On 20 January 1947 in Chorzów, the Municipal Court in Chorzów, Fifth Department, in the person of Municipal Judge W. Czosnek, with the participation of a reporter, apprenticed clerk M. Urbiczykówna, heard the person named below as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the wording of Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, as well as the meaning of the oath, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Jerzy Malcherczyk |
| Age | 27 |
| Parents’ names | Jan and Maria, née Wójcik |
| Place of residence | Chorzów, Daszyńskiego Street 26 |
| Occupation | tradesman |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
I was held in the concentration camp in Auschwitz from June 1940 until 21 September 1943. During the last seven months before my release, I worked at the Kantinverwaltung [canteen administration].
When I arrived in the camp, Rudolf Höß – holding the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer – was the commandant. When I was leaving the camp, the suspect Höß had the rank of Obersturmbannführer. Höß, as the commandant of the camp, rarely beat the prisoners. His position was too high, and besides, he had an entire group of SS men to do that for him. Nevertheless, there were a few times when I saw Höß himself slapping prisoners in the faces, as they were leaving the camp for work.
During the first period of my stay in the camp, the SS men that took the prisoners out to work received what was called a Komandozettel, which contained only information about the number of prisoners being taken out of the camp and the place of their work. Later on, there were instructions for the SS men on the reverse side of the control sheet, approved by Höß. It brought to their attention the fact that they were facing their enemies, whom they should keep at a minimum distance of six steps, even if they seemed to be decent people.
When some larger execution was taking place at the camp, the Kantinverwaltung would receive a sheet of paper signed by Höß or his deputy [for] political affairs, Gradner, instructing us to issue a certain amount of cigarettes and vodka for the SS men on the occasion of the so-called Sonderaktion. Usually, each SS man who was to participate in the execution would receive 20 cigarettes and about one third of a liter of vodka.
Public and non-public executions often took place on the camp premises. To my understanding, every death sentence carried out at the camp had to be approved by commandant Höß and, seemingly, also by Gradner, the deputy of the Political Department. Since every death sentence had to be approved by Höß, I would deduce that, as the commandant, he must have known what was going on in the camp. Besides this, I know of a concrete example of a prisoner twice sentenced to death and spared because of Höß’s objection. This prisoner worked as his gardener. His name is Stanisław Dubiel and he resides in Chorzów, however, I don’t know his address. I suspect that he would be able to say a lot about Höß, since he worked as his gardener for about four years and for Höß’s wife, who treated him well, and who would tell him different things, even things concerning Höß’s private life at home.
The second person at the camp after Höß was SS-Hauptsturmführer Aumeier, who was the Lagerführer [camp leader]. That man was a sadist. He would beat and kick the prisoners for no reason. At the beginning of 1940, from the window of the Kantinverwaltung building, I saw him finish off a Jewish woman – with a shot from his pistol – who had been shot by an SS man.
The post of Höß’s deputy was held by SS-Untersturmführer Walter Grabner, the commandant of the Political Department. He was a lawyer of Austrian origin – an intelligent man, but nevertheless a sadist. He would torture prisoners by telling them that they were sentenced to death, even while that wasn’t true. He would usually make such announcements with a smile on his face. That was a refined form of psychological abuse.
Schwarz was the deputy of Lagerführer Aumeier. He was a very noisy man who also beat prisoners, but he didn’t abuse them like the others did.
Engelschar, Emmerich, Schoppe, Frise [Friese] and Palitzsch were the Rapportführers [report leaders] in the main camp in Auschwitz. All those Rapportführers were ruthless people and sadists, who would beat and kick the prisoners. With Aumeier’s approval, they decided on the form of corporal punishment to be used, such as hanging on a pole, flogging or placement in bunkers. They administered the corporal punishment personally, in public, with the prisoners brought to the area near the camp kitchen as witnesses. Sometimes they would carry out from 20 to 25 such sentences per day.
SS-Oberscharführer Palitzsch was particularly sadistic, and he was most often the one to carry out death sentences at the execution ground near block 11, in a non-public manner. Aside from him, executions were also performed by SS-Unterscharführer Lachman [Lachmann], who knew Polish very well and who probably came from Poznań. Lachmann was one of Grabner’s deputies in the Political Department.
I also remember that immediately after my arrival at the camp, while I was being kept in the so-called quarantine, I came into contact with SS-Unterscharführer Plagge. He organized the so-called sport with the prisoners, which would take up 12 hours of a day. The prisoners had to run around, crawl, do squats. Meanwhile, sitting and smoking his pipe, Plagge gave orders. When someone got tired and could no longer do the “sport,” Plagge would stand up and start to beat and kick the prisoner.
From the early period of the camp, I also remember a Rapportführer named Hössler, who was known for the so-called “stand-stills” he organized for the entire camp in the event of some prisoner’s escape. During that time, all prisoners had to stand at attention, sometimes for 24 hours, while he would look out the window and say: “You’ll be standing here until either the one who escaped is found or 300 of you collapse.” I would like to emphasize that these words were spoken by Hössler during the first stand-still in August 1940, which lasted 24 hours. There were other stand-stills in the camp, but none of them lasted that long.
I would also like to add that I, personally, had one run-in with the camp’s commandant, Höß. Namely, he noticed that, on the way to my workplace, I made a shortcut through the field instead of walking on the street. As a result, without giving me a chance to explain myself, Höß had me placed in a bunker for two and a half days.
As I have already pointed out above, I spent the last few months as a book-keeper for all of the enterprises on the camp premises, in the so-called Deutsche Lebensmittelgesellschaft. In that function, I had the chance to assess the extent to which the Germans exploited the prisoners. The canteen itself had a monthly revenue of 160,000 to 225,000 marks. The goods allocated to this canteen, apart from administrative costs, were evaluated at a 30-percent profit. However, in reality, the profit was over a hundred percent higher. This additional profit came from situations when, for example, one kilogram of cabbage was to cost one mark, but the buyer only got a handful of cabbage instead of one kilogram. There was no food scale at the prisoners’ canteen and the crooked service was a result of Fritz Englerbracht’s [Engelbrecht’s] orders. He was an SS-Untersturmführer from Bavaria, in charge of all canteens and economic units on the camp premises. The revenue data mentioned above only apply to one canteen, while there were several of them. In total, all prisoner canteens had a revenue of one million marks per month, of which at least 50 percent was net profit.
At present, I own no original camp documents; in particular, I have no authentic balance sheets. I had had such balance sheets after leaving the camp and I had brought them home with me, but they got lost during the time when the Soviet army turned my house into a casino. From memory, I can only add that the monthly income of all enterprises on the main camp premises in Auschwitz and the additional camps was between 2,200,000 and 2,500,000 marks per month. The monthly net profit from those enterprises was between 320,000 and 380,000 marks. The overall profit was lower than the profit from the prisoner canteens, because some enterprises were only run for the benefit of the Germans, particularly the canteens for the SS men, and they only generated minimal, fictional profits. In reality, large deficits were covered from the profits from the prisoner canteen. In the accounts, certain goods were charged to the canteen.
The report was concluded and read out before signing.