Locked up with a Nazi

We’re back — and starting with a book that genuinely floored us.

In 1949, Polish resistance fighter and journalist Kazimierz Moczarski was thrown into a Warsaw prison cell with Jürgen Stroop, the SS general responsible for the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. They lived together for 255 days.

The result was Conversations with an Executioner: Moczarski’s extraordinary attempt to understand the man beside him. Stroop talks about his childhood, his embrace of Nazism, his rise through the SS and the murder of tens of thousands of people — with a chilling absence of remorse.

We talk about how an apparently ordinary man becomes a committed Nazi; the seductive appeal of hierarchy, comradeship and obedience; Stroop’s horrifyingly matter-of-fact account of crushing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising; and the big question hanging over the book: can we trust conversations reconstructed years after they happened?

For both of us, this is an astonishing book — intimate, disturbing and one of the most remarkable examinations of the Nazi mind we’ve read.

BOOKS

📚 Kazimierz Moczarski, Conversations with an Executioner: 255 Days Imprisoned with the Nazi Who Destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto, translated by Sean Gasper Bye

And coming up on History Book Buffs:

📚 Terry Stiastny, Believable Lies: The Misfits Who Fought Churchill’s Secret Propaganda War — the extraordinary characters, dirty tricks, fake radio stations and black propaganda of Britain’s Political Warfare Executive.

📚 Miranda Malins, The House of Cromwell: Power, Family and the Making of Modern Britain — Thomas, Oliver and the extraordinary family that produced two of the most consequential commoners in British history.

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