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The Stroop Report Is No More! Series of 82 sheets, charcoal on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm each, 2018
The Stroop Report Is No More! Series of 82 sheets, charcoal on paper, 29.7 x 21 cm each, 2018
Maren Lübbke-Tidow
Working until everything flickers
[…] On 16 May, 1943, Jürgen Stroop, a German SS-Gruppenführer and Generalleutnant of the Waffen-SS and police, reported the following to Krakaw: “The former Jewish quarter of Warsaw is no longer in existence […] Total number of Jews dealt with 56,065, including both Jews caught and Jews whose extermination can be proved.” As proof of the suppression of the uprising and the liquidation of the ghetto, Stroop compiled a report. Today known as the “Stroop Report”, the document is titled “The Jewish Quarter of Warsaw Is No More” and contains lists of names of SS men killed in the line of duty, orders given and reports written during the squashing, and a series of photographs commissioned by Stroop to document the German military victory. […] Using a facsimile edition as the basis for her new work, Tatiana Lecomte deconstructs the “Stroop Report” step by step in a complete and thorough manner.
She made countless lists of all the words and characters found in this report, counting them, putting them in alphabetical order, and thus coming up with a rough draft for her transcript, which she transfers using carbon paper. […] Like a punishment she “subjects” herself to over the course of months, forcing herself to copy lines not in the cursive writing she learned as a girl growing up in France but in the German handwriting established as standard in 1941 and taught in German-speaking countries to this day, Lecomte writes down every single word found in this report: “operation”, “bandits”, “bunkers”, “Germans”, “shootings”, “Krakow”, “transfer”, “extermination”, “women”, etc. At the end of the transcript she puts all the punctuation marks such as commas, periods, etc., so that not a single word or character of the original report is omitted. […]
(translated by Friederike Kulcsar)