On 16 September 1947 in Kraków, a member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Magistrate Dr Henryk Gawacki, on the written application of The First Prosecutor of the Supreme National Tribunal dated 25 April 1947 (file no. NTN 719/47) in accordance with the provisions of and procedure provided for under the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293) in conjunction with article 254, 107, 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, heard as a witness the below mentioned former prisoner of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Jerzy Brandhuber |
| Date and place of birth | 23 October 1897 in Kraków |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Occupation | artist-painter |
| Place of residence | Kraków, Chopina Street 16, flat 11 |
| The witness testifies without hindrance. |
In October 1942 I was arrested in Jasło, then transferred to the prison in Tarnów and from there I was [deported] [and] imprisoned in the Auschwitz camp. I stayed there from 3 January 1943 to 26 October 1944, after which, in connection with the transfer of Polish prisoners from Auschwitz, I was transported to the camp in Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg). In the Auschwitz camp, as a Polish political prisoner, I received no. 87112.
Initially, for four weeks I was quarantined in block 2, and then I was assigned to the paint shop in the Bekleidungskammer, where the Kommandoführer was Unterscharführer Karl Reichenbacher. I stayed there until the end of my stint in Auschwitz.
There are no prisoners who wouldn’t have known Aumeier from the fact that for every step he took he would beat, kick, and even shoot them. His conduct and treatment of the prisoners indicated that he was not only a sadist, but also extremely unstable as a person. The screaming, often more like a roar, the thud of his boots, whether in the courtyard or in the building, signaled that Aumeier had arrived.
As Lagerführer he decided to mete out the following punishments: flogging (at least 25 lashes), assignment to the punitive unit (SK, [Strafkompanie]), shutting in the bunker – without giving any end date, as a result of which some prisoners stayed in the bunker for months because Aumeier had forgotten about them – or sentencing a prisoner to the so- called Stehbunker (up to 10 nights), which meant that a prisoner after finishing work would be shut in the basement in block 11, where he would have to remain standing all the time because of its size. The surface area of this basement was 80 cm by 80 cm and in this space four prisoners would stand. Aumeier used to order public floggings in the roll call square after the roll call. Another specialty of Aumeier was the unnecessary extension of roll calls, sometimes lasting for hours – mostly when it was raining or snowing.
Once, when the camp fire brigade had to leave because of a fire alarm, a crowd of prisoners gathered to observe this event. Aumeier was standing at the main gate of the camp and shouting to the prisoners, gathered far away from the gate, and when they didn’t respond to his screams, he took out a gun and started firing, aiming at the crowd of prisoners.
On the basis of observations of the relations in the camp, the opinion among the prisoners was confirmed that in Aumeier’s time some prisoners in block 11 were shot by the Political Department without notifying Berlin. Aumeier was always to be seen around block 11, where the executions took place. While chasing some prisoners who were fleeing at the sight of him, he pistol-whipped about the head the late prisoner Józef Bąk, who at that time just happened to be standing behind the wall of block 28. He caused such severe damage to one ear that the prisoner spent about half a year recovering and even then he’d lost hearing in this ear.
Liebehenschel, Höss’s successor as camp commandant, softened the existing camp regime by, for example, abolishing the obligation for prisoners to doff their caps when passing by the camp gate on the way to or from work, in the rain or cold. He also instated inspections at the main gate, checking in winter if the prisoners had warm underwear and socks on their feet. He removed the so-called death wall by block 11 and the gallows, forbade the members of the Political Department from entering the camp, and from that time onwards a prisoner could only be arrested after obtaining Liebehenschel’s permission to do so. He abolished the system of confidants and camp informers, who were known to the prisoners by the way, he sent from the camp in a penal transport. He issued a ban on beating prisoners and greatly shortened the duration of the roll calls. During the Liebehenschel period, the half-dead prisoners, known as the “Muslims”, were sent to the so-called Erholung to Birkenau. What happened to them in Birkenau, I don’t know.
At this the report was concluded, read out and signed.