings which were not afire."

The leather-bound commemorative book theme works great as trial evidence for revenge against Nazis. So much so that similar items come up in in two other court cases: The trial of Ilse Koch, where a witness, Kurt Froboess, told the court that Koch had a photo album bound in tattooed human skin with a tattoo on the front cover.

Then there's the Kurt Franz trial: Around 1960, 15 years after the supposed fact, Kurt Franz was arrested and put on trial for his time at Treblinka. In his apartment, an incriminating photo album was found with a title that would anger any jury: "The Best Years Of My Life." It contained supposed pictures of Treblinka. Franz, who in various written witness accounts was accused of skimming millions of dollars, in addition to sadistically murdering Jews, lived in a modest apartment under his real name for 15 years prior to his arrest, and it evidently never occured to him to throw his supposed album away. The "Best Years of My Life" photo album was likely another planted fake document.

To summarize, the Stroop Report was a key piece of Nuremberg trial evidence, but it also fits in with other faked albums. The photo album theme made great copy for the press, and helped Jürgen Stroop get sentenced to death at his trial, and Kurt Franz and Ilse Koch sentenced to life in prison.

9: The Forger Got A Second Gun Wrong.

An Australian man who has studied WWII weapons for many years, brought to my attention that the type of anti-aircraft gun mentioned in the weapons list is a "2.28-cm A.A. Gun." The problem is that caliber doesn't exist. "2.28 cm" was not a caliber used by any military. It's a mix-up with an anti aircraft gun called the 2 cm. FlaK 28, which is named from the year 1928. Possibly the forger thought it was a reference to the caliber. 'FlaK' by the way, is a German abbreviation for anti-aircraft gun, not to be confused with 'flak' as in 'flak jacket.'

But that's not the only problem with this gun. We translate the full line:

Three 2.28-cm anti-aircraft guns 2/24

They have three guns and "2/24" means 2 officers and 24 enlisted men. 26 people. It would thus appear that 8 or 9 men operate each gun. The problem is that in the German army, there was a 4-man crew for this anti-aircraft gun. Not 8. We have a photo of an anti-aircraft gun in the Stroop Report:

We see 3 men, and it's hard to imagine what 5 or 6 more men are going to do in support of this gun.

Indeed, the gun in the photo looks like it could be a 2 cm FlaK 28. There's not a lot of photos of the 2 cm Flak 28 on the web but here are some I found:

Thus it's easy to see how the forger might have made the mistake of putting it down as 2.28 cm. thinking the 28 was a caliber reference. But we're supposed to believe that not only did a German general make this mistake, but didn't catch the mistake when putting a book together for the second most powerful man in Germany, Heinrich Himmler.

If you were a one-star American general and you were asked to put together a commemorative book for Dwight D. Eisenhower, would you bother proof-reading it?

To be fair, later in the 4-20-1943 entry, the gun caliber is mentioned properly. We read "The A.A. Artillery - 3 2-cm. guns used for this operation had two men killed."

The Stroop Report has sarcasm, irony, and action sequences that are written skillfully, but we find many military problems. The 2.28 cm caliber gun fits into that. From this one can surmise that the forger was an experienced writer but not an experienced military person. That would also explain why the daily reports which are supposedly one general communicating with another, never have a situation of generals "talking shop," I.e. the reports don't include difficult phrases to understand for the non-military layman. Rather, it's all very readable even many years later in the same way that a good short story is readable.

10: A Willy-Nilly Assemblage Of Photographs, Duplicated In Weird Ways.

Imagine that you are general Stroop. You're putting together a commemorative album for Heinrich Himmler, and there will be 3 copies of the album altogether. Besides Himmler's, there will be one for your superior general, Friedrich Krüger, and one for yourself. Your camera people have taken photos of the uprising. You pick around 50 you like. You then order 3 prints to be made from the negatives, so that you can assemble your 3 copies of the report.

But that scenario is not the case at all.

There are two copies of the Stroop Report in existence today: One in Warsaw, and one in in the United States National Archives (NARA.) Many of the photos aren't even the same. Many of the same photos have different hand-written captions, and there are even examples where the duplication method is "click the camera button twice in order to have a copy of the photo."

Richard Raskin's book "A Child at Gunpoint" points this out:

"37 of the 53 photos in the Warsaw document are also in the NARA copy, though not necessarily in the same order nor of the same size. And in the case of three other photos, the 7th, 15th, and 41st in the Warsaw document, there is a NARA variant, taken of the same scene but a moment earlier or later and from another angle." (pg. 49)

To see a "variant", let's look at photo #7 in both albums:

From USA document. Title: "To the Transfer Station

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From Warsaw document. Title: "Pulled from the bunkers by force."

Notice where the man on the right is in both photos; or the direction the little girl is looking. It's photo duplication by clicking the camera button twice. Germans are known for working in a manner that exhibits exactitude, detail, precision and uniformity. That's a national trait of the Germans. A German military general is probably a hyperized version of that. The assemblage of photos makes more sense for a Jewish Underground working with limited means and resources.

Duplicating the famous photo.

But the story of how the famous photo of the little boy with his hands raised up was duplicated is even more incredible. It's a photo of a photo. The duplication method is *point your camera at a photo and take a photo of a photo.* The photographer even photographed the caption as a way to duplicate that. Once again Richard Raskin tells us about it on page 52 and 53 of his book. My comments are in yellow:

Regarding the photograph on the left above, Raskin writes "The caption, 'Mit Gewalt aus Bunkern hervorgeholt' ('Pulled from the bunkers by force'), is hand -written directly on the Bristol board, below the photograph." (p. 52)

But regarding the photo on the right Raskin states "The caption...is photographically reproduced along with the image; in other words, the photo and caption on the Warsaw page were photographed, and reproduced on the photo paper mounted on the corresponding page in the NARA document. In the process, the upper, right and left edges of the Warsaw photo were slightly cropped." (p. 53)

If it had really been Stroop's project, his people would have just printed another image from their negative. On this supposed level of a German general working on a commemorative album to be given to Heinrich Himmler (who is the head of the SS) this shoddy workmanship isn't believable.

It's hard to know what really happened, but an intelligent guess might be that the Jewish Underground who made the Stroop Report didn't have access to some of the negatives or duplicating equipment. And perhaps no access to the original calligrapher who wrote the captions which such an over-the-top script:

At a later time, there may have been some distance between the two copies, which would have made last minute additions (including the calligraphy captions) tenuous across the two copies. Raskin points out that one of the copies was at one time in British hands, and the other found by the Americans. Could there have been some distance between the two copies when the Warsaw Jewish Underground obtained the little boy photo and realized that it had great propaganda value and decided to add it into the copies? A fact that supports this assertion is that, in the NARA copy, the little boy photo is on a different kind of paper that appears to be a later insertion. Here's what Raskin writes

"'Pictorial Report' [Bildbericht], 50 and 52 pages (including section title page), in the Warsaw and NARA specimens respectively, both of which contain 53 photos. The photos in the Warsaw specimen are mounted on the same A4 Bristol board pages, with ragged edges, used in the preliminary and introductory sections. All but three of the photos in the NARA specimen are mounted on Bristol board pages with ragged edges, the only exceptions being those numbered 14, 34, and 39 below, which are mounted on cardboard with straight edges. This is worth noting since the first of these three photos (number 14) is that of the boy with hands raised." (pg. 39)

In other words, it appears that the little boy photo, along with two other photos, were inserted into the NARA copy after it was put together. They are mounted on different paper. If the calligrapher had come and gone, that would explain why they had to photograph the caption.

The handwritten captions, by the way, are not Stroop's own writing.

Above: close-up of handwriting under the famous photo (Raskin, p 68) my comments in teal.

Above: Stroop's handwriting sample from a letter written in jail, found in Raskin's book.

Raskin found a handwritten letter Stroop wrote from jail in 1951, and sent it to a handwriting expert who determined that Stroop didn't write the captions. (Raskin, note 34 page 68)

Stroop's handwriting is elegant enough to have sufficed for writing the captions, yet it's not his handwriting. It's a small part of the argument that it's a forgery though: after all, Stroop could have dictated the captions. But then you have to stretch further to believe that Stroop dictated different captions under the same photos across the two copies. But not only that we find the same phrases under different photos, across the two copies. It's odd to say the least.

Later in this essay it's posited that Rachel Auerbach might be the forger. However the captions are not her handwriting either as a comparison to her handwriting reveals. Below is a letter of Rachel Auerbach's found at the YIVO institute in New York City:

Rachel Auerbach's letter to Philip Friedman shows that she's not the person who wrote the Stroop Report captions.
Letter Source: Yivo Institute, New York, Records Group 1258

My guess is that the writing under the Stroop Report photos is in a purposeful calligraphy. In other words it's not the basic writing style of some person.

This would be in sync with the Stroop Report's propaganda theme: a supposed celebration of a ghastly deed, and thus over-the-top aspects like the Gothic Germanic lettering on the cover page, leather binding, photos of smiling Germans, stylized calligraphy under the photos, etc.

The forger may have been assembling the albums when Warsaw was still occupied. To keep from being discovered, obtaining photos and duplicating them may have been a challenge. Supporting this is the George Kadish section below in #13.

It's hard to know what the situation was: Did Jews in the ghetto take the photos? Were some photos stolen from the Germans? Some real? Some staged? Photos taken out of context? Did the forger write the text and also assemble the photos? Was George Kadish involved as is discussed in #13 of this essay?

Whatever the case, it isn't the "teutonic devotion to detail" which Nuremberg prosecutor Robert Jackson mentioned when he held up the Stroop Report for the court to see in the opening statement of the Nuremberg Trial. Rather, the work that went into the photo section is so shoddy and haphazard that it points to a German general not being involved.

And it's not just the photos: the best version of the Stroop Report is the Warsaw version and below is a scanned page from it: The roman numeral "I" at the top (denoting section I) is not centered.

Click to enlarge.

SOURCE

It's not believable that this is the work of a German general preparing a document for the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler. I'm an American (USA) and we pay less attention to precision detail than German culture, yet in college or high school (on an IBM Selectric typewriter) I would have noticed the heading being off-center after a line or two and would have removed the page and started a new one. And that would for an essay for merely a teacher, not for the equivalent of the Vice President of the United States or whatever position you want to loosely compare to that of Heinrich Himmler. Some cultures don't make such a big deal out of precision and exactitude though, like perhaps Warsaw Yiddish culture.

Not to mention that if you look at scans of the Warsaw Stroop Report pages, you find smudges and stains all over Stroop's supposed introduction. This might be understandable for the copies of the daily reports, but the splotches are on the pages of the introduction section of this supposed commemorative book. Would this be acceptable for a book to be given to Heinrich Himmler? One could argue, however, that these stains happened when they were in Allied hands. But considering other instances of shoddy workmanship one wonders if that's how the pages looked when found by the allies, See the pages yourself, particularly the pages of the introduction which start with the Roman numeral "I."

11: Over-The-Top Use Of The Word "Bandit" And "Subhuman."

It's hard to believe, but the word "bandit" appears in the Stroop Report 99 times. Perhaps Stroop's superior general, Krüger, at headquarters might want to know who these bandits are. Polish Communists? Polish Home Army? Polish Soviet communists? Stroop obviously isn't working on the "know your enemy" principle! However, using derogatory names makes complete sense for a forger who is creating anti-nazi propaganda. Do a keyword search on "bandit" on the Avalon Project Stroop Report and see for yourself how often the word is used. At one point, the forger gets carried away to the point of not making sense, where near the end of the report, we read:

"180 Jews, bandits, and subhumans were destroyed. The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence."

O.K. so we have the Jews mentioned. And the bandits must be the Poles, and the "subhumans" are?

The forger having Stroop use the term "subhuman" has parallels to a radio personality known as "Der Chef" --a character developed by British propagandist Sefton Delmer. "Der Chef" broadcast on a radio station called Gustav Siefried Eins which was claimed to be illegally run by right wing nazis inside Germany, but was in reality a British propaganda operation. On the station, Der Chef would call Churchill a "drunken old cigar-smoking Jew." The point being that anti-German propaganda sometimes involved taking German positions to the extreme. Which is what we're seing when the forger refers to people fighting in the ghetto as "subhumans."

Midway through the Stroop Report there are supposedly around 25,000 Jews still hiding in underground dug-outs. These dug-outs must be crowded and makeshift. However they would still look like a "facility" to some extent. Rows of bunk beds, something like that. But there are 5 photos of dug-outs in the Stroop Report and they all look like they're made for one or two people. Here they are:

"When the raiding parties combed out the area for remaining dug-outs in which Jews were hiding, they succeeded in discovering 30 dug-outs. 663 Jews were pulled out of them and 133 Jews were shot." (May 12th entry)

663 Jews/30 dug-outs = 22 Jews per dug-out
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"1,660 Jews were caught for evacuation, pulled out of dug-outs, about 330 shot. Innumerable Jews Swede (sic.) destroyed by the flames or perished when the dug-outs were blown up. 26 dug-outs were blown up and an amount of paper money, especially dollars was captured; this money has not yet been counted." (April 24th entry)

1,660/26 = 64 Jews per dug-out.
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"30 Jews evacuated, 1,330 Jews pulled out of dug-outs and immediately destroyed, 362 Jews killed in battle. Caught today altogether: 1,722 Jews. This brings the total of Jews caught to 29,186. Moreover, it is very probable that numerous Jews have perished in the 13 dug-outs blown up today and in the conflagrations." (April 26th entry)

1,330 Jews/13 dug-outs = 102 Jews per dug-out.
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"At another point an Engineer officer, attached by the Wehrmacht to the units with great trouble opened a dug-out situated about 3 meters below ground. From this dug-out, which had been ready since October of last year and was equipped with running water, toilet, and electric light, we pulled out 274 of the richest and most influential Jews." (April 28th entry)

274 Jews in one dug-out.
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Wouldn't Stroop want a photo of an impressive dug-out facility? A photo, perhaps, with rows of bunk beds? Isn't that the kind of photo he would want to show Himmler? It's likely these large dug-outs never existed. They were made-up by the forger, and the much more minor reality are what's seen in the photographs.

On the last two pages of Richard Raskin's book, there is a bit of a postscript: A strange explanation and a lot of questions as to why a certain photographer was in possession of the photo (on a lead plate) of the famous Jewish boy with his hands raised up. We'll look at an excerpt from Raskin's book, and then show some parallels that point to George Kadish being the photographer. While reading the following keep in mind how Richard Raskin doesn't say that Kadish might be the photographer:

"In October 2003, after the research for this book was completed and the above chapters written, I learned from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum that they had a related artifact in their collection: a lead plate used for printing copies of the photograph of the boy with raised hands. It is one of a group of thirty such plates, bearing images of the Nazi persecution of Jews. These photographic plates had been found in a second-hand bookstore, possibly in Munich, 'at the end of the war' by a Kovno survivor and photographer named George Kadish (originally Tsvi Kadushin), who in 1991 gave the plates to the Museum via Raye Farr, then director of the Museum's Permanent Exhibition.

How and when a copy of the photograph was made available to whoever made the lead plate, is a mystery, considering that only four copies of the photograph are known to have been printed in connection with the Stroop Report - a document available only to an inner circle of the SS elite. And equally perplexing are such questions as: what was the plate used for and by whom? And through what channels and to what public was the picture disseminated via the photographic plate, in the final years of the Second World War?" (p. 178)

Raskin just tells us that Kadish was "a Kovno survivor and photographer." That's pretty evasive considering that George Kadish was a "ghetto photographer" and the most famous one at that. Check out the the Wikipedia entry, screen-captured on 1/2/9:

As grateful as I am to Richard Raskin for relating about George Kadish giving this lead plate to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (something I would have never found out otherwise) I can also see why Raskin wasn't forthcoming with pertinent information about George Kadish that I so easily found on the web: Because George Kadish as the photographer points to the Stroop Report being a forgery made by the Jewish underground. In Raskin's book there's uncharacterically no footnote regarding the information about finding the plates in a second hand bookstore at the end of the war; And Raskin doesn't mention that Kadish built his own cameras to take secret ghetto photographs, taking pictures through a buttonhole on his coat or via a custom-built camera worn on his belt. Kadish as photographer destroys the validity of the Stroop Report, and Raskin couldn't go there. Making a reference to the movie Planet of the Apes, this would be Raskin's Statue of Liberty protruding out of the sand.

We have the story of "I found this photo in a second hand bookstore" but could that be a cover for Kadish being the photographer? It makes sense that a ghetto photographer in possession of ghetto photographs might have had something to do with the taking of those photographs. Compare with the unlikelihood of a ghetto photographer perusing a second hand Munich bookstore at the end of the war and finding someone else's ghetto photographs.

The man below might be the real person who took the famous photo of the little boy. Here he is with a photo that has similar aims to the little boy photo: it is made to engender a strong response against the Nazis and sympathy for the Jews.

It's a farfetched story: someone writing "revenge" with their own blood, but it could be true. Except what makes it likely untrue is a second version of the photo: in the book, Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto published by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1997, we find another photo of a message written supposedly in blood. The problem is that it's obviously not the same photo since the letters are different. This implies that when they were creating this propaganda photo, they thought of a better phrase, a better surface, and a more convincing look. If you compare lettering and surface, you'll see it's a different photo.

And at the Yivo Institute website we find possible first attempts by George Kadish of taking a photo of a child meant to elicit sympathy for Jews and anger toward the Germans:

Above, the boy is the center of the photo, but he's too far away. And the photo doesn't convey a powerful story like the famous photo.

In the Kovno ghetto, the Jews were required to live there, but they weren't locked in. Could Kaddish have traveled from the Kovno ghetto in Lithuania to Warsaw, Poland? We know that there was communication between ghettos, and that Zionist groups had secret couriers between ghettos. The book Hidden History of the Kovno Ghetto tells us that early on Kadish "joined the rightist Zionist movement called Betar." (p. 55) So could they have arranged it? While Kadish is known for taking secret and not-secret photos, if the famous photo is at the Hotel Polski, that means Kadish didn't need to be in the ghetto and maybe didn't need to be secret about taking the photo. He would have then returned to Lithuania.

It's inconclusive, but considering what Kadish did during the war and considering that he possessed a lead plate of the photo, one wonders if he was the person who took the famous photo of the little boy with his hands raised.

My guess is the author is Rachel Auerbach. I suspect the author was a feminist and a zionist, and who was connected to a propaganda group headed by Adolf Berman and Emmanuel Ringelblum. The one person who fits that mold is Rachel Auerbach. A passage in the Stroop Report that perhaps reveals the true voice of the author is the following passage from section II of the introduction:

"During this armed resistance the women belonging to the battle groups were equipped the same as the men; some were members of the Chaluzim movement. Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands. It happened time and again that these women had pistols or hand grenades (Polish "pineapple" hand grenades) concealed in their bloomers up to the last moment to use against the men of the Waffen SS, Police, or Wehrmacht."

Now consider that General Stroop never mentions the two main Jewish fighting groups, the ZOB and the ZZW. The forger makes the mistake of portraying Stroop as too ignorant. As if, with all the possible interrogation opportunities from the thousands of captured Jews, Stroop would never get up to speed on the specifics of who these people are, instead preferring to call them "Jews and bandits." The author poorly gauged how knowledgable she should make Stroop, but here's the kicker: we're supposed to believe Stroop can just throw out the Hebrew word "Chaluzim." A term that means "Young Pioneers"-- A Jewish group centered around learning skills to take with them in their future immigration to Israel. Does that seem like Stroop's voice or a momentary revealing of the voice of the true author?

Secondly the passage promotes women as fighters alongside the men: "Not infrequently, these women fired pistols with both hands." But it's an absurd notion that an SS general would admire the enemy for doing something as ridiculously "wild west" as firing pistols with both hands. Wouldn't it be better just to have one pistol and hold it with two hands to steady the aim? Considering the Resistance hardly ever killed a German, aiming is probably more of an issue than doubling your rate of fire with two guns. Would Stroop admire their brazen courage or wonder why they are so poorly trained by the ZOB and ZZW? The forger wants to make the women in the Resistance look courageous and attempts to convey this through Stroop's admiring voice, but it comes off poorly due to the forger's lack of military knowledge.

The last thing we look at in analyzing this paragraph is the heroic women hiding grenades and pistols in their bloomers (a loose-fitting pair of long shorts.)

"It happened time and again that these women had pistols or hand grenades (Polish "pineapple" hand grenades) concealed in their bloomers up to the last moment to use against the men of the Waffen SS, Police, or Wehrmacht."

The problem is the Stroop Report doesn't include a single death by a grenade thrown by a Jew. The passage doesn't make sense with the Stroop Report death figures. It is the author going into fantasy self-greatness mode.

In the Stroop Report we see that the author employs a sardonic style: juxtaposing a chummy camaraderie of cheerful troops with the deplorable killing of meek Jews who venture out at night with the humble goal of making contact with a neighbor or finding some food. It's the irony of doing a despicable deed with gusto:

"The longer the resistance lasted, the tougher the men of the Waffen SS, Police, and Wehrmacht became; they fulfilled their duty indefatigably in faithful comradeship and stood together as models and examples of soldiers. Their duty hours often lasted from early morning until late at night. At night, search patrols with rags wound round their feet remained at the heels of the Jews and gave them no respite. Not infrequently they caught and killed Jews who used the night hours for supplementing their stores from abandoned dug-outs and for contacting neighboring groups or exchanging news with them.

Considering that the greater part of the men of the Waffen-SS had only been trained for three to four weeks before being assigned to this action, high credit should be given for the pluck, courage, and devotion to duty which they showed. It must be stated that the Wehrmacht Engineers, too, executed the blowing up of dug-outs, sewers, and concrete buildings with indefatigability and great devotion to duty. Officers and men of the Police, a large part of whom had already been at the front, again excelled by their dashing spirit."

In other words the common German soldier tirelessly perseveres at something so cruel. The idea being that the German people, not just the Nazis were the murderers. Would even three-four weeks of training be needed for this instinct to come out? That's the theme Auerbach is trying to convey and remarkably we can find her articulating that same idea using her sardonic style in an essay she wrote called "In The Fields of Treblinka." which is found in Alexander Donat's compilation book "Treblinka" (1979) Notice the stylistic similarities found in that essay:

"The catastrophe never touched them, (the Germans) and this alone was enough to give them a splendid self-confidence. Precisely in the face of this abyss of human degradation into which they watched masses of Jews drowning, they saw themselves as masterful and exalted." (pages 40 to 41)

"If one could prove that he was a particularly proficient and dedicated worker at the job of annihilation, then he could stay on and get promoted." (page 43)

"The specialists in this new profession were businesslike, practical and conscientious. The instructor in incineration at Treblinka was nicknamed by the Jews as 'Tadellos' (perfect); that was his favorite expression. 'Thank God, now the fire's perfect,' he used to say when, with the help of gasoline and the bodies of the fatter females, the pile of corpses finally burst into flames." (Page 38)

Just as Auerbach married her sardonic literary style to a lack of military knowledge, here she mixes her sardonic style to a lack of fire knowledge. Sardonic literary style, but c'mon: fatter females are supposed to burn better?

Rachel Auerbach also wrote a short history of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in Yiddish called Der Yidisher Oyfshtand Varshe published in 1948 in Warsaw. She then immigrated to Israel and had a career at Israel's Holocaust Museum called Yad Vashem. And just as we see a parallel in early works of George Kadish to the goals of the famous photo of the little Jewish boy, consider this passage from Who Will Write Our History by Samuel Kassow, page 309, that describes an earlier project of Rachel Auerbach:

I've read Auerbach's account of Krzepicki, and it's an obvious fraud to anyone who knows the official Treblinka story. But notice the parallels to the Stroop Report: a clandestine book with the goal of making people resist the Nazis.