Conversations with an Executioner: a chilling classic reveals the mind of a Nazi mass murderer

The useful part

Polish war hero Kazimierz Moczarski spent 255 days sharing a cell with an SS general. One of them was Jürgen Stroop – a war criminal and SS general who had led the infamous destruction of the Warsaw ghetto and was responsible for the murder or capture of more than 56,000 Jews. A celebrated figure in modern-day Poland, Moczarski was regarded as a threat to the power of the postwar communist regime in the country.

How it works

• Like other resistance members, he was accused of collaboration and arrested.
• Moczarski, who spoke German, used his imprisonment with Stroop as an opportunity to investigate a question: what turned some Germans into mass murderers, seeking to impose their " Ordnung ", order, across...
• His book about the experience, Conversations with an Executioner, was published in 1977.
• An instant bestseller, it was performed as a play the same year, directed by Andrzej Wajda.
• It is finally being published in the UK this month, in its first uncensored translation into English by Sean Gasper Bye.

Example or evidence

• Nearly 50 years after it was published, an uncensored version of his account is appearing in English for the first time In 1949, Kazimierz Moczarski, a leading member of the Polish resistance, was in his...

Details worth keeping

They shared the same four walls for 255 consecutive days.