Warsaw, 9 July 1947. Member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw, Acting Judge Halina Wereńko, interviewed the person named below as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the obligation to speak the truth, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Mieczysław Garwin aka Garfinkiel |
| Parents’ names | Sanel and Balbina, née Wiślicka |
| Date of birth | 11 May 1898, Zamość |
| Religious affiliation | Jewish |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Wileńska Street 15, flat 17 |
| Education | law studies at the University of Warsaw |
| Occupation | lawyer |
From September 1939 to 23 October 1942, I was in Zamość as the president of the Jewish Council and the District Jewish Self-Help Committee.
SS-Sturmbahnführer Fritz was the commander of the first squadron of the first Totenkopfreiterregiment (dead heads) SS cavalry regiment in Zamość from the end of 1939. The unit was stationed in an agricultural school in Janowice, about two kilometers from Zamość.
Fritz himself told me once that he came from Wrocław. He was the highest-ranking SS man in Zamość. As the commander of the first Totenkopfreiterregiment regiment, he reported to Globocnik from Lublin, and then to Himmler. Fritz’s cavalry unit carried out sentences imposed by the Gestapo summary court in Zamość in the Rotunda, that is, on the old embankments. Fritz himself told me that during those executions he personally fired the so-called Gnadenschuss – shot of mercy, finishing off the wounded person, and making sure that the sentence had been carried out.
In 1940 or 1941, I don’t remember the exact date, an old city hall clerk, Wolf Totengreber, and his son, Izaak, were executed in the Rotunda, along with ten Poles, including the depot owner, Sobecki, and other residents of his building. The reason was that underground newspapers were found in the apartment of one of the residents. That sentence of the summary court was carried out by Fritz and his unit, as he himself told me. I cannot say anything about his part in pacification operations because I was not present in Zamość in 1943.
Dr. Stanisław Kulesza from Zamość could provide information on pacification operations.
From the end of 1939, as the president of the Jewish Council, I had official contact with Fritz. I met him personally at the end of January 1940.
Fritz always demanded a lot from the Jewish Council and his demands were difficult to meet: he wanted money, furniture, barracks for SS men, and Jewish workers to work in the barracks.
At the beginning of January 1940, he demanded 500 meters of net curtains. Since I didn’t have that much, I had to buy curtains in Warsaw. The demands were directed to the council through a liaison, a Jew named Goldhamer, who was an agent provocateur. Suspecting that the liaison had exaggerated the demands, in the second half of January, I personally went to see Fritz, and that was when I met him. Fritz lived with Judge Godziszewski (currently a district judge in Zamość), at Orlicz Dreszera Street in Zamość. The first time I was met with a rude reception. He was running around the room, cracking a whip on the table. After the conversation, the demands were slightly reduced, but then they continued to grow. At that time, he wanted the council to give him 200 thousand zlotys. As soon as the Germans arrived, they demanded the council provide them with a certain number of Jewish workers every day. The operation was led by an Ortskommandant, who assigned the workers to individual German units.
Since Fritz was never satisfied with the number of workers we delivered, he soon took over the operation and appointed two SS men for that purpose. One of them was Hans Pieńkowski from Oberhausen in the Rhineland, a metallurgy worker by profession, the greatest sadist and criminal I met during the war. I don’t remember the other’s name because he moved to Warsaw soon after he was appointed. Every day, Fritz would take several hundred workers to work. I believe that in order to avoid being sent together with his unit to the front, he started building barracks, a stable and a horse hospital. Jews worked for free, were fed by the Jewish Council, which was also forced to deliver one to two million bricks, iron, lime, cement, and sheet metal to the construction site. They also had to pay Polish professionals for the work that the Jews were not able to do.
The Jewish Council accepted those difficult conditions to protect several hundred Jews from being deported to other camps. The works lasted throughout my stay in Zamość, and then, after the entire Jewish population in Izbica was exterminated, several hundred more workers worked there. Ultimately, however, all of them were killed before the war ended. In 1941, the Totenkopfreiterregiment unit was sent to the front. Fritz himself stayed in Zamość and created the SS Reifundfahrschule – a horse riding school. He became its commander, opened a camp for Jewish workers in the barracks, and continued the construction works.
In Zamość, until May 1941, there were no housing restrictions for Jews, except for occasional plundering and evictions. Before the war, the number of Jews in Zamość was twelve to fourteen thousand. Before the Germans entered the city, many of them fled to the East, so probably about 3 thousand remained. This number soon increased to 8 thousand due to an influx of people from nearby towns and villages, and the arrival of transports of Jews displaced from Włocławek, Łódź, and Kutno. From 1 May 1941, Jews were being resettled to a suburb called Nowa Osada, inhabited mainly by the poor.
From then on, it was a Polish-Jewish district. From 1 September 1942, the Poles were being displaced from a part of the suburb and the rest of the Jews, 4 thousand of them, were forced to settle in that small area. In the spring of 1942, three transports of Jews arrived: 2 thousand people from the Czech Republic and 1 thousand from Germany. The Germans began preparations for the creation of a closed ghetto, but it did not happen because on 16 October 1942 the Jews were forced to leave Nowa Osada for Izbica, where the final extermination took place.
Fritz had no part in creating the Jewish district, but he participated in roundups. On 17 January 1940 in the barracks, Fritz’s unit caught about fifteen to twenty Jews, including Blas, Praszkier, Czarny, and Stupaj. They all came from the first transport of displaced persons from Włocławek to Zamość. The transport was initially locked up in the Zamość camp. After a month, I managed to get them out from behind the wires, under the condition that they would settle in Szczebrzeszyn. Some of those people, against my requests and advice, left Szczebrzeszyn for Zamość, where they were brutally murdered by SS men from Fritz’s unit, who poured water over them when the temperature was 30 degrees below zero. The people turned into ice pillars. The murder took three days.
I don’t know if it was Fritz who gave the order to murder them, but he was in the barracks at that time and he must have known about the incident. Later on, when I asked him about it, he stated he hadn’t known about the murder and his people had done it without his knowledge.
I don’t know the names of the SS men who committed the crime.
In June 1940, Fritz, as the head of the cavalry unit, carried out the first roundup of people who were then transported to labor camps in Zamość and the district area. Posters with Fritz’s signature were displayed in Zamość and announced that Jewish males were ordered to report to the barracks. In the barracks, a medical commission, consisting of an SS doctor (I don’t remember his name) and two doctors from the Jewish Council, Leon Rosenman and Fridhofer (both are deceased), singled out several hundred young and healthy men. Fritz sent the group, under the escort of his unit, to perform irrigation and drainage works near Zamość.
Fritz and his people detained Jews in the district and sent them to the camp – numerous people were killed. Only one person lost his life in the roundup in Zamość. An SS man, whose name I don’t know, shot a Jew, Srul Lerner, without any serious reason (for stepping out of the line).
The second roundup was carried out a month or a few weeks later in the same way: about three hundred Jews from Zamość and about three or four hundred from the district. They were transported to Bełżec, where they were joined by transports from Warsaw and Radom. About 15 thousand people were gathered in Bełżec. The Jews were forced to settle in the vicinity of the steam locomotive depot, and then they began digging an antitank trench, which later, when Bełżec was transformed into a death camp, became a mass grave.
The Bełżec camp was subordinated to Globocnik from Lublin and was commanded by SS Sturmbannführer Dolp. At that time, Fritz developed a closer relationship with the Jewish Council thanks to bribes and gifts. Fritz promised the Council that every two weeks he would employ new workers from Bełżec, where the conditions were terrible, people were starved, mistreated, and executed for no reason.
The Zamość Jewish Council organized food aid for their people in Bełżec, but Dolp did not allow it and shot the envoys on the spot. Then, I started negotiating with Fritz for the release of the Zamość Jews from the camp. Fritz tried to arrange it and after some time, in August 1940, having bribed Globocnik with 40 thousand zlotys and several hundred rubles in gold, he brought the Council back the lists of our Jews in Bełżec that we had made. The lists were signed by Globocnik and contained six to seven hundred names of Jews from the Zamość region who had been sent to Bełżec. I personally went to pick them up with Fritz’s trucks. Everyone came back, except for five or six people who had died.
In [blank space in the original text], Fritz picked the prettiest property in Zamość for himself. It belonged to the president of the local Landowners Association, Stanisław Kowerski. Kowerski was sent to Auschwitz, where he soon died, while his wife was thrown out of the apartment. Jewish youths, who were paid by the Council, worked for Fritz and in his garden, and they were treated quite well.
Jewish extermination operations began on 11 April 1942 and were carried out by the Gestapo. Fritz himself did not participate in the operations, he only watched the roundups, while individual SS men from his unit, e.g. Pieńkowski, volunteered to take part. On 11 April, on a Saturday afternoon, the Gestapo, the gendarmerie, and the German police herded unemployed people and loaded three thousand Jews, without giving them any choice, into railroad cars that were sent to Bełżec.
At the end of May 1942, the second extermination operation was carried out; it mainly affected the areas near Zamość and foreign transports. Several hundred people from Zamość were then detained, a thousand from foreign transports, and the rest from the areas near the city. A total of one and a half thousand Jews were sent to Bełżec. In March 1942, Bełżec had become an extermination camp. The operation was conducted by the Gestapo, the gendarmerie, and the German police.
Fritz did not take part in this, and he even defended his workers. On 11 August, the Lublin Gestapo, headed by Obersturmführer Getz, selected about three hundred and several dozen Jews from Zamość. It was not a great roundup because the residents had been warned and managed to hide. Those who were caught were taken to Bełżec. The Germans began preparations for the creation of a closed ghetto, but it did not happen because on 16 October 1942 the Jews were forced to leave Nowa Osada for Izbica, where, in two subsequent operations – on 19 October and 2 November – they were all exterminated, some of them on the spot, and some of them by being deported to Bełżec and Sobibór.
Several hundred Jews from Zamość and foreign Jews from the Czech Republic, a total of five hundred men and several women, were permanently kept in the barracks of Fritz’s unit. They were commanded by Pieńkowski, who was given a fixed salary and gifts by the Jewish Council so that he wouldn’t murder Jews. In 1942, as the extermination of Jews intensified, Pieńkowski changed his attitude towards them and murdered several dozen people with his own hands. For example, on 11 August, during the above-mentioned extermination operation, when the Jews were being herded into a square, in my presence, he murdered a colleague of mine, Attorney Julian Goldstein, a member of the Jewish Council, his wife Regina, a lawyer by profession, and their little daughter. At the end of May 1942, during the second extermination operation I have described, he personally killed with a machine gun all the residents of a Jewish nursing home – 36 or 38 men and women. In the summer of 1942, he murdered two Jewish shoemakers, Feller and Diabeł – for no reason; the shoemakers worked exclusively for him and other SS men. At the beginning of June 1942, he took Symuch Feldstein from Zamość into his car and shot him; after an hour, he sent his hat to the Council.
In the summer of 1942, Fritz demanded several hundred workers from the Jewish Council. Since the Jewish population already had jobs, the Council was not able to meet the demand; then, Fritz received several hundred Soviet prisoners of war from the camp in Zamość. Jewish workers then told me that Pieńkowski himself shot over two hundred of those prisoners within a week. He enjoyed himself in the following way: he shot a prisoner and told two others to take the first one to a field and bury him; after they carried out the order, he murdered them both and called four others over to bury them. And in this way, using a geometric progression, he murdered over two hundred prisoners. I informed the Wehrmacht about the incident, as a result of which no more prisoners were sent to work for Fritz, while Pieńkowski was punished by a special court with seven days’ confinement in the barracks, during which the Jewish Council had to provide him with a liter of vodka per day.
The man who encouraged Pieńkowski to commit the crime was his close friend, an architect and SS man, Rimenschneider from the Rhineland. I notified Fritz many times about the actions of Pieńkowski and other SS men, but to no avail.
Hans Pieńkowski came from Oberhausen. He was very tall (2 meters), about 26-28 years old, slim, blonde with dense, curly hair, hunched, with long arms, and wide, large hands. He had a gold tooth in the upper jaw at the front. He stayed in Zamość until July 1944 and was one of the last to escape.
After the Jews were expelled from Izbica, Fritz probably asked Globocnik to send him several hundred Jews to Izbica for work. They worked there until mid-1943, and then they were sent to the old embankments in Zamość (the Rotunda), where they were murdered. In the end, none of Fritz’s workers survived. The execution ordered by the Gestapo was carried out by Fritz’s unit. I heard about the extermination of the Jewish work unit in Zamość from Sażyński, a gardener who lives in Janowice near Zamość. I myself was no longer in Zamość in 1943, so I determined the circumstances of the extermination at the Rotunda only this year when I was in Zamość.
Fritz’s zealous helpers in the roundups and murders were the following SS officers: Essel from Austria, Schmidt, Kettman from Berlin (a bar owner), and Wiegand.
At this point, the report was concluded and read out.