Locked up with a Nazi

The History Book Buffs · Sep 17, 2026 · 30m

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…