Iconic Photos

In 1943, SS General Jürgen Stroop compiled a report to Himmler on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto, which he personally saw to earlier. Originally titled “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw is no more!”, and commonly referred to as “The Stroop Report”, the report also included many photographs with captions in Gothic script. Among them was the above photo, titled, “Forcibly pulled out of dug-outs”, one of the best-known pictures of World War II.

The photo of a young unknown boy with his hands up being driven from the Warsaw ghetto has served as a touchstone for everyone from the Nuremberg prosecutors to Elie Wiesel, and from Susan Sontag to revisionist ranters on the web. In reality, the children played an important role inside the Ghetto; they begged everywhere, in the Ghetto as well as on the ‘Aryan’ side. Six-year-old boys crawled through the barbed wire under the very eyes of the gendarmes in order to obtain food. Often a lone shot in the vicinity told that another little smuggler had died in his fight with omnipotent hunger. The Stoop Report was later used as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials, and to convict and hang Stoop of war crimes.

Marek Edelman, the last surviving leader of the five-person command group that led the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, died earlier this week, aged 90. Nearly 400,000 Jewish men, women and children had been sealed into the Ghetto in 1940 – the prelude to the Final Solution, which murdered almost all of Poland’s three million Jews, half of the total victims. The uprising surprised the Nazis; Dr. Goebbels paid them a remarkable tribute: “The Jews have actually succeeded in making a defensive position of the Ghetto… It shows what is to be expected of the Jews when they are in possession of arms. Unfortunately some of their weapons were good German ones…”