At the age of ten he was accepted into the master class of Joseph Joachim's student Bram Eldering at the Cologne Conservatory.
In 1930 he passed his final examination with distinction In the same year he went to Berlin, where he was concertmaster of Edwin Fischer's chamber orchestra and continued his studies with Carl Flesch.
In 1934 he was brought to the then Akademie der Tonkunst, now the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, as successor to Felix Berber as Germany's youngest academy professor.
With it he renewed a baroque tradition: the ensemble played without baton conductors in a standing position and was led by Stross from the first desk.
Thus the Munich Musikhochschule became an internationally radiating "violinist's forge", which produced numerous concert masters and soloists, such as Yūko Shiokawa, Takaya Urakawa, Oscar Yatco and others.
Thus, in the 1960s, numerous quartet associations were founded with Stross students as primary school teachers (for example Heinz Endres, Erich Keller, Josef Märkl, Gerhardt Seitz, Ingo Sinnhoffer, Kurt-Christian Stier - all of whom later became concertmasters and/or professors at the Munich Musikhochschule).