Fourth day of the hearing
(Following a recess)
Presiding Judge: Witness Tadeusz Hołuj. Please provide your personal details. I hereby instruct the witness, pursuant to the provisions of Article 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, that you are required to speak the truth. The provision of false testimony is punishable by a term of imprisonment of up to five years. Do the parties want to submit any motions as to the procedure according to which the witness is to be interviewed?
Prosecutors: We release the witness from the obligation to take an oath.
Defense attorneys: We likewise.
Witness: Tadeusz Hołuj, a writer, 31 years old, born in Kraków, unmarried, relationship to the accused – none.
Presiding Judge: What does the witness know about the goings-on at the camp in Auschwitz?
Witness: I would like to start off by putting right certain statements made in the press, and also make a declaration as to the testimony given by the accused. The accused Grabner testified before the Supreme National Tribunal that for all intents and purposes it was he who had saved the French fleet. He mentioned a prisoner who reported to the political department with a document containing a plan for a putsch in the French Navy, and stated that he himself destroyed this document. I had the privilege of perusing this document at an earlier date. It had been stolen by us from a French engineer who was a prisoner in the camp. He was a German spy who had been working for German intelligence since 1933. This document was in fact a request for his release from the camp. I do not remember the applicant’s name. He was a Gestapo plenipotentiary tasked with determining the whereabouts of Jewish assets, hidden on so-called Aryan bank accounts. Grabner would have been unable to prevent the putsch, for all this occurred after the destruction of the French fleet in Toulon. The accused continues to maintain that he was the guardian angel of the prisoners, and we have even learned that the concentration camp was not a camp, that the political department was innocent, and that all the SS commanders took care of the inmates.
As regards the accused Liebehenschel, I would also like to remark that when Auschwitz was divided into three camps, he continued to be the senior of all three commandants, and pulled all the strings as concerns administration of the whole. In the same way, the political department in camp I was the headquarters for political affairs for all three camps, all units, and all subcamps – 39 of them in total. I shall return to these issues.
I know what the accused have said; this was all put forward during Höß’ trial. All of the accused maintain that they did not know what the concentration camp was and what their roles consisted in. I would like to explain that the political prisoners organized in the resistance movement in Auschwitz (both Polish and of other nationalities as well), who busied themselves gathering materials concerning the workings of the camp, had an excellent idea of the essence of Auschwitz.
We considered that each SS man – and NSDAP member and follower of Hitler – was a living mouthpiece of the Hitlerite concept of exterminating the Slavic nations.
This fact, I think, is objective – that the plan was to exterminate the Polish nation. When the German-Soviet War broke out, the Germans treated the Slavic nations of the Soviet Union as their worst enemy, and applied the most brutal terror with respect thereto. Initially, the camp in Auschwitz had an exclusively Polish population. Its nature changed over time, until it finally became an international camp. The situation of individual national groups also changed.
And whereas over time all the other nationalities, with the exception of Jews, received such or such exemptions and privileges, the Soviet group was granted absolutely none.
We should keep in mind that even a certain group of Jews was allowed to receive parcels. But none of the Russians were thus privileged. From amongst all the Hitlerite propaganda slogans concerning the annihilation of entire nations, I would like to recall that of the SS-Stubhauptamt [SS main office]: “It is absolutely necessary to bring about the destruction of a considerable part of the Polish population”. Himmler in one of his speeches declared that “in the beginning we must proceed with great severity, for we have to deprive the Polish nation of its best class, that is the intelligentsia. These we have to destroy, and thereby administer a shock, long overdue, to the Polish nation”. What went on in Auschwitz with respect to the Polish intelligentsia was not the result of its stance towards the camp authorities. For irrespective of the intelligentsia’s position during the War, its destruction had been determined in advance and was conducted in a planned manner. It was not a theoretical assumption that the Polish intelligentsia must be destroyed.
I arrived at the camp in the beginning of September 1942 and immediately learned that shortly before my coming the Germans had shot a number of representatives of the Polish intelligentsia from a few dozen kommandos, and that these shootings had been attended in person by the accused Aumeier. Immediately before these events occurred, a large transport of Polish intelligentsia had arrived from Kraków. These people had been taken from the Artists’ Café and were all shot, some 83 in total. This annihilation of the Polish intelligentsia took place in accordance with Hitlerite directives and ideology. In January 1943, the political department organized selections not of the sick, but of prisoners who worked at the Bekleidungskammer [clothing warehouse] and who were normally considered too valuable to kill. This selection was carried out by the political department of the camp, whereas people were sorted not according to “crimes” committed, but on the basis of education. The majority of them were shot, while some were deported for forced labor. At the time, I worked in the prison hospital. A few months later, in March 1943, following roll call at block 21 (where I worked), a group of SS men barged in, the accused Grabner among them. They ordered all Polish male nurses to step forward. As a matter of fact, most of the male nurses were Poles. I cannot say why we were lucky and did not end up in block 11. I only know that the head SS doctor intervened in some way, probably fearing that the camp would end up without professional workers. Concerning the Germans’ approach to the intelligentsia, there were instances when admitting to being a member of this class would have been tantamount to a death sentence. When they wrote down our personal details, we would all give a fictitious occupation. I know that representatives of the intelligentsia were especially sought out and, in consequence, doctors would be sent to the most difficult squads, while hospitals would be staffed with painters, blacksmiths and carpenters, who sometimes had to perform the most complicated surgical procedures. In our opinion, the objective of all this was both to deprive Polish society of its leadership, and remove any independently minded persons from the camp population.
The persecution of the intelligentsia had one more singular trait. I will allow myself to quote from Himmler: “The Germanization of families of other nationalities is intended to increase the numerical strength of the German nation by the addition of persons with Nordic blood”. The political department conducted an organized campaign aimed at destroying all Poles incarcerated at the camp. It is well known that attempts were made to force inmates to sign the Volksliste, frequently under pain of death. There were a great many informers and spies, who were recruited from amongst the most demoralized prisoners. The main informer who conducted such actions was one Ołpiński; before the outbreak of the War in 1939 he had broadcast radio programs from Breslau, entitled “Is it not strange?”. Those prisoners who knew of his dealings finally arranged his liquidation. He was deliberately infected with typhus fever and died in the camp hospital.
The political department exerted great pressure on the inmates, and in particular on the intelligentsia. Even when people were being led to their deaths, they were offered the possibility of saving themselves for the price of declaring that they were of German nationality. During the period after the Katyń provocation, the Germans tried to recruit people for an anti-Russian campaign. Purportedly, a legion was to be organized to fight against the Soviet Union. The SS men encouraged individual prisoners to volunteer for these units, or for the German army as such. In Auschwitz, the persecution of another important social group – the priesthood – was specially orchestrated. In the end, these men were transported from the camp and sent to a central “collection point”, that is Dachau. Their misery in Auschwitz was great. I will take the liberty of quoting a source which indicates that these matters [i.e. the fate of the priesthood] had not been completely decided when the camps were originally set up. During a conference held in 1940, Hitler said as follows: “it is completely natural for the Poles to retain their Catholicism. We will provide Polish priests with food, and in return they are to give their flocks such intellectual nourishment as we instruct them to, and to preach in the way we want – or otherwise they shall be dealt with summarily. They are to keep them [the Polish nation] in stupidity and ignorance”.
In Auschwitz, the camp authorities strove to use all means at their disposal in order to maintain the prison population in stupidity and ignorance exactly. I remember one very typical incident which illustrates how the Germans went about achieving this goal. Namely, the commandant’s office issued a strange order. They gathered the elderly Jews – rabbis, leaders and more important activists, and instructed them to issue an appeal to the Jewish prisoners to disclose all Jewish assets hidden on Aryan accounts, for which they were to receive a 10 percent finder’s fee.
Having talked with thousands of prisoners, I knew full well that when they were deported [to Auschwitz], they did not have an inkling of where and why they were being taken. The Germans used the most insidious lies to lure them to the camp and ensure that they did not revolt along the way. A transport would arrive from Greece with the people having been told that they were being taken to the Ukraine for resettlement. In Greece, for example, there were special offices where you could pay deposits for plots of land. When the Hungarians arrived, they had everything with them, including wood for the building of barracks; this was later used to burn them. After the Jewish transport came in from Theresienstadt, in which various international organizations took a great interest, the people were kept thinking that they were not in a concentration camp, but in a family camp. They were even given some of the fresh supplies and provisions, and ordered to write home or to these organizations (however they were given the name of a fictitious township, or one where there was no camp) and say that they were alright – whereupon they were sent to be gassed. The chocolate and other provisions continued to pour in, and were received by the SS men.
It is a well-known fact that apart from destroying such leading individuals and groups of society, the Germans also erected concentration camps in which they strove to annihilate entire nations. If any of the accused said that he did not know that such a destruction of masses of people took place in the camp and was unaware of what went on there, I can only point out that the biological elimination of societies had been decided on many years before the camp system was established. Many documents, circulated completely openly and available to all of the SS men, and also a great many books, instructed how selected nations were to be liquidated.
This biological extermination took place not only in the camp, but also outside its grounds, and we should keep in mind, among others, the specific regulations and correspondence that was exchanged between Himmler and the head of the camp’s health office, Dr. Conti, regarding the forced abortions performed on Poles, in which documents such procedures are recommended and encouraged, to be performed without threat of punishment; indeed, abortions were removed from the competences of Polish courts, while homosexual relations between Poles were officially considered as acts not worthy of punishment.
The policy of destruction was conducted at the camp in Auschwitz, but it was not created there. The camp was no more than its tool. The Germans destroyed not only political prisoners – and truth be said such inmates should perhaps have not had any complaints that, since they involved themselves in the resistance and fought, they were locked up and even executed – but also children, such as those from the transports from the Zamość region, or from the Lublin region, and indeed one of the SS men who was supposed to give these children lethal injections said while talking to us that even if the camp commandant or the political department was to sentence him to death, he simply could not carry out this sentence, for these were small boys, completely innocent of anything. Nevertheless, the boys were put to death.
And the destruction of women and children, the taking away and killing of newborns, the killing of pregnant women and the conduct of experiments aimed at making women infertile – these were not the whims of the SS men, but a much deeper matter altogether. The experiments conducted in Auschwitz into sterilization were intended – and the SS men stated this openly – to find the best method of sterilization not only of individual people and groups, but also entire societies.
Apart from people with clear political convictions, they destroyed entire social groups en masse, as for example during the infamous gassing of the Gypsies. I would like to add that amongst them [i.e. the Gypsies] were a great many German officers and non-commissioned officers, and there were even numerous Hitlerjugend members who were the sons of mixed German and Gypsy parentage. They were offered release from the camp in return for voluntarily consenting to sterilization. Witnesses who testified before me and those who will testify after me shall in all certainty cite a great many individual instances of people being killed and murdered in the camp only because they were Poles, Jews or Russians.
And they were destroyed not only by being shot or gassed on the basis of trumped-up death sentences. For the conditions in the camp were so terrible that they themselves were sufficient to kill people off. The mortality rate, which initially amounted to 20 percent of the camp population, was not only the result of gassings, but the living conditions themselves. I would like to recall that the Birkenau barrack, which was intended to house 52 horses, housed – when the number of new arrivals reached its zenith – more than one thousand people, and that they were provided with water which was unsuitable for drinking – as a matter of fact, the SS men were given a special order forbidding them to drink it.
When people slept on the pallets, four or even six to each, the Germans thought it prudent and fully justified to erect a luxury kennel in Auschwitz, complete with ventilation and concrete floors, which cost some 80,000 marks. It had a special hospital for dogs and whenever these animals did not receive the appropriate food, there were rows; this shows that the Germans were more concerned with the well-being of their dogs than of the prisoners, who died in droves.
Initially, we were told that the political department was one were prisoners were only registered. This is what the accused Grabner said, also adding that he cared for the prisoners, that he sabotaged the camp by pouring oil down the crematorium chimneys, that he conspired with Witzleben against Hitler, and that he tried to save the prisoners. I would like to stress what hit me most, and that is that if one says that Grabner and the political department had nothing to say in the camp, then this would belie his statements that he released prisoners, that he cared for them, and that he was a very important figure in the camp. It is indeed true that the camp was run by the II department – the political department – and that the surnames of the SS men who worked there caused great fear amongst the inmates, and whenever these SS men appeared at a certain block, then such a block would soon be in mourning.
I would like to provide no more than a few facts concerning the activities of the political department. It was said and continues to be said that the political department took no part in the gassings. I myself never personally witnessed a gassing, for I worked in camp I, however I carefully gathered all materials concerning the camp itself, and I know that the political department assisted in these killings. In order not to be accused of repeating hearsay, I would like to return to the transport about which it was said that it had rebelled. The political department was present at the time. And the transports from Sosnowiec and Bergen-Belsen, when representatives of the political department were also present. This department carried out various “specially commissioned actions”, if I may say so. I remember a transport of Silesians who were locked up and interrogated in Auschwitz in cooperation with the SD; they were terribly maltreated, and thereafter shot. And I also remember how the political department tried to destroy all traces of its activities. I myself worked in the office of the camp hospital, where the incriminating documents were kept. These were files and records in which the Germans noted down instances of natural death, and anyone who read these documents, this book of the dead, could easily see that it was one gigantic falsehood. We were given lists containing the surnames of some 400 or 600 deceased, and we handled a few dozen people each – depending on the number of clerks available; each clerk would write down the same diagnosis, as instructed by the SS doctor, and change only the date of death. For this reason many families whose sons and fathers were shot dead or gassed in Auschwitz received notifications of their deaths with information that, for example, a son had died of heart failure, diarrhea or some other ailment. I know that these SS men, these Germans, who had a love of quaint poetry, kept on thinking up ever more weird cryptonyms, that they would annotate the files of people who were incarcerated in block 11 with the letters “NN” and “M”, which stood for Nachtnebel and Meerschaum – this means that the person in question was to be consumed by the nightly fog or by the sea froth.
The bunker of block 11 was the scene of happenings that I would like to present. I have learned what I have because the Schreiber [clerk] employed at block 11 worked for a clandestine organization, and my quarters were exactly opposite his. I know that when the bunker was full, people would be selected to be shot, and that a representative of the political department would go there: Aumeier. He would add some more prisoners to those who were to be shot, or strike some inmates from the list – and this means that he was in charge of what went on.
As regards the accused Aumeier, there is another fact that I would like to recall. I saw him taking part in executions. We knew previously that executions would take place, for the Rapportführers [report leaders] would order us to cover up the windows with blankets. On a number of occasions – I do not remember how many – I saw Aumeier leaving this block.
On 21 January 1943, they shot Colonel Karcz. Colonel Karcz informed Aumeier that he had finished his sentence, and therefore requested that he be released. Aumeier said something cheerful and had him led to block 11, where he was shot.
I remember quite a few such incidents, all very typical.
On 25 September 1943, the Germans shot dead a large group of Polish intelligentsia, who had been accused by the political department of planning a military plot. They included a great many eminent military personnel, activists, lawyers and politicians. For a dozen or so hours, these people were viciously interrogated at the political department.
The methods of maltreatment used at the political department were well known to all the prisoners.
I had the honor of being at the political department thrice, however I was summoned in matters of little importance. I saw all the equipment that they had there. Also when sending reports about the political department back home, I based myself on information provided by inmates. While working in the hospital, I saw the victims of these “examinations”. When I was employed at the dentistry station, I saw broken jaws, wounds, and unhealed phlegmons. I know that the methods of torture used there were worse than in the Middle Ages. Bucks and needles fixed to sticks, which were used to puncture the backs and testicles of men, or were inserted into women’s breasts. I know that during the interrogation of a large transport the Germans used these sophisticated means to force people to testify.
Another issue that I would like to touch upon is the usage of prisoners as forced labor. For the objective was not to ensure work, to provide the inmates with something to occupy themselves with, nor to educate us through work. While observing this unprecedented gathering of cheap slave labor, grouped all in one place, I saw that the vicinity of Auschwitz – before the War barren and swampy – was being turned into an industrial conglomerate.
I would now like to cite a fragment from Hitler, so that the accused too may understand what they were doing in the camp. “The Poles are not and should not become qualified employees. In order to live, they must facilitate their own exploitation. The Polish standard of living must be low, and it must be maintained at the lowest level. The General Government is one enormous labor camp. We shall care for the health of Poles, we shall make sure that they do not starve, however we must never allow them to attain a higher level, for then they would become communists and anarchists. If we were to lift the Poles to a higher level, they would cease to be laborers. A Pole who works for 14 hours must earn less than a German laborer who works eight hours a day”.
German industry knew of this fountain of cheap labor, located in the immediate proximity of the Third Reich, and quickly determined that its utilization made excellent economic sense. As I have already mentioned, if the ideologue Rosenberg received an academic degree for a dissertation on crematoria, then small wonder that German companies were all too happy to erect these crematoria. The company “Topf and Sons” from Erfurt built crematoria on the grounds of the camp, while the company “Strom” purchased the bones of the incinerated victims to use them as fertilizer. The largest German industrial concerns located their agencies near the camp, making huge profits on the labor provided by prisoners. IG Farbenindustrie operated gigantic industrial plants in Dwory, the so-called Bunawerke, which were built by some 40,000 prisoners, not counting the laborers employed by private contractors. After these were opened, they became a workplace for 25,000 inmates, a few dozen civilian workers, and one thousand English prisoners of war. Figures show that the work there led people to exhaustion: from amongst the 25,000 prisoners employed at these facilities, more than 11,500 did not die of natural causes; only some 1,200 did. Krupp, too, set up a factory in Auschwitz – the “Union”, which produced grenade detonators; people worked there in two shifts. Siemens also had a branch at the camp. It is impossible to count the total number of smaller companies that made use of slave labor. The coal mines located nearby also received forced laborers from the camp, as did the refinery in Trzebinia. The cost of maintaining a prisoner at the camp, together with his guards, was 30 pfennigs. The camp sold off qualified laborers for 6 marks and unqualified laborers for 4 marks. Such a deal allowed the refinery alone to make a monthly profit of 53,000 marks. These calculations were reported back home [i.e. to Poland] even during the War, and some [of the documents] have survived.
Exploitation did not concern just physical effort. The Third Reich also profited by the seizure of property; for example, the Jews alone were deprived of assets with a value of one billion marks. Once the camp was liquidated and the “Canada” barracks burned down, there were still immense quantities of goods left; these were testament to the sheer number of people who passed through the camp, and also to the profits made by the Germans. Further, I would like to recall that many of the accused were included in the so-called London list – of those sentenced to death – and on the list drawn up by the secret command of the camp, as persons responsible for what went on in Auschwitz. This list included Höß, Liebehenschel, Grabner, Lachman, Woźnica, Aumeier, Hoffman, Palitzsch, and doctors Wirths, Mengele and Rhode. We, the political prisoners, were not interested merely in determining whether an SS man hit anyone or not. We always knew that even when the approach of the authorities became more lenient, the Germans were still striving to destroy individual members of society, and society as a whole, to achieve the biological destruction of our entire nation.
Presiding Judge: Are there any questions to the witness?
Prosecutor Szewczyk: Could the witness inform us about the structure of the clandestine organization that was active in the camp?
Presiding Judge: Since the subject matter of this question is very broad, it shall be considered after a 10-minute recess. I hereby order a recess.
(Following a recess)
Presiding Judge: I would ask the witness to inform us of the organizations that existed in the camp.
Witness: I request that the question be precised.
Prosecutor Szewczyk: What clandestine organizations functioned in Auschwitz and what was their impact on camp life and on outside world opinion?
Witness: Initially, the camp at Auschwitz had an exclusively Polish population. Newly arriving transports ferried people sentenced in “identical cases”, that is they had been arrested in connection with one and the same political case, or had come from the same political camp and had worked together even before they were sent to Auschwitz. These people kept in touch with themselves in order to provide mutual assistance, and also to cooperate with the home country. During this initial phase there were Polish groups, officer groups – these I have already mentioned, as their members were shot dead in 1943. Later, when the camp became international, underground political activists arrived from all over Europe. In the beginning, the individual groups kept to themselves, within their own nationalities. It should be mentioned at this point that the policy of the camp administration was not conducive to international solidarity, and indeed every effort was made to set individual national groups at variance with one another. To this end, the various national and ethnic groups were treated differently. Nevertheless, people whose political outlook was based on the principle of international cooperation managed to communicate through personal contacts and create the origins of an international organization. The first international group was established at the beginning of 1942 on the initiative of the Communists. In 1943 there existed an international organization that later became known as the “Auschwitz Group”; it comprised individual national left- wing groups from nearly every European country. Its members included the French, Poles, Russians, Czechs, Austrians, Yugoslavs and Greeks. The leadership was international. This group has its members in all of the kommandos and all of the subcamps, and also a system for communicating between camps and kommandos, between camps and the outside world, as well as between individual countries – Poland, France, Czechoslovakia and Austria. One of the main tasks of the resistance movement in Auschwitz was to ensure the international solidarity of all the prisoners, irrespective of their national or ethnic origin. We were aware of the fact that the job of the SS was made easier when the prisoners were not cooperating with each other, which allowed the political department to engage in spying. The second objective was to raise the moral caliber of prisoners, to that they no longer felt as hounded victims but as people who fought for specific objectives, in the same way as members of the resistance – who engaged in real warfare with real weapons. This organization was able to unite nearly all of the military groups active in Auschwitz – not only the Polish element – under a single, joint Military Council. The resistance must have been ably organized, for the political department did not manage to uncover it – even though Grabner boasted that he knew of its existence – and, acting blindly, arrested individual members on the basis of cursory examinations of their political leanings. This is how they arrested one of the leading members, the Austrian Communist Langbein. In the last days of the camp’s existence, the leading figures of the organization were supposed to have escaped, however they were betrayed by one of the SS men and subsequently hanged. The victims included both Austrians and Poles. The third objective of the organization was to gather materials, books, photographs and letters left behind by the gassed victims, and send them back to the home country. These materials were transferred to Poland, and the courts and the commission for the investigation of German crimes made – and continue to make – full use of them. Such materials can also be found in Czechoslovakia, Austria and France. The fourth task of the resistance was to prepare the camp and subcamps for all sorts of possible danger from the SS command. When the Germans organized a conference during which they discussed the destruction of the camp and its entire population, the details of the meeting were broadcast over British radio just three days later. American, English and Soviet radio stations broadcast our appeal, addressed in the name of Poland to all nations, in which we specifically mentioned that the camp may be liquidated in whole and all of its inmates exterminated. In the camp, preparing for an armed struggle was not easy. We gathered explosives, which were sent to the camp with great risk of life – weapons, gunpowder and grenades. Nearly daily we sent information about what went on in Auschwitz – together with lists of those who had been gassed, had received lethal injections, or had been shot – to Polish contact points outside the camp. We submitted messages which were later broadcast (both nationally and internationally) by a short-wave radio station, which initially operated between Będzin and Sosnowiec, and later in Kraków.
I would also like to mention the famous rebellion at the crematorium. This all started when a battle group set up in the Sonderkommando [special squad], this comprising Jews and Soviet officers, turned to us with a request that we help them destroy the camp, for they had sufficient means and resources to break out and take the prisoners with them. Since the situation was very dramatic and these people were threatened with imminent death, for each Sonderkommando was subsequently gassed, we turned to all the military organizations operating in Silesia with a plea for assistance. Indeed, they even sent us a special liaison officer, who used the pseudonym “Urban”, and he maintained contacts between us and Polish military organizations. As a matter of fact, the Germans later captured him – completely by chance – and interrogated him in the camp, whereafter he was taken away in an unknown direction. He told us that we could not count on any help, for it would have been impossible to lead away such a large number of prisoners. For it would have been relatively simple to break out of the camp together with the prisoners, but totally impossible to arm them, to provide each one with weapons, and ensure them assistance from outside. And without weapons and outside assistance, their fate would have been sealed. For this reason we were unable to provide the group with help to carry out its plan. What we did was give them pistols and explosives, and when the time arrived for them to be liquidated, they attacked the SS men, blew up one of the crematoria and fled, en masse. The SS garrison was alerted and immediately gave chase. According to what we established at the time, none of these unfortunate heroes survived. Only after the War did we learn that a few of them, making use of the fact that some English, or perhaps American aircraft flew overhead, somehow hid and made good their escape.
We managed to photograph a gassing conducted in Höß’s presence. This document is in the Auschwitz files and, as I think, it is the sole piece of evidence showing that people were murdered in this way.
Presiding Judge: Does the defense have any questions?
Defense attorney Kossek: Is the witness specifically aware of the fact that Liebehenschel abolished the “wall of death”, the crematorium, and the Stehbunker [standing cell]?
Witness: Yes, I am aware of the fact, however I would like to remind the accused Liebehenschel that in January 1944, if my memory serves me correctly, he received a report written in German, which I translated. This was after those who had been sentenced to death had left the bunker. We were aware that the “wall of death” had been abolished and that the approach of the Germans had become more lenient, however we also knew why this had occurred, and what their objective was. Immediately after being freed from the bunker, these people wrote through our agency to three countries – Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia – to inform that no one should be fooled that the slighter leniency introduced by Liebehenschel is a significant change. It served a very prosaic goal and was connected with the alarm raised by the heads of industry, in particular in Silesia, and noted in Berlin, concerning the extraordinary decrease in work efficiency and the lack of labor. The goal was to increase the efficiency of prisoners, and we wrote in the letter to Liebehenschel – as he must certainly remember – that if he wanted the prisoners to work, he had to be more lenient, remove the spies from the camp, and stop threatening people with constant punishment, as had been the case to date. Thus, this greater leniency was partially the doing of Liebehenschel, and partially the result of external factors.
Defense attorneys: Is the witness aware whether following Liebehenschel’s departure in May 1944 the treatment of inmates deteriorated?
Witness: This would depend on the group of prisoners whom we were talking about. We were allowed to receive parcels, this did not change. As a whole, our improved treatment following the arrival of Liebehenschel – which we are talking about here – did not come suddenly, like deus ex machina. It was a slow process, and indeed difficult to observe for prisoners who were in the camp at the time.
Defense attorneys: Is the witness aware that Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz was released by Liebehenschel?
Witness: Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz was one of those incarcerated in the bunker, and Liebehenschel did not know who he was. Only when he was freed from the bunker and placed in block number 11 did we send a memorial informing about Cyrankiewicz and asking for his release. Thereafter he was released.
Defense attorneys: Thank you.
Presiding Judge: Are there any questions?
Prosecutors and defense attorneys: No.
Presiding Judge: The witness may step down.