Conversations with an Executioner by Kazimierz Moczarski

Conversations with an Executioner by Kazimierz Moczarski — the chilling, unforgettable classic in which a Polish resistance hero shares a prison cell with the SS general who destroyed the Warsaw Ghetto.

In 1949, Kazimierz Moczarski, a leading member of the Polish Home Army, was locked in a Warsaw prison cell with Jürgen Stroop — the Nazi war criminal responsible for the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto and the murder or capture of more than 56,000 Jews. For 255 days the two men, both expecting death, talked.

Moczarski, who spoke German, used the time to investigate a single, urgent question: what historical, psychological and social forces turned an ordinary German into a mass murderer? The result is one of the most extraordinary documents of the twentieth century — a first-hand record of Stroop’s life, his rise through the SS, and his detailed, unrepentant account of the destruction of the ghetto.

Written in secrecy after Moczarski’s release and long suppressed under communism, Conversations with an Executioner is both a masterpiece of investigative journalism and a profound study of totalitarianism. It remains a vital, harrowing work that forces readers to confront how ordinary people become capable of extraordinary evil.

A new uncensored English translation brings this essential book to a new generation.