Tenth day of the trial, 21 March 1947
(Following a recess)
Those present the same as on the seventh day of the hearing.
Presiding Judge: I resume the session of the Supreme National Tribunal. Would the witness Prime Minister Cyrankiewicz please come forward.
The witness stated the following with regard to his person: Józef Cyrankiewicz, born on 23 April 1911, unmarried, Roman Catholic, journalist, President of the Council of Ministers, relationship to the parties – none.
Presiding Judge: On account of the office held by the witness, there is no need to remind him that all witnesses are under the obligation to tell the truth. Does the Prosecutor wish to file a motion as regards the procedure of interviewing the witness?
Prosecutor Cyprian: I exempt [the witness from taking the oath].
Presiding Judge: And the Defence Counsel?
Attorney Ostaszewski: We exempt [the witness from taking the oath].
Presiding Judge: The Tribunal has determined that the witness will testify without an oath. The Tribunal is interested in shedding light on the activity of the organization in Auschwitz – the so-called resistance movement, the underground movement. The name of the witness has been mentioned here many times with regards to this issue. Was it indeed a Polish organization or did it rather have an international character? The Tribunal would like to ask the witness to present this issue.
Witness: Your Honor! The reminder concerning the obligation of the witness to tell the truth – particularly in the case of testifying prisoners, it seems – may be motivated by the reason opposite to the usual fear of the Tribunal that the witness may exaggerate. I simply do not know if there is any concentration camp prisoner who could think up and tell the whole truth concerning Nazi concentration camps. I certainly will not be able to present it either.
Your Honor asked whether the clandestine organization in the camp was exclusively Polish, or international. No concentration camp established by the SS – in fact all such camps – was ever intended for one nationality, and this holds true for all such camps. Their objective was to destroy prisoners, and one of the methods used for this purpose was to put prisoners of various nationalities together, to mix them up. To turn prisoners, who were surrounded by barbed wire and guards, against one another – taking advantage of the chauvinism naturally existing within communities – and to incite them to murder each other, insofar as possible, and thus do the Nazis’ job for them. The camps were international. The inmates of these camps – the prisoners of Auschwitz – were representatives of nearly all the nations subjugated by Hitler. If the movement had not been international, there would have been no resistance, mainly psychological that is (the significance of which should not be underrated), among the prisoners.
The prisoners’ resistance, their activities, had to be international in nature. They had to develop a degree of international solidarity, as the Nazis – the SS men – were hoping that the lack thereof would make it easier for them to not only murder us – which was easy enough, any trained Nazi could do that – but also to rule over subjugated Europe and, in future, over the entire world.
For us, the prisoners, concentration camps were not just some place of detention where we were locked up and from which we wanted to flee. We saw the camps as something much more tragic. From our perspective, concentration camps were the site of a large-scale experiment. On the one hand It involved the mechanized, or indeed “civilized” – as regards the concept of material civilization – destruction of a huge group. Plans for the future undoubtedly involved the destruction of the Slavic nations – especially the Poles, following the prelude that was the destruction of Jews. Putting aside the development of physical means as such, we must state that this destruction was intended for a huge group and carried out on an unprecedented scale, in cold blood, systematically – it was not committed out of passion or in direct combat, in the heat of emotion, but in the execution of a well- thought-out, hideously ruthless and nihilistic plan.
We saw an experiment in the camp which instilled the greatest terror in us. This experiment was an assault on humankind in general. It involved so much contempt for everything which is human that I would consider it unfair to compare the Nazis and the Nazi system to any impulse or reaction of primitive peoples, savages or barbarians. It is unfair because one can imagine that a barbarian might jump on someone in a certain period of history, armed with a club, an axe or some other murder weapon – perhaps acting in anger, out of revenge or passion – as a primitive way of venting emotions. Venting emotions in this manner obscured the barbarian’s humanity only for a moment. In time, along with the development of civilization and spirituality he would become more humane. This was completely different. These were not barbarians killing in anger or passion. It was people, leaders, who created that system. Their education was purposefully founded on philosophical antagonism. They came to identify with nihilism – a complete rejection of humanity. What truly terrified us, was not the fact that there was one such murderer, or that in other concentration camps there were a hundred of men just like him, because every nation has some percentage of sadists, criminals and murderers who are deemed social outsiders and against whom normal measures of safety are put in place by the law. Perhaps a trial against one particularly degenerate murderer or criminal would have been more preferable. But in the camp it was clear to us that if a perfectly ordinary, typical Nazi henchman were to be transferred elsewhere – which did happen with such murderers – the next one delegated from the German nation to perform a similar function would be just the same and capable of the same murderous actions. After all, the Auschwitz camp commandant had various problems with the prisoners, but throughout this whole time he had no quarrel with the SS garrison or the German nation. Quite the opposite, he considered himself one of the most honorable representatives of his nation and its expansive tendencies. That was the most tragic part. Watching them could make us lose all faith in humanity. Several days ago I read the testimony of one of my colleagues from the camp, who said that he lost faith in God at Auschwitz. I think that the great majority of the prisoners who acted in an organized manner, and many of those who manifested their attitude towards Nazism as actively as it was permitted in the camp – those of us actually strengthened our faith in people and humankind while being in the camp. I believe that to be one of the most valuable gains, if one can speak of gaining anything from such monstrous tragedy. We did not lose our faith in humanity even for a moment while we were there. We tried to fight for people, for their humanity – which was good enough. It was enough to stop worrying solely about one’s own fate too much and too often. We felt that we were part of the great struggle for humanity that was happening around the world – the great war against Nazism. Our task was perhaps the most difficult, in a sense that it is easier for a soldier to fight with a rifle – the hardest
I have an example which should be mentioned with the highest respect, and which has already been spoken of in this hall. I am referring to the leader of the radical nationalists, Mosdorf. He realized faster than other nationalists and chauvinists that the killing of Jews by the Germans was the first stage. The chauvinism of some nationalists led them to see this solution as positive, just as Hitler and the SS had hoped for. [Mosdorf] realized in the camp that it was simply a question of who would be next – that the camp was a lens focusing all of the ideological consequences of nationalism and chauvinism. This awareness led him to become one of the main representatives of the concept and of the sense of international solidarity in the camp, who actively practiced this notion. He helped people of other nationalities and beliefs, Jews, socialists, communists; he aided representatives of the so-called Judeo-Bolshevism, to use the pre-war term. He rightly believed that the recent war and the struggle against fascism were a learning experience for us all, and that there was a chance for everyone who had previously erred in their political or ideological views by building them on various nationalist beliefs.
The organization of international solidarity in Auschwitz was not comprised solely of representatives of the left, of socialists and communists. We were joined by all those who knew that the fight for the freedom of their own nation must be founded in a respect for and the recognition of every nation’s right to live and to be free – irrespective of how small or defenceless that nation may be; simply put, it had to be founded in a respect for man and mankind.
We had many brave colleagues – very brave and so incredibly resilient, ideologically, to the pressure generated by life in the camp. The toughest were those from Austria and Germany, perhaps due to their considerable experience of politics. But they constituted a minority. The selections of political prisoners in Austria and Germany were different, maybe even worse – these inmates included representatives of national groups who were taken en masse, regardless of their ideological convictions, simply because they were members of a given national group. And only in the camp were they forced to revise their ideology, so as to get rid of the nationalism and chauvinism that invariably played into the hands of the Nazis. We had such friends mainly among the Austrian antifascists and communists. One cannot mention them without uttering words of the most genuine friendship and respect, or speak of those who died there, such as one of our best comrades – Burger, without all the Polish political prisoners who knew them bowing their heads in reverence.
What purpose was this international solidarity among prisoners supposed to serve? Firstly, it was to teach us how to act the right way between ourselves (thanks to the establishment of international solidarity), develop the sense of solidarity within ourselves, and then try to enforce it among larger groups as the first objective. Once the obstacles resulting from mutual antagonism and distrust among nationalists and chauvinists were gone – if possible – it would also serve to teach us how to use the prisoners’ resistance to fight – not only with the camp or the camp commandant, but also in a more general sense.
This solidarity allowed us to establish in the camp the sort of organization which simply could not have been conceived by a single individual or nationality. Because it was initiated by a large group of people and had a very broad reach, every other day – or more or less frequently, depending on needs – our organization, acting on behalf of the entire camp, was able to send data and documents concerning what went on inside – and this information was practically ripped from the hands of the Nazi administrative apparatus – to the outside world. We were not so naive as to think that this would bring us any personal advantage, that someone would at this point have been able to liberate the camp. In any case, we spoke very little between ourselves about our own freedom, but we did have one cause for satisfaction – namely, we knew that we were in effect an intelligence cell within the still highly clandestine laboratories working on the Hitlerite plan to murder entire nations. We were doing our duty – tens and hundreds of prisoners performed their duty while working in administrative offices, eavesdropping on SS men and stealing away documents to be sent outside, all the while running the risk that these materials could potentially be traced to some prisoner or other due to the place of their origin. In consequence, we were able to send out information – insofar as possible – however not related to us, as this might have been, and in all probability was of lesser importance during the war – but concerning what was happening to human lives and what could happen to entire nations in future. This is why we could pass on warnings about the commandant’s plans and Mr. Himmler’s plans for the complete or partial liquidation of the camp. And when Mr. Höß supervised the extermination of Hungarian Jews in the morning, in the afternoon we were able to pass on information about the exact number of people who had been gassed that day. Perhaps we even naively believed that this would be a practical warning for those outside the camp to avoid getting caught too easily.
We had quite a lot of disappointments in this regard. When Mr. Höß was no longer the camp commandant, he organized mass transports of Hungarian Jews from Hungary to the crematoriums at Auschwitz (the so-called Action-Höß). We were very sad to see people arrive [in the camp] in 1944, at the point when Hitler and Nazism were fairly well known around Europe. They arrived at Auschwitz, thinking that they have reached England in order to be exchanged for German prisoners of war, as they had been told by Mr. Höß’ people. They arrived at Auschwitz with this belief and asked the prisoners who manned the transports how far it was to the English Channel. There were also Jewish transports which arrived with wood intended for building barracks – these citizens naively believed that they were going to settle in Auschwitz, while the wood had actually been ordered by Mr. Höß for burning these Jews on pyres, because the crematoria could not keep up. What did that tell us? It told us just how important it was to warn the whole world that Nazi Germany was hoping that while ordinary crimes may alarm everyone, the atrocities of this kind – such mass killings as those committed at Auschwitz – might go unpunished, because no one would believe they could happen. That was indeed correct, because I know from the people who delivered our reports to England that for quite a long time they themselves did not believe us, and the English could not believe us even longer. When they started believing, there was still the issue of convincing the societies and nations listening to these news on the radio to believe that it was not just the war propaganda of the allies, but a tiny part of the truth about the camp that we had managed to collect and pass on, which involved authentic numbers that were more likely under- than overestimated.
Your Honor asked about the organization. Near the end, the prisoners simply developed the sense of solidarity, there was a great solidarity in the camp. In 1944 three prisoners fled from the camp – one of them got severely wounded during the escape, then managed to drag himself back to the camp and hide on its premises. From the perspective of the administrative office the man no longer existed, so he – not to mention those who helped him out – obviously would have been shot if he were found out. But no one turned him in. Unbeknown to Mr. Höß and his people, for more than a month he stayed on the camp’s grounds, while secretly receiving medical treatment and remaining under the moral care and guidance of not just the organization, numbering several hundred or a thousand people, but of the entire camp – the prisoners who all knew about him. At that point we started to believe that following the first period of panic which had been contained fairly quickly, the prisoners assumed an attitude so solid in terms of ideology that the camp as a whole was ready to fight not only for life, but also for the cause.
I think that the collective character of the resistance movement in Auschwitz, the fact that it ceased to rely on individuals which showed initiative and had many members in the whole camp – except the criminal part – was our biggest success. It was a success that this international solidarity was not shared only by several people who communicated with one another in some room, but by the whole camp, despite the fact that egoistic motives in the camp could easily push people to chauvinism.
I do not know whether I should go into details?
Presiding Judge: Could the witness name the persons who were especially active in the camp and as part of the operation in the camp?
Witness: In the camp we tried to write down all the names – but those of the SS men. Obviously, no one wrote down the names of the prisoners who were active in the resistance, simply out of basic concern for safety. Today we obviously can and should reconstruct these matters. Now it is the easiest to speak about people whom I can easily remember, because I am looking at them. There sits my closest friend from the camp, there sits the man who completely devoted himself to the operation and aided prisoners as a physician – “Stakło”, as he was known in the camp, Kłodziński. Here sits our Austrian colleague, Dr. Durmeier, who previously fought in Spain, and was later detained with us in the camp. I think that Herman Langbein is to testify here as well. Our colleague Hołuj has testified here. It is hard for me to name everyone now. My colleague Kuryłowicz has already mentioned many of them. I could list many names and I think that these things can and should be put into order. People who sacrificed everything in the camp and laid down their lives for one another – and for all of us – are not here, and they will never appear before the Court. Those are, most importantly, Ernst Burger, Bernard Świerczyna, Kostek Jagiełło, and many others, whom I cannot name presently without a list. They were Polish officers, Polish socialists, Polish communists, German communists, French communists, socialists and Gaullists, soldiers and officers of the Red Army, Czechs, and Yugoslavs. All of them were anti-fascists, who were able to find a common ground in the camp – perhaps more easily than they would have outside of it.
If the Tribunal wishes, we will try to reconstruct these matters in our future accounts with more details and list all of the relevant names.
Presiding Judge: Are there any questions from the Prosecutor?
Prosecutor Cyprian: It has been said here that Höß’ command over the camp was something uncommon, that such kind of extermination was not the intention of the people who had established the camp, and that Höß’ successors were suitable for the post. We would like to ask the witness to answer the question whether Höß was a typical executor of the German will or an exception?
Witness: I do not know if the term “exception” is a compliment to Höß. It could be, however, an undeserved compliment to the German nation. Höß was a perfectly typical representative of the Nazi regime. They acted like tools of the regime, but they also carried out the general plan of extermination with quite a considerable pleasure and eagerness. It is hard to suspect that these rather typical Germans holding the post of commandant could come up with such ideas and devise such a system. No, they were following the orders of the command, but did so willingly – realizing their entire sadistic potential and undoubtedly adding to it in terms of the thoroughness with which nearly all SS men carried out their orders. In this regard, Höß was no “tortured spirit” who reluctantly followed orders. He was fine with such orders – even more so, he personally organized many sadistic operations. One can find himself in the hands of sadists by chance – especially during the war – or end up in an even worse camp. I was later detained in Mauthausen. Besides, on the basis of the whole system and of what all my colleagues said, about 10 percent of individual situations was what made the difference in terms of treatment of prisoners. It was a system – this is what made it so dangerous to the future of our nations.
Prosecutor Cyprian: Did any of Höß’ assistants who were given such brutal orders ever openly refuse to follow them?
Witness: No. This never happened.
Prosecutor: And a third question. Does the witness remember that the camp in Auschwitz was part of the plan of general extermination of the Polish nation?
Witness: I do. All of the letters which we sent from the camp were intended mainly as a warning that this was not just about us – that it was a huge laboratory. The planned extension of Auschwitz into Himmlerstadt, large enough for 500,000 people, and the crematoria alone – capable of burning huge numbers of people daily – were not meant just for us. For us, the prisoners, the usual camp methods were sufficient: hunger, the German camp physicians, “the wall of death” in block 11, and maybe an additional small gas chamber would be enough. This huge [thing] was not meant for us, but for the people who still believed that they were free citizens of the world, all the while according to the German plans they were to be destroyed.
Prosecutor: Thank you. I have no further questions.
Presiding Judge: Would the Defence like to question the witness?
Attorney Ostaszewski: Yes.
Presiding Judge: Proceed.
Attorney Ostaszewski: Prime Minister, you have mentioned that after Auschwitz you were also detained in another camp, in Mauthausen. How much did the systems at Auschwitz and the other extermination camp – Mauthausen – differ?
Witness: They differed mainly in terms of the size of the camp. The camp in Mauthausen was much smaller. I would say that Auschwitz was a large factory – a huge combination of factories of death, while Mauthausen was smaller but just as ruthless, and identical with regards to the methods of destruction.
Presiding Judge: There are no other questions, therefore the witness is excused. I call a 10-minute recess.