Conversations with an Executioner
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| Author | Kazimierz Moczarski |
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| Original title | Rozmowy z katem |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | The Holocaust |
| Genre | History |
| Publisher | Prentice-Hall |
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Publication date
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First Edition 1981 |
| Pages | 282 |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 7277353 |
Conversations with an Executioner (Polish: Rozmowy z katem) is a book by Kazimierz Moczarski, a Polish writer and journalist, officer of the Polish Home Army active in the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II. On August 11, 1945, he was captured and locked up in a maximum-security jail by the notorious UB secret police under Stalinism. For a time, he shared the same cell with the Nazi war criminal Jürgen Stroop, who was soon to be executed. They engaged in a series of conversations. The book is a retelling of those interviews.
Moczarski spent four years on death row (1952–56), incarcerated as an alleged enemy of the state. He was tried three times while in prison as an anticommunist, and pardoned eleven years later, during the anti-Stalinist Polish October. His manuscript about Stroop, written in secrecy since 1956, was published in monthly installments by the magazine Odra in 1972–74, followed by a shortened book version released in 1977. The full text without communist censorship was published in 1992 after the collapse of the Soviet empire, by the Polish Scientific Publishers PWN. Moczarski did not witness the publication of his book. He died on September 27, 1975 in Warsaw, weakened by the years of savage physical torture endured during his police interrogations.
SS-Gruppenführer Jürgen Stroop was taken prisoner by the Allies in Germany under a false identity. He was put on trial by the U.S. Military Tribunal at Dachau on unrelated charges. In late May 1947 Stroop was handed over for retrial to the People's Republic of Poland for the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the methodical destruction of the Ghetto. His crimes resulted in the death of over 50,000 people. He was kept in a Stalinist jail for four years before the Criminal District Court in Warsaw put him on trial on July 18, 1951 for the war crimes committed in Poland. Stroop was executed on 6 March 1952, arrogant and unrepentant until the very end.
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