Sixth day of the hearing, 17 March 1947.
(After the break.)
Present: as the day before.
Presiding judge: I resume the proceedings of the Supreme National Tribunal in the case against Rudolf Höß. Please bring witness Hołuj.
Witness has stated in regard to himself: Tadeusz Hołuj, writer, unmarried, Roman Catholic, no relation to parties.
Presiding judge: What are the motions regarding the conditions of examination of the witness?
Prosecutor Siewierski: We relieve the witness of oath.
| Defence attorney Umbreit: | We relieve [the witness of oath]. |
| Presiding judge: | By agreement of sides, the Tribunal has decided to relieve the witness of |
| oath. I | remind the witness of his obligation to testify the truth and of criminal liability for |
false testimony. Please tell, in what conditions did the witness find himself in Auschwitz, in particular, what could the witness tell us about the organization of the so-called resistance movement in Auschwitz itself. Are those circumstances known to the witness and can the witness present them to the Tribunal more extensively?
Witness: I was arrested by the Gestapo in the summer of 1942 and on 4 September 1942 I arrived in the Auschwitz camp. My knowledge about what happened in the concentration camp comes both from my personal experiences and from my work in the resistance movement.
In the Auschwitz camp, I worked in the camp hospital and the camp administrative office. Documents of extraordinary importance went through that office. In the resistance I took part as a member of the international resistance committee in the camp. In talking about the resistance movement and what happened in the camp, I would like to highlight both the system itself that governed the camp and the profile of the defendant against the background of that system. These individual facts of persecution, terror, abusing people, stripping people of their human dignity are countless, infinite. They are commonly known and no one questions them.
I would like to list some of them generally as a characteristic for the background for the formation of the resistance movement due to the fact that much like today, in Europe and across the globe, at that time, in the period of the concentration camps, people did not believe and refused to believe in what happened in the concentration camps. Those who did not believe and did not know included the so-called Zugangs coming to the Auschwitz concentration camp, especially ones from outside Poland; the wide world, in spite of the existence of the resistance movement and in spite of multiple alarms we sounded for the foreign public, for the public opinion in Allied States, sometimes it happened, as it did in 1943, when the official director of British radio refused to publish news of the Auschwitz concentration camp. On the one hand, the immense crimes taking place in Auschwitz were covered up because of rational reasons. The point was to avoid clipping the wings of the resistance in Europe and especially in Poland, to avoid intimidating it with what was going on in the Auschwitz camp. On the other hand, the scale of those crimes was so monstrous that even people of good will refused to believe that all those facts and events actually took place.
Of course, in the mental situation where there was no will to believe what was going on in the Auschwitz concentration camp, it was difficult to gain the necessary protection from the world opinion.
On the other hand, the Germans were very adept in camouflaging their entire system; camouflaging both the Auschwitz camp and their entire Nazi policy towards Poland and towards other sites of extermination in Europe.
[There are] a few examples of such camouflaging of the crimes that took place in Auschwitz. It is known today that [people in] the mass transports that arrived in Auschwitz were not only caught, but also partially recruited. It happened for example in Greece, where a colonization action for Belarus and Ukraine was initiated and where Greek peasants and Greek Jews were ordered to sign documents that granted them plots of land in Belarus and Ukraine. I have personally had a document like that in front of me.
We can also mention the fact of camouflaging like it was done here, in Warsaw, when an operation was organized to exchange Warsaw Jews for prisoners of war at first, and later it was changed to being sent to the United States of America; however, instead of the United States, everyone found themselves in Auschwitz.
There were more cases like that. For example, the Dutch Jews were recruited to work in precision tool factories, and they ended up in Auschwitz.
There was the giant Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia, partially under the protection of international institutions, first and foremost the International Red Cross. Since all inhabitants of that camp received help and care from the Red Cross and other committees taking care of that camp, the commander of Auschwitz, in agreement with government representatives, came upon a joke idea to create a family camp for Jews in the Auschwitz camp, from where they could write to their relatives that they are well and to ask for care packages. The packages were naturally confiscated, and the inhabitants of this Familienlager were usually gassed.
There are thousands of such examples of what went on in the camp. What happened in the Auschwitz camp must have been beyond what Berlin was willing to stomach. For if a special commission sent by Berlin arrived in the camp to investigate the management of defendant Höß, and especially his abuses [of power] in comparison to what Berlin allowed him with regards to terror, that means that beyond the official “Berlin terrorist decree”, as we called it, the camp authorities, in this case the Auschwitz commandant, had the power to make this system more or less strict.
The best proof of that is that when, after Höß’s removal, another commandant – Liebehenschel – came in and introduced a new regime in the Auschwitz concentration camp – we called that “loosening the belt” – we were still perfectly aware that even though the commandant of the Auschwitz camp had the possibility to counteract specific moves or decisions of Berlin and could soften them a little, it was, in that case, a “loosening of the belt” done in accordance with the order of superior institutions related to the Reich Main Security Office [Reichssicherheitshauptamt, RSHA], who, due to the political situation, namely, the defeats of the German army in the East, decided to make the camp regime somewhat less onerous.
I arrived at the camp in 1942, by then it was basically an international camp, meaning that while the clear majority both in the numbers and in terms of positions held in the camp was still Polish, there were already tens of thousands of prisoners of other nationalities.
It is clear that maintaining such a mass of prisoners, housed not just in the main Auschwitz I camp, but also all the side camps, was only possible through the use of a special system that so perfectly fit the general system of Nazism. To maintain discipline amongst the prisoner masses, the terror used by the SS was not enough, the Politische Abteilung [Political Department] – the Gestapo camp – was not enough, it was necessary to find an appropriate tool within the camp itself. In this regard, the policy of the camp command was to play one nationality against another, one minority against another minority. Their moves were perfidious. We noticed how a Kommando [work detail] of Poles always had a foreigner in charge – a German or a Volksdeutch [person of German ancestry] – and, conversely, a Jewish Kommando often had a Vorarbeiter [foreman] Pole, the French would have a Volksdeutsch. Even specific Jewish groups did not have their leaders come from the same national group, but in general they were recruited from other national groups. It was done because if the camp command failed to keep up the tension in that huge mass of prisoners through both political terror and the destruction of the biological mass of prisoners, they would maintain one hundred percent solidarity and the blade of the Political Department would turn dull. That much is proven through the results of what the Supreme Tribunal calls the resistance movement in the camp.
We assumed – correctly, it seems – that without achieving that solidarity of prisoners of various nations and races in the camp, it would be impossible to do anything in there. We had to fight the demoralization instituted by the camp command and the SS. We had to combat the mood in the camp that suggested that everything evil and immoral gave people the possibility for a better life and improved well-being. We had to rip the positions assigned by the camp command from the hands of various German bandits marked with a green triangle [uniform patch for criminal prisoners]. We had to place brave and selfless people in various positions in the camp so that they could help the prisoners. Finally, we also had to bring the attention of the wide world, especially of the Allied public opinion, but also of our brothers fighting in Poland and elsewhere in Europe, whether as part of resistance, as guerrillas, or even already in the camps, to what was happening in the Auschwitz camp.
I do not intend to present here the entire history of the resistance; it could be summarized in a few short sentences.
The camp had many groups in it, both military and political. This was because the political and national composition of the camp was such that there were very different people there: left-wing, right-wing, officers of international brigades in Spain, officers of the Polish Army, members of the Austrian resistance, old German communists, who had already been in camps for several years. Czechs, Hungarians, and Jews had either directly taken part in the resistance or had indirect contact with political organizations. We put the most effort in these loose groups, trying to soothe the antagonisms fomented – purposefully and consciously – by the camp command, so that we could bring those groups together in a common effort, for the situation in the camp was very dramatic. Based on the plans and decrees going through our hands, we were aware that the Auschwitz camp, originally intended as an extermination site for Poles, soon became the place of execution for all European nations, and there was a project for the expansion of a huge city called Himmlerstadt, which would fit within its walls, within its wires, hundreds of thousands of prisoners of various nationalities. The camp map included even daycares for children. It was a period of great danger, in part because it was a period of increased intensity of German terror within the camp and without. The resistance movement throughout Europe also grew at the time, and one must not forget it was the period after Stalingrad, when the balance of the war clearly tipped against the Germans.
Of course, these external political factors influenced not only the resistance, but also the camp command, as well as the Gestapo, and the change of specific conditions of prisoner life in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
However, to inform the world about what was going on in the camp and inform the forces that could help the camp about what was about to happen in the camp, we had to use a carefully constructed intelligence network of our own. Thanks to the information gained from the specific intelligence posts, the resistance – located under the very nose of the command, in the Political Department and all the offices of the Auschwitz camp that even the head doctor of Auschwitz, Dr. Wirths, had to work with, whether he liked it or not – we could obtain specific material and pass it outside. The people working with us as part of our organization or cooperating with us would risk their lives to smuggle out precise lists of transports and copies of documents produced both in the SS administrative office and in the prisoner administrative office, the office of the main Schreibstube [administrative office] or of the rewir [hospital].
We sought attention not just through those documents. In that period, when the already unheard-of terror intensified immensely, in the autumn of 1942, when people were shot just because they were in the camp, without looking for any excuse; when the rozwałkas [massacres] took place, such as the mass shootings of transports of people from Lublin, people with all kinds of [prisoner] numbers and from all kinds of cases; when that terror threatened to destroy especially European intelligentsia, particularly Polish, which was eliminated with great prejudice, regardless of any crimes; which was destroyed blindly and ruthlessly, such as the group of officers who were shot, such as the members of the Bekleidungskammer, such as the other Kommandos crewed mostly by Poles, where Höß and the Political Department expected – and rightly so – that they could find the central, most sensitive points of the resistance. In 1943, word of many of those things got out of the camp. They were then researched by an investigative commission and the Commission to Investigate German Crimes. These documents are in the file.
When defendant Höß returned to the camp as plenipotentiary of the action to gas the Jews, especially Hungarian[-Jews], that action was larger in size than anything that the Auschwitz concentration camp had seen before then. Some 600,000 Jews were gassed then, and over the course of the whole so-called Aktion Höß, some 1,020,000 people [were gassed]. Entire French transports, which contained French partisans, who should have been treated as prisoners of war, were gassed. I say this because we had in our hands little plates [identification tags] of officers and soldiers – French prisoners of war. This proves prisoners of war were gassed. We had already known about the extermination of several transports of Soviet prisoners of war, who were the first to have the gas used against them and who were all barbarically destroyed in a short time, when out of 11,000, only 112 – I believe – were left. The Auschwitz camp also held, against international law, officers and soldiers of other nationalities. An officer of the British navy was brought to the camp from the Red Sea shores because he was Jewish.
In defiance of international law, a group of Soviet higher officers, colonels, and generals were in the camp in 1942 for allegedly conducting political agitation in prisoner of war camps they had been in.
When the infamous Aktion Höß began, when the stacks kept smoking without interruption, transports of Hungarian women would arrive at the notorious “Meksyk” [“Mexico”, unfinished section III of the Birkenau camp]. They would be held for a few days without clothes, without food, then they would be shaved so that they could then be sent to the gas. We tried to obtain at any cost some kind of tangible proof of how the action was conducted, so that the world would believe in an action of this kind. Thanks to the personal dedication of one of the members of the resistance, codename “Dawid”, we managed to take pictures of a gassing, of that exact action that was being conducted by Rudolf Höß as a plenipotentiary, with a photo camera. Those photos have been added to the case file, they depict Jews going to the gas.
Nevertheless, the work of the intelligence itself, of the resistance institutions, was
| exceptionally hard, because it | ran into counteractions conducted by the Political |
| Department through a | broad network of camp snitches recruited from all possible nations |
| and social groups. It | was dangerous because Himmler had already been alerted by how the |
news would leak too profusely outside the camp and brought the attention of defendant Höß to that problem during his visit to the Auschwitz camp. The news would initially be published very rarely, then more and more frequently in English radio, in journals published illegally by the Polish resistance movement, and in the publications that appeared both in the United States and in Great Britain. They were based on the documents which the camp resistance had managed to extract. [Moreover], during the famous action of completely liquidating the Auschwitz camp, [evidence of] the so-called Moll conversation on how to liquidate the Auschwitz camp so that no trace would remain, so that all prisoners were executed, when a specific number of armoured means and aircraft was proposed – we got all that and sent it to Kraków. Three days later, the London radio broadcast that news with dates and names. This started a period favorable for the radio campaign, meaning that people far away from the Auschwitz camp had finally believed that the camp is in danger of being completely and fundamentally exterminated. We asked several times for tangible aid to be given to the camp, for such aid could be provided, since the Allies had taken as prisoners of war some people who could have been used as hostages against the action that was going to take place in the camp. We alerted the world, pointing to the names of main criminals, already back then accusing them of being responsible for what was going on in Auschwitz. One of the reports sent through the so-called iskrówka [wireless telegraph], the iskrówka of the Polish Government Delegation [for Poland], contained the documents from 1944, which explicitly listed the main butchers of the Auschwitz concentration camp, putting defendant Höß in second place, after Pohl from Berlin. I know that the British radio broadcast warnings to the camp authorities and the Reich Main Security Office several times, stating that it knew of plans to destroy the camp and [knew] what was going on in the camp, and that the Allied governments sternly warned the German government and the camp command. And it was in those broadcasts that the name of Höß was given as [the name of] one of the main criminals.
One has to be aware of the position the political prisoners had in the camp. It could not be said that we were done by being locked up in the camp if we were actually part of the resistance. None of the political prisoners protested that; however, all of them had resolutely demanded we, especially the political prisoners, but also that great mass of prisoners in Auschwitz, be given human rights, and once it turned hot in the camp – prisoner of war rights. We directed such appeals to Allied governments and we know those appeals reached them, however, it reached them without causing any of the effects we desired. During the trial of Witzleben – who was accused of attempting to assassinate Hitler – General Witzleben stated in his speech that the concentration camp housed scum from all over Europe. We had to protest then as well, for by then the nations which had not personally suffered Nazi occupation were starting to form an opinion that the camps really housed some terrible social refuse, rather than political prisoners, who were there in actuality.
Of course, the resistance did not limit itself to gathering materials and carrying them outside. There were situations where even Gestapo had to be helped. There were, for example, situations where the command, under Höß’s orders, would issue death sentences without consulting Berlin, which was against the German law on concentration camps. An extraordinary commission then arrived in Auschwitz and the camp command alongside the Political Department wanted to cover up the evidence of their exceeding their competences in the crimes done in Auschwitz as quickly and as radically as possible. It was done by confiscating, from the camp administrative offices, [from] the so-called Schreibstube, all the records and books and files where we, the prisoners, marked deaths from non-natural causes with red crosses. The goal of the command and the Political Department was to prevent the extraordinary commission from finding evidence of exceeding competences by the command and the Gestapo camp. At that point, with help from our contacts with the country, we wrote to that special commission in Berlin that such and such files were confiscated and that they are in one of the desks of the Political Department. Thanks to our letter, the commission found those files, resulting in an extended investigation, the removal of defendant Höß, putting his successor Liebehenschel in place as camp commandant, an easing of the camp regime, and implementing at least in a small degree what we called the regulations of German concentration camps.
Most importantly, since then, during Liebehenschel’s time as commandant and after Höß arrived [as] plenipotentiary for the killing of Hungarian-Jews, prisoners were no longer killed without conferring with Berlin. But one should not think they were no longer being killed at all. We have, however, managed to make it so that the kapos and SS-men were forbidden from beating prisoners without first consulting the camp command, which often granted permission for it in any case. Thanks to that, we were able to hide a great number of people in the camp hospital – especially those who were needed for underground work in the camp, besides them, included were those who were tired and worn down by the prison regime, people in danger of dying from famine, exhaustion, or from an SS sentence.
Once it became clear to us that at some point the German authorities will have no other way [but] to either completely liquidate the camp or resettle all prisoners to other areas of the German Reich, to other camps, we decided to put the military action being conducted in the camp on proper footing, to no longer just defend the dignity and honor of political prisoners, but the actual lives of tens of thousands of inmates. Of course, we needed weapons to do that. They were delivered by the girls working in the organization and employed at Union- Werke. They were delivered by our organizations. Weapons and explosives came in smuggled by Schwester Marie – Sister Mary, working in the SS-rewir [SS hospital], one of our main sources of information on what went on in the camp command. The camp authorities tracked down [our] organizations in the camp several times and issued unquestionable death sentences to anyone they caught. The girls who had been smuggling gunpowder and grenades were hanged, the entire forefront of the military resistance was caught by the SS-men and hanged. The losses of activists that the resistance incurred were very painful – twenty-odd of the most selfless and brave individuals.
The situation in 1944 changed insofar as it became clear that it was impossible to keep this mass of prisoners in the Auschwitz camp, that therefore it was possible that it would either be completely evacuated, or at least partially evacuated of Poles and Russians, whom the command and political authorities of the camp feared the most.
We had to take some kind of a stance towards that, for in our fight, in the camp resistance, we always assumed that we are a part – perhaps a small and insignificant one – of that all-Polish and all-European resistance against fascism and Nazism. We wanted to preserve amongst our mass at least such a fraction of the political prisoners who could, at the right time, when the military and political situation would be favorable, take up arms, and not just sell their lives dearly – but also assist Polish guerrillas and Czechoslovak guerrillas to regain freedom in Silesia as quickly as possible. Of course, breaking up the camp through complete or partial evacuation would have completely paralyzed any actions of this kind.
In 1944, German authorities caught the plenipotentiary of the Polish Government Delegation to Poland, who was working in the Oświęcim area to organize a military action. Of course, we then had to destroy and change all organization plans, for there was worry that that man, especially since he was caught with some materials about the resistance, may cause the defeat of the entire resistance.
Moments like those – when the resistance helped the entire camp – were many. One of them was stopping the selections for gassing within the camp. Thanks to us successfully explaining to the chief camp authorities that it would constrict the workforce – the only argument that could work with those people – the selections were then stopped.
There was also the fact that we managed to supply people in need both with food and with medication, that we managed to help dozens of people escape and they could afterwards immediately take up positive work in the underground movement in Poland. They were Poles, as well as Czechs, Slovaks, Germans, and Austrians.
Thanks to the resistance, the world learned about what went on in the Auschwitz camp, thanks to the resistance many thousands of people were saved, for it is indubitable that because the Allies adopted a clear stance and threatened consequences for the camp command and German government, who wanted to liquidate the camp as per their plan, this has absolutely contributed to saving that great crowd of prisoners who were in the camp.
On several occasions, the camp command attempted to garner favor with the prisoners, for example after an Allied air raid on Auschwitz, when the Lagerführer [camp commander], wounded in the Allied bombing, sent red flowers, one for every two wounded, and one cigarette for every two wounded, but when there was a selection for the gas, he also sent all the wounded to the gas.
It was a time when there were attempts to bring world events to the prisoners’ attention. The command and the Gestapo conducted strict searches of all incoming packages, but, strangely, they would consciously and intentionally let through all the magazines which called for collaboration with the Germans. These made the rounds in the camp and nobody was held responsible for that.
One of the events where the resistance also had a tangible influence on the situation in the camp was the change of camp commandants, when Höß left and Liebehenschel came in, when there was a push to change course. Activists of the resistance were held in Block 11, including now-Prime Minister Józef Cyrankiewicz, who was given a memorandum in German to present to commandant Liebehenschel. [He was supposed] to present the situation in such a way that we would be able to once and for all rid ourselves of that network of spying tentacles that surrounded our every move in the camp; so that we would be able to do our work free of the terror of the camp Gestapo. This daring and undoubtedly risky move succeeded fully and thanks to that almost all camp snitches, almost all helpers of the camp Gestapo, left for penal assignments to other camps; moreover, the commandant forbade the Political Department from handing out sentences without knowledge of the command, [and] for a time even from entering the Auschwitz camp at all.
It turned out that thanks to the solidarity of political prisoners we could change much. Thanks to the sacrifices not of the leaders of the resistance, but of the tens of thousands [of members] of the resistance movement who worked in different areas – in intelligence, aid sections, contacting the outside world, the military organization, the military organizations that controlled the area, aiding the escapee prisoners, and preparing for the possibility of a military action during an evacuation to death, which could take place – we could change camp policy on several occasions.
If I say that everything that happened in the camp was indubitably the result of the Nazi system, then we need to bring up the official statement of the camp resistance movement itself on who should actually answer for what happened in the concentration camps. In the dispatch we sent to the Allies we stated unequivocally that we, the political prisoners, far from desiring revenge or retribution, note that the entire German nation – unless it proves through action that it is opposed to the Nazi regime – will have to take at least the moral responsibility for what happened in the concentration camps, what happened in the occupied countries, what happened wherever the Nazi regime was in place.
We were aware that there were Germans and Austrians in the camp; that there were some distinguished and selfless German individuals in the resistance, but nevertheless the larger part of those people, of the Germans, especially the criminals marked with green triangles, was intentionally used for the purpose of educating into bandits just like them the tens of thousands of political prisoners and of those taken from their homes by accident and delivered to the concentration camp. That is because the fact that evil paid in the camp, not good; that a prisoner was forced to murder another prisoner; that cases where a prisoner tortured another prisoner were supported and lauded; that a prisoner took food and bread from another prisoner; the fact that the only people capable of remaining on the surface of that terror were those who were willing to apply the same terror to their camp comrades, to their colleagues – that was not an accident. And the fact that at any given moment the man in charge was Höß or Liebehenschel was not a matter of the Political Department being made up of some people or other, but it was due to detailed, specific directives coming from Berlin, from the highest Nazi authorities, and those directives were dutifully followed. And even terror in the camp had periods when it diminished – it was not due to the merits of some individual or another, of one SS-man or another, but it was the instructions coming straight from Berlin, conditioned both by the general war situation in Europe and by what happened in the camp.
I know that several times the British radio talked about all those things that happened in the concentration camp almost immediately, the day after the events took place in the camp. I know that the British radio and the underground press published Höß’s death sentence, I know that such a sentence was sent to Höß – whether it was delivered I cannot know. I know that we considered the camp command to be guilty, since, as I said, during [the tenure] of the last commandant we learned that a specific man in a specific position could be more human, could influence even the events outlined in the regulations or in law. However, if Höß did not have any positive influence, he did not stop that terror, he even made the regulations at his disposal harsher, and went [so far] in his terror that even a special commission from Berlin decided he went too far in his terror and plundering of prisoner property, enriching himself at the expense of the prisoners and running camp policy on his own – that means that against the background of this camp system, this Nazi system which we had in the camp, the defendant’s profile is one of remarkable cruelty and ruthlessness. I know that for many months, maybe even years, there was a struggle between the Political Department, that is, the camp Gestapo, and the camp command. Thanks to that struggle we could play the command against the Gestapo and the Gestapo against the command in order to obtain better conditions in the camp. But one of the camp chiefs was the SS-man Wirths, who had enough of a sense for the real political situation that he knew Germany would lose the war and that he had to save his own skin; if he had so much influence over the new camp commandant, Liebehenschel, that he could bring about some easing of the terror; if we even take [into consideration] that there was a resistance movement in the camp and the people in that movement could influence events, we must conclude that defendant Höß could at least have been doing as much as we, regular prisoners, had managed in order to restrict the barbarism in the camp.
The resistance suffered – like I have said before – many losses. The first time when almost all of the officers of the first military organization were shot, the second time when resistance members were hanged in the last December before the evacuation, in 1944. Those people died almost all of the time – they died escaping, they died during armed work in Brzeszcze and other surroundings of the Auschwitz camp, when operating to recover captives, and when transporting those who had escaped. These losses were even more painful because we cannot calculate them even today, as many people were taken to places unknown, to other camps.
We conducted work of this kind since the very beginning, gathering documents, photographs of documents and records, smuggling entire books [with lists] of the deceased, photographs of the gassed and tortured, interrogating old prisoners who did not know if they would ever manage to get out of the camp and go to any kind of court and testify – as we meticulously gathered all that, we gathered it not only as an accusation against Höß, but against the system that produced Höß, and against the nation that produced Nazism.
We could, perhaps, go on at length about the specific escapes, specific acts of terror performed against the resistance members, however, I believe it is less important.
The fundamental detail for us, the political prisoners, in the times that we live in, is to state that we testify both against Höß as the man responsible for the Auschwitz camp, and against the system that produced Höß. [We also do it because] we are the witnesses to the morality of the nation that allowed for Hitler’s rise to power and for the development of his entire ideology.
Presiding judge: The witness has mentioned the inception of the organizations. Did they only include Poles, or activists of other nationalities as well?
Witness: Perhaps I have highlighted this matter poorly. At the very beginning, the camp was a Polish camp, that is, at the beginning, there were only Poles there. It was only later that foreigners started flowing in. Thanks to the camp being on Polish land, although annexed to the Reich, it was surrounded by Polish settlements and was the closest to the Generalgouvernement [non-annexed occupied Poland] – thanks to that, the Polish groups in the camp had the possibility to organize faster, that is, the Poles were the first to begin organizing underground work. This was the military group that was shot, with Gilewicz and the others.
Presiding judge: Could the witness name those people?
Witness: It was the group of Lisowski, Gilewicz, Dziama. The group focused around the military activists of the Union of Armed Struggle [Związek Walki Zbrojnej, ZWZ], who were not angling at any particularly political work – they wanted first and foremost to help activists and army men in the country. When the camp became an international camp – when Czech, Belgian, Slovak, Russian and other transports began to arrive – other organizations started to be formed, of course. At first it was conducted strictly in accordance with the models of underground work followed outside the camp. International groups began forming. Such groups were few in the beginning. They did not have contact [with one another]. They contacted incidentally. After the liquidation of the purely Polish military group and the elimination of Dubois, Barlicki, and Woźniakowski, who formed the Polish center, the situation was that there were a few Polish groups in the camp and a few such international groups at the same time. These groups were in contact and established communications, they created a common international organization independent from the already existing ones. There had already been our own, purely Polish military organization, made up of the survivors of that group of shot military men. There was an international organization, which was in contact with all camps and also in contact with Poland, with the country, headed by the main committee, made up of representatives of various nationalities. Besides the purely Polish military group, there were other national groups that arrived in the camp: the French – partisans, francs-tireurs, who arrived in a unified mass, who had their own group. Then there was the Russian group, among the prisoners of war, there were [also] a few military groups. The activists included Bondarenko, female Captain Okuzeva [?] and many others, who led their groups on specific occasions. Their work was facilitating escape and getting out to fighting formations.
In the spring of 1944, we can talk about the formation of an international Auschwitz resistance group, which initiated the creation of military organizations all over the camp, which united all the former military groups: Home Army [Armia Krajowa, AK], Peasants’ Battalions [Bataliony Chłopskie, BCh], People’s Army [Armia Ludowa, AL], former [Union] of Armed Struggle, French partisans, a group of the Jewish military organization that arrived in a mass transport from Łódź. We created a common Auschwitz Military Council [Rada Wojskowa Oświęcim]. Thanks to that we could develop a specific plan for our work, we even expected an intervention from Allied military units in the sense of air assistance in case of the expected extermination.
Presiding judge: The action was proceeding in a defensive direction rather than an offensive one? There was a mention of weapons. Were any specific actions taken?
Witness: The offensive action was prepared just in case there was an appropriate military situation. There were designs for forming some kind of assault groups that could forcibly break out of the camp. Beyond doubt a hundred, two hundred prisoners could have been able to get out. However, the consequences and the responsibility would fall on the rest of the prisoners. The terror would intensify, and the SS-men would decimate the entire camp. Specifically: [we were] asked [about this] by a group of the Sonderkommando working in Birkenau who knew they were doomed to extermination, because that was the fate of all Sonderkommando groups; they asked for permission to break out of the Birkenau camp. With great heartache, after some dramatic moments, we had to refuse, because that Birkenau camp breakout would end in an unprecedented massacre, and we were trying to keep people alive and the entire action was done to keep people alive to fight in the future. That was why we had armed that group with pistols and grenades in case of threat of death. There were attempts to get through the barbed wire, there was a firefight, our comrades threw grenades into the crematorium oven and blew it up, there was a fire, a commotion, shooting, they jumped at the wires, there was a tunnel that had been dug there, a [buried] barrel they went through. Unfortunately, the advantage of the SS-men was enormous, they fought until the end, there were SS casualties. I have recently learned that, in spite of the SS-men bragging that everyone was finished off, some prisoners broke through under arms. By accident, Allied planes overflew the camp at that time – the camp command could infer an effective cooperation between the resistance and that plane action. I personally do not know those who made it through. The publications of the Jewish historical commission list the names of people who supposedly made it all the way to Berlin.
Presiding judge: Were there other cases where you provided aid?
Witness: We had to wait until the front line came nearer, since a military action was equivalent to Auschwitz’s doom. Our activity was to facilitate escapes for people, there were even some partisan unit actions, some died during the actions of various transports, some joined partisan units [and] even took part in the Warsaw Uprising, e.g. Stefan Bratkowski. Those people got arms from us. It came to pass that the plans I mentioned, which courier Urban had on his person, fell into the hands of the Political Department. Command learned that there was danger of some kind of action in the camp and accelerated its liquidation. In the autumn of 1944, a group of Aryans left the camp, transferring to other camps, and two months later, in the last batch, all prisoners left it, only some few groups were left behind in Auschwitz. On several occasions I made contact, through Auschwitz, with the Brzeszcze base, which was managed heroically by the people there. Other military members, [both] foreign and Polish, were sent to other camps, in Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen, Mauthausen.
Presiding judge: Were the camp authorities aware of this, of the existence of this kind of organisation?
Witness: It is difficult to say.
Presiding judge: The witness has mentioned that Aryans were sent to other camps.
Witness: This happened because the front line was drawing near. There were military men, Poles and Russians, determined [to] break free as soon as the situation allowed.
Presiding judge: How many Russians were there?
Witness: They were Russian prisoners of war who had special numbers. In the first period there were 11 000 of them, only a hundred and some were left – the rest had been murdered in Auschwitz. Other Russians were those brought from forced labour or from Russia, Russian partisans, Russian military men brought from various prisoner of war camps.
Presiding judge: Were the communications the organisation had with outside factors mostly and fundamentally about providing information that arrived through radiotelegraphy from abroad?
Witness: No. It consisted first of all of gathering the maximum amount of records that might be (and, as it later turned out, were) destroyed by the SS. Furthermore, it consisted especially of informing the world about what was going on in the camp and vice versa – on receiving information from the world about what our possibilities and chances were. We received not only Polish and German press, but also French, Belgian, and Czech. We received information about people coming into the camp, just a note that on this or that day a group of people will arrive, including such and such activists.
Presiding judge: Perhaps the witness knows the case of Captain Nowotny, whose wife was gassed?
Witness: I know that case, but not in any detail. In general I can say that specific people in the camp also maintained contact with organisations. For example someone got into the camp, had no connections there, but had connections outside. The case of Captain Nowotny I know insofar that I learned about him after I left the camp, but I had not seen him in the camp, I only know that Captain Nowotny’s wife was gassed. There were various versions of how it happened. I was not there when the news was broadcast, so I would not be competent in that matter.
Presiding judge: The witness has mentioned, among other things, that he knew of a plan to destroy the camp and that that information was commented on abroad. Was the defendant complicit in that destruction plan, was he aware of that plan to destroy the camp with planes? Can the defendant be described as complicit here?
Witness: It can only be supposed that these are plans that were not born the day when the conversation took place, but that they were already in preparation for some time by then. If there were identical plans in other concentration camps, that means the commanders of those other camps had to cooperate with one another and develop those plans together, which became relevant especially when the Eastern Front drew near to any given concentration camp.
Presiding judge: The witness has said a characteristic thing here: that in regards to terror in the camp the defendant has essentially exceeded his prerogatives as an overseer – even under the Nazi system.
Witness: Yes, indeed, because some things that would go on in Auschwitz did not take place in the so-called old concentration camps, where the rules were unwritten, but known to all prisoners. For example, in no camp was it permitted to summarily shoot people without authorisation from Berlin, and yet it is a fact that the special commission – at least according to the reporting from our department, more specifically, from Sister Mary – uncovered, I believe in the defendant’s desk, proof of death sentences being carried out without consulting Berlin. This would prove that there were attempts to destroy the evidence of those people dying a non-natural death, namely, in place of sentences an official diagnosis was simply written down, saying that the prisoner was just sick and died.
Presiding judge: Did the commission arrive because it was informed by one of the organisations?
Witness: I do not know. I think it was simply because it was getting louder and louder around the world about Auschwitz and about the crew and SS command abusing their power not only with regards to terror, but also enriching themselves on prisoners’ property. We know of cases where they built mansions off that.
Presiding judge: I have a question for the defendant. Please rise. The defendant has heard the testimony of the witness about how the defendant had crossed even the limits of terror outlined by his own superiors in Berlin, that he had carried out death sentences without authorisation and permission of his authorities. Is this correct?
Defendant: No. As for this, I would like to make a statement. When my transfer was already underway, a special commission for military court arrived under Himmler’s orders. It was supposed to investigate not just Auschwitz, but all the camps, and it was supposed to find out if SS-men had committed any abuses with regards to post-Jewish property. At the same time, the commission was conducting an investigation against Grabner, whose successor alleged he had exceeded his prerogatives. This investigation against Grabner ran on for months, until the spring of 1945. All the relevant materials, all the death books, all the execution protocols in Auschwitz and in the Reich Main Security Office, and in the inspectorate of the concentration camp, were investigated. All the telegrams, all the wireless telegraph messages were investigated, and in the spring of 1945, in March, the investigation against Grabner had to be halted, as throughout the entirety of the investigation not even the slightest proof of Grabner exceeding his powers was uncovered. The Reich Main Security Office – it was Gruppenführer [general-level SS rank] Müller testified before the military court operating under the Reichsführer [rank and title of Heinrich Himmler as chief of the SS] that he had personally investigated those things on his own and had not found anything either. The Reichsführer explicitly demanded that the investigation, especially against Grabner, be conducted as strictly as possible, but it was really impossible to prove any wrongdoing on his part. Grabner, like all the heads of the Political Department in general, was, after all, essentially a Gestapo employee and only partially subordinate to the camp commandant.
I myself could not have issued any death sentences. What the witnesses here keeps repeating, namely, those death sentences, or orders of shooting, are all based on a misunderstanding. One must fundamentally differentiate between commands or orders of execution and protocols of execution. The commands and orders of execution arrived from Himmler, or from the Reich Main Security Office, or from another police office, or from the concentration camp inspectorate. I believe that there is not a single document to be found in Auschwitz that would be any kind of order for an execution and signed by me. I personally only commanded the executions for which orders came from Grabner or some other, equivalent office, and I signed those commands with my signature. As I know from the Reich Main Security Office, Himmler paid absolutely no mind to any news coming from abroad, even though the Reich Main Security Office wanted that for political reasons. Himmler refused to respond in any way to all those allusions.
My transfer to a higher office cannot be a result of those foreign reports, since that transfer happened for another reason. I myself have seen the correspondence between Pohl and Himmler. After his visit in August of 1944, Pohl reported to Himmler that he refuses personal responsibility for 140 000 prisoners and asks that the camp be split into three autonomous camps, and since there was no will to satisfy me with just a third of the camp, I was transferred to a superior office. If things were indeed the way the witnesses here presented them, if I was transferred there because of my actions as camp commandant, in that case it would not be right for me to be transferred to a higher office. Besides, it was Pohl who, after investigating those [actions], decided that I had not overstepped my competences in any measure. Besides, the shrinking of the camp had been planned since 1942. Already then there was an order to have all Poles, Russians, all Aryan prisoners in general withdrawn from Auschwitz and to make Auschwitz a purely Jewish camp.
It was only in spring of 1944 that it became possible to withdraw large contingents of prisoners from Auschwitz, as it was not until that period that the arms industry prepared labour camps for those prisoners to be placed in, it was also in that period that the translocation of arms production facilities to underground factories began.
The witnesses – former prisoners – cannot have any capacity to state if I had exceeded my competences as commandant, because Auschwitz had a unique status among all concentration camp and I was ordered to conduct many a thing that was unthought of in other camps. I do not believe any prisoners had access to secret orders that I was given, which I stored in a special safe in my office. What was brought to my apartment for signing and what was on my desk – those were completely unimportant signatures. They would arrive from all departments, including the Political Department as well, [they were] also protocols relating to executions, however, they influenced nothing aside from the time of the shooting or hanging, but in no way can we speak here of any order or command regarding an execution itself.
All the execution orders I received, be it through wireless telegraph or phone telegram, were presented to me personally by my aide-de-camp. And if sudden orders came in, even at night, which happened frequently, I would personally go to the room where those phone telegrams or wireless telegraph messages were sent and I received what was needed from there.
It is impossible for any prisoner to have been handed any of those orders, or to have seen them.
That is all.
Presiding judge: Has the witness heard what the defendant claims?
Witness: I am not saying that the resistance was in Höß’s safe, but some orders coming into the camp, be it direct for Höß or for the Political Department – whether we are talking about the famous argument between Berlin and Auschwitz over the hanging of those people who had escaped and who were hanged during the last December, in 1944, or others – the resistance knew about those.
Presiding judge: That means such things were known to the organisation?
Witness: Obviously, not all secrets could be intercepted, but we had the information we needed to learn if Höß had broken the regulations and overstepped the prerogatives he had or not. That we did not do it in a way that would allow us to know the results of the investigations of the Berlin special commission? That was not possible for any member of the resistance, especially since this was not information provided by the prisoners, who could have been spreading rumours that way, but we received [it] from people such as the SS doctor Wirths, who informed us in this way.
I have not claimed at all to have seen death sentences signed by defendant Höß, nevertheless I would like to ask: if the regulations followed by Höß allowed certain things, then why were they not applied by his successor, Liebehenschel?
Prosecutor Cyprian: Considering the statement of defendant Höß, the prosecution requests permission to ask him a few questions. Afterwards, while having questions for the witness, it would also like to refer to what defendant Höß has stated.
Presiding judge: Perhaps after the break.
Prosecutor Cyprian: We will be able to address questions to the witness after the break, but to defendant Höß right now.
(After the break.)
Presiding judge: Are there any more questions for the witness?
Prosecutor Cyprian: Yes.
Presiding judge: Please bring in the witness.
Prosecutor Cyprian: The testimony of the witness and of others tells us that there were many nationalities in Auschwitz. Did the camp authorities institute any special policy towards nationalities?
Witness: It was there in the sense that I have already mentioned. Firstly, the camp authorities always tried to play one nationality against another. Secondly, there was a certain gradation of terror, meaning that the terror in the period when Auschwitz was an international camp was directed mostly against Jews, then against Poles, then against intelligentsia groups and resistance activists from various countries.
Prosecutor Cyprian: Did the camp authorities make criminals of one nationality kapos and block supervisors in kommandos of other nationalities?
Witness: Always and in principle.
Prosecutor Cyprian: Were those people actually in the camp for criminal reasons?
Witness: There were criminal elements or people who wore red triangles, that is political prisoners, but ones who had been in the camp for a long time and thus broken; they had done so much for the Germans that [they] could make them kapos and block supervisor functions without worry.
Prosecutor Cyprian: Was there any “bad blood” between nationalities because of that?
Witness: Yes, there was.
Prosecutor Cyprian: How did it manifest?
Witness: It manifested first of all in intentional stoking of anti-Semitism in the camp, in tolerating all actions of Aryan prisoners against Jews, and in inspiring group and national hatred in this manner as well. Let’s say for example that the Czechs disliked the Poles, so it was intentionally fomented, which then had repercussions and still has them today; the French, who had only seen a kapo for the first time when they ran into a Pole kapo, formed a bad opinion about Poles, not considering that it was the category of the most criminal element.
Prosecutor Cyprian: Did the underground organisation in the camp manage to partially resolve that situation?
Witness: Yes, we managed to explain it. It was due perhaps not to the organisation alone, but also the camp authorities, which tried intentionally to man all kapos and block supervisor positions with Poles, or at least the people they trusted, or such German Communists who passed their camp test. Because the camp authorities wanted to remedy the situation, and, moreover, it was the period when the highest German authorities considered it prudent to save the Eastern Front, so they organised brigades of criminals who were sent to the front.
Prosecutor Cyprian: Were there instances of lynching of such kapos?
Witness: There were. In the first period, where it carried great consequences, it was usually avoided. Lynching was only undertaken when a man was already in the hands of the prisoners. If the bloodiest criminals and murderers had the misfortune of falling ill, they usually would not get out of the hospital, as the political prisoners in the Rewir typically looked to that. Similarly, if such a kapo was sent to a transport, the prisoners in the transport train carriages would receive an order to lynch. The lynchings were most frequently performed during transports.
Prosecutor Cyprian: I have no further questions.
Presiding judge: Does the defence have questions?
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: Yes. Since the witness has presented the entirety of the resistance movement in Auschwitz, and this matter was not explained, I would like to ask how does the witness reason why so many people survived Auschwitz and what was the cause of Auschwitz itself being saved?
Witness: A very minuscule number survived. This is, in my opinion, an indisputable fact. If we take the number of Auschwitz prisoners – not in proportion to the regular prisoners, that is, those who had been tattooed and noted in the records, but in proportion to the entire number of the prisoners who went through the camp – the number of we who have survived is minuscule. The fact that so many of those who had been in the camp, Poles, survived, is attributable not just to the organisation on the inside, but also aid from the outside, especially packages. It was some very valuable aid, because they could no longer be overcome by hunger. Besides that, it must be attributed to aid that the prisoners would receive from various groups and organisations who looked after them. Finally, it happened because we would place people in evacuation transports leaving the camp if we knew that a transport was headed for a less dangerous camp – and there were camps where the terror was not as intense – for a camp where there were a lot of known people working for the resistance, then those most exhausted would be added to such a transport, either replacing others or just added to the transport lists.
That Auschwitz itself was saved – this is a historical fact – happened by accident. Namely, when the Soviet front was approaching the camp itself, all prisoners were marked for elimination. An overwhelming majority of them was sick. The sick were already lined up on a street in the Auschwitz camp and SS-men with automatic weapons were ready to execute the order. The order was to be carried out at, say, five o’clock, but before five o’clock a motorcycle courier arrived – but I do not know that, I was not present there, I know this from accounts. The SS-men were supposed to leave at seven o’clock, after the extermination was complete, but the attack of the Soviet Army caused the last evacuation train to leave not at seven, but at five, so those SS-men standing by for extermination were loaded onto the train and hauled away.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: So it happened thanks to the lightning-fast operations of the Soviet Army.
Was there, in the resistance movement, due to the stockpiling of – insignificant, I presume – quantities of weaponry and due to the anticipated action of complete extermination of Auschwitz, was there an intention of armed resistance in the final moment, should there have been no other option?
Witness: It was expected for a moment when the political and military situation would not allow for a joint action, but it was clear to all of us that there was a plan for the complete liquidation of the camp and that at that point we were ready to defend ourselves regardless of the fact that there would be consequences for the people, the so-called innocents, not involved in that kind of work.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: Now, for the witness’s testimony regarding the defendant himself. The witness has mentioned a special commission. The defendant has presented some explanation in this regard. I seek to determine if the witness rules out the commission potentially arriving in Auschwitz as a result, perhaps, of the defendant’s intervention. Does the witness rule out such a possibility – that is, that [the defendant petitioned] for a commission to be sent to investigate the SS-men?
Witness: It was impossible for us to have known why the commission arrived. I quoted where I got that information from, namely, from a source close to the camp command, that is, doctor Wirths, who told me that [the commission came] not as a result of the commandant’s intervention, but due to theft of prison property through which the SS-men enriched themselves, and due to Europe’s alarm at the terror in Auschwitz. Whether or not it was so I do not know, since, as the defendant has stated, the commission dragged on until the spring of 1945.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: Did Wirths claim during the conversation that he had heard it from some other people?
Witness: I will not be able to answer this question, but I believe the Austrian witnesses who will testify will have first-hand information about this.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: The witness has testified that Höß’s successor, Liebehenschel, forbade the Political Department from issuing death sentences?
Witness: Liebehenschel forbade any SS action to be undertaken at all without consulting him, meaning that kapos or SS-men could not beat prisoners up without permission. Not just shoot, but even beat them.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: I thought the witness said that [Liebehenschel] had forbidden the Political Department from issuing death sentences?
Witness: I do not remember if I formulated it that way, but I meant in that case that for two or three months the Political Department would not appear in the camp, that all agents of the Political Department, with aid of lists presented to Liebehenschel, were sent away.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: Is the witness aware that the Political Department, as Gestapo, had the right to issue death sentences?
Witness: Of course it had the right to issue death sentences.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: The witness has said that the relations in the camp improved after the arrival of the second commandant. This point was touched upon several times. I understood [that] as follows – please correct me if I wrote it down incorrectly, or if I misunderstood – that the second commandant arrived with a special order to relax the regime.
Witness: I claim that the regime was relaxed both because of directives that the next commandant had received from Berlin and because of Liebehenschel following regulations, real or non-existent, that is, because of the attitude he personally adopted.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: Does the witness, who was there and has seen [it] personally, believe that Höß’s second stay in Auschwitz, when he arrived, was [a period of] tightening the regime, or was the course just like the second commandant made [it], that is, relaxed?
Witness: The relaxing of the regime was short-lived, it did not survive until the end of the camp, as the abuses started happening again in 1944; they were applied under different forms, but they were applied. If someone was sentenced to 25 lashes with a stick, then the Berlin note was followed very precisely and meticulously, the subject would be given a medical examination to see if they could survive that punishment; this procedure was observed, it had not been observed under Höß.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: But when Höß was there for the inspection, was the second system in effect?
Witness: It was around the end of that relaxing of the regime.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: What was the attitude of German prisoners to Polish prisoners in Auschwitz?
Witness: Please specify, because I cannot generalise.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: I do not mean Austrians or Czechs, but Germans from the Reich.
Witness: They were divided into separate groups based on their crimes.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: I mean the attitude of German political prisoners to Polish political prisoners in the camp.
Witness: I cannot pass a generalising judgment here, because there were some German individuals cooperating with the resistance movement, but there were also people who had been in concentration camps for 10 or 12 years, had broken down and not only did not cooperate with the resistance, but helped the SS-men.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: I mean less the resistance movement and more their behaviour towards their fellow prisoners. Was there any will from them to aid Poles, or did they still deride them?
Witness: There was a group of German political prisoners who, since they were Reichsdeutsches [ethnic Germans from the Reich], had additional privileges, especially a greater ability to live in the camp. They had various functions, they had been in other German camps and knew members of the command, who got them into better kommandos. That group isolated itself in that way, they did not occupy themselves with the fate of the broader group of prisoners. But most German political prisoners were quite friendly towards Poles.
Presiding judge: There are no more questions? The witness is excused.