Warsaw, 10 October 1946. Acting Investigative Judge Halina Wereńko, delegated to the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw, interviewed Dr. Stanisław Konopka, a former prisoner of the Gross-Rosen concentration camp, prisoner number 27872, as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Stanisław Józef Konopka |
| Date of birth | 24 May 1896 in Pilzno, Kraków Voivodeship |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Marital status | married |
| Place of residence | Kujawska 3/39 Street, Warsaw |
| Education | Doctor of Medicine |
| Occupation | doctor |
On the night of January 9 to January 10 1943, I was taken from my home in Warsaw by the German police and placed in Pawiak prison. Even now, I don’t know the reason for my arrest. I only know that mass arrests were being carried out that night in Warsaw as a repressive measure after a couple of Germans had been killed, and that during the interrogation I was asked if I was a member of the Polish Underground. Ten days later, I was in a transport to Majdanek camp, where I stayed until the camp’s liquidation in 1944, and then, in one of the last transports, I was sent to the concentration camp in Gross-Rosen. I stayed there until 9 February 1944, receiving the number 27 872.
In Gross-Rosen, the concentration camp was connected with a stone quarry works (extracting and processing rocks). Besides that, different worksite existed in the camp, such as a cotton mill, a Siemens outpost, etc. During the last months of the camp’s functioning, when there was no other work, the prisoners were engaged in moving rocks from one place to another. Dr. Antoni Hałgas could provide details of the conditions in the camp at its beginnings, as he had been staying there since December 1941, a period when Gross-Rosen was one of the most severe concentration camps. Dr. Hałgas is presently residing in Kraków, where he will have soon completed his medical degree. From my arrival until the end, the camp’s commandant was Hassebroek, an SS Obersturmführer or Sturmbahnführer. His deputy, the so-called Lagerführer, was Ernstberger. They both rarely showed in the camp and didn’t torture the prisoners on their own.
What was the area of their competence, I do not know. The actual ruler of the camp was the Rapportführer, SS officer Helmut Eschner – the evil spirit of the camp, who was personally sending prisoners to penal blocks, carrying out inspections in the barracks and plotting against the prisoners to find excuses for torture. He was the one responsible for tightening the policies towards the inmates. There were rumors, which I didn’t have the chance to verify, that he was personally murdering the prisoners. Eschner was a man of medium height with the thin face of a degenerate and the rasping voice of a drunkard. He was on duty until the camp ceased to exist.
I don’t know the surnames of the prior camp authorities. I heard that the camp had been started by Thumann, whom I knew from Majdanek.
At the time of my arrival, the number of prisoners was around 12 thousand men, not including the subcamps, whose number was initially 40 and then grew to 80.
The details about the satellite camps can be provided by a pharmacist, Władysław Kotula (residing in Jabłonna Pomorska, Dworcowa Street), who delivered medicaments to the subcamps.
Having arrived in Gross-Rosen with a transport from Majdanek consisting of 1.5 thousand inmates, we were placed in two barb-wired blocks. During the first days of our stay, we slept on the floor, with 40 centimeters of space for each person. After ten days, we were given some old pallets swarming with lice and fleas. Food rations were provided according to the camp’s standards. We got half a liter of coffee for breakfast, a soup from herbs for dinner, which included tiny pieces of meat twice a week, and 150 grams of a suspicious-looking sausage for supper. Throughout the quarantine, a number of typhoid fever cases were diagnosed and the sick were placed in the camp hospital, the so-called rewir. When the quarantine was over, the majority of the transport, about 800 people I would estimate, were moved to another camp (in Litomierzyce – as I learned later, when I met them on 13 February 1945 after I came to Litomierzyce with a cargo of prisoners from Gross-Rosen. Only 250 out of the 800 remained alive). The remaining prisoners of the Gross-Rosen camp were assigned to different blocks, I and a couple of other doctors were sent to the rewir. Due to the fact that I’m mostly familiar with the camp infirmary system, I will limit my testimony mainly to that topic.
I am enclosing with the file a brochure that I drew up, entitled “ Rewir in Gross-Rosen”, wherein I have tried to describe the German rewir authorities and the aspect of mortality.
At the time of my arrival the rewir had 800 patients and only three doctors, including two Poles, that is, Dr. Mianowski (who had graduated from the Lwów medical faculty in 1940), Dr. Zegleń, and a French doctor, Lafont. The Lublin transport had twelve doctors and we were all assigned to the rewir.
I recall the following names of my colleagues:
Prof. Mieczysław Michałowicz (currently residing in Warsaw)
Dr. Jan Nowak (currenly employed in the Pediatric Clinic in Warsaw, Litewska Street) Dr. Władysław Ostaszewski (passed away two months ago in Piotrków) Dr. Romuald Sztaba (currently residing in Sosnowiec)
Dr. Gluckner (residing in Czech)
Dr. Doktór (still abroad),
Dr. Kosibowicz (currenly residing in Dąbrowa),
Zembrzuski (residing in Olsztyn),
Ryszard Hanusz (abroad),
Witold Kopczyński (Gdańsk),
Roman Pawłowski (currently staying in Poland, but I don’t know the address)
A Lagerarzt [camp doctor] was the head of the rewir. From May 1940 to December 1941, Dr. Entress, a pupil of Poznań University, whose father was a storekeeper in Raczyńscy’s Library, performed this function. From 15 December to 30 December 1941 Dr. Babor was the head of the rewir, from January to February 1942 – Dr. Jobst, from June 1942 to December 1943 – Dr. Schmidt, then Dr. Entress again, and eventually Dr. Rindfleisch and Dr. Thilo. Dr. Entress was a doctor in Auschwitz in the meantime, and – according to what I’d heard from my colleagues – performed experiments on the sick and personally picked prisoners for the crematorium. In the Gross-Rosen camp, none of the doctors listed above tortured the prisoners, nor did they take care of them in any way whatsoever. They popped in every second day and didn’t do much for the sick. There were no experimental blocks on the camp’s premises. The prisoners were sent to the crematorium, where phenol injections would be given, only based on a “sentence”, that is an order from the Gestapo, usually from Radom (see p. 8 of my brochure).
A secondary assistance to the Lagerazt was provided by the SDG (Sanitäts Dienst Grad), that is, SS men in the sanitary service. I remembered the following names:
Scheffer, a Berliner; appearance: short, wearing glasses, square face;
Beterek, born in Strzygoń;
Müller, aged 50, medium-height;
Biderman;
Vlossak.
The SS men didn’t show any interest in the patients. They oversaw roll calls in the morning and in the evening, picked up medicines and food from the infirmary kapo. The SS men usually stole food, and that’s the main harm they caused; they didn’t beat the ill.
The whole hospital management – food and medicine supplies, room for the patients, etc. – didn’t depend on the Lagerazt but on the Lager Kapo. At the time of my arrival this function was performed by the cruel Georg Prill, whom I describe in my brochure (p. 9), a German criminal prisoner. His deputy was Rudolf Langer, a pederast (p. 10). The rewir had quotas for more provisions for the sick, but given the thievery of the kapos and the block seniors dependent on them, the patients received the same rations as the usual working prisoners.
It was common knowledge that the block seniors bartered bread. The block seniors’ surnames are hard to determine, because they often used fake surnames or were known only by first name. For example “Józef” in block I, born in Czech; Ziege in block II, supposedly his surname was Vernike; Władysław Nuchowicz, a Pole in block III (the diarrhea block), about whom Dr. Hanusz (still abroad) could say more, as well as Dr. Antoni Jankowski and Dr. Mazurek. Block V was covered by Maul – a German. Block VI (the surgical block) – “Kurt”. At the time of my arrival the infirmary’s block senior, Gustaw Schutzendubel, became a pharmacist, then a nurse. The worst among the block seniors were Nuchowicz, who made the patients lie on the bare floor, and “Kurt”. All the block seniors would steal food and beat prisoners. They were usually the senior prisoners, who had a story of “meritorious” cooperation with the German authorities. Every day, when on duty, kapo Prill assaulted the patients while they were being admitted into the infirmary, beating them up so that only the ones who couldn’t walk remained. Reportedly, when the mildly sick went to the ambulance after the evening roll call, Prill – who demanded the ambulance operate for only two hours – would throw them out, striking blows. After Prill left, such spontaneous acts of cruelty didn’t happen anymore. However, as I mentioned before, based on the Gestapo rules, the prisoners were sent to the crematorium, where they were injected with phenol. It would happen more than a dozen times a week, and there were times when 30-40 people were killed at the same time. The injections were given by Hauptscharführer Dehnel from Silesia, an NCO of the German sanitary service. Appearance: stout, short (160 centimetres height), face plump and wide, 50-something years old. Apart from that function, Dehnel was only interested in getting food and clothes from the kapos that were meant for the prisoners (see p. 7 of the brochure).
I do not recall the date, but sometime in autumn 1944 SS men announced that the patients seriously ill with tuberculosis could go to a sanatorium with very good conditions. 150 patients were selected and taken in an unknown direction, and there was never any sign of them after, none of them were ever seen again either by me or any of my colleagues.
At the time of my arrival there were 800 sick people in the rewir, in the last months of the camp’s functioning the number reached 2.2 thousand sick.
According to the camp’s regulations, the rewir could only hold up to 10 per cent of the general camp population, but it was closer to 20 per cent in the late period. Because of the overflow, the authorities were exerting pressure on the doctors to discharge the patients who weren’t gravely ill. Eventually the doctors obtained the right to give sick leaves to those mildly ill. Then the function of Block Artzts was created – a doctor was assigned to each of the blocks, who evaluated whether the prisoner’s condition allowed him to work on a specific day. I am enclosing data on the mortality in VI surgical ward in the brochure attached to the file on pp. 14-15. I took the numbers directly from the authentic hospital record of block VI.
Since I was responsible for the ambulance, I was the one to sign patients in and out, so I can estimate that on average the mortality in the whole of the rewir equaled 20 people a day until July 1944, that is, until the food parcels from prisoners’ homes ceased coming. After that the mortality was 80 deceased a day.
There were prisoners of over ten nationalities staying in the camp, 70 per cent were Polish. The Germans, who made up about 5 per cent, were treated most fairly. New transports came in almost every day, not always of similar numbers. The most common were the transports from Radom and Warsaw. I do not recall the dates of arrivals nor the number of people.
By the end of September 1944 a transport from Warsaw’s Old Town came. I was a witness to a speech given to those people by Eschner, who consoled them by promising that they were safe, that they would get rest and be appointed to farms the next day. In reality, the transport got robbed completely and was deported from Gross-Rosen. The SS men were saying that they hadn’t gotten their hands on so much jewelry and money for a long time.
The conditions in the subcamps were varying. Wrocław [Breslau] camp was extremely hard, with the so-called revolver spray painting. The prisoners slept in the same room where the work was done, breathing in the air poisoned by the paint fumes. That’s why usually out of a 200-person transport sent from Gross-Rosen, after two weeks most of the people would come back to the rewir in a terrible condition.
Most of the unnatural deaths centered around the so-called penal company. For minor and major offenses, the prisoners were directed to the penal company situated in a separate block, where Kurt Vogel – a German criminal prisoner, tall (177 cm) and slim, with dark hair and a thin, pale face – was the block senior (Blockaltester der Straf Kompanie). I had access to the block as an ambulance doctor, because the prisoners of the penal company were not allowed to come for advice to the rewir. Only at the end of camp’s existence were they allowed to consult the doctors once a week, on Sunday. Other people didn’t have access to the penal company. The penal company got up an hour before other prisoners, that, is at 3 a.m.; at 6 a.m. they set out for the quarry work. For a long time, they were expected to literally run while working. They worked until suppertime – six p.m. in summer, three p.m. in winter, including a one-hour meal break. After coming back from the quarry, the company had to work for two more hours in the camp. They were given half of the standard rations and were especially intimidated by the block senior. It’s enough to say that prisoners preferred heavy labor over staying within the block. Vogel was a sophisticated criminal, he employed a method of punching in the stomach, for example. There were incidents when a person absolutely well one day would die the next. The penal company consisted of around 50-60 people. Of course, Vogel never hit anybody in my presence. I came in to assist an SS man in changing wound dressings and I saw marks of cuffs tightened around hands and legs, which – after dressing the wound – were put on again. I heard the prisoners would be ordered to stand at attention for a few days and get splashed with water if they fainted, and then they were set on their feet again. More about the penal company could be testified to by Dr. Bołądź, presently residing in France, who was in Vogel’s block for some time, and so was Krzysztof Radziwiłł. Most of the people there were Poles. It sometimes happened that some of the people from Polish transports were sent directly to the penal company.
During my stay two public executions by hanging were carried out: of Lageraltester Kajzer’s killers, and of a young Russian in the German service who called an SS man a traitor.
The camp’s evacuation
Starting from October 1944 the camp began to expand. The transports were arriving often, and the general number of prisoners rose to 40 thousand. From December that year Gross-Rosen became a temporary camp. There was a huge inflow and outflow of transports. The inmates from Auschwitz were forced to walk on foot, arriving in terrible state, 80 per cent qualifying for the rewir, 60 per cent not reaching their destination at all. The transports departing from Gross-Rosen were also driven to the West, on foot. The last transport, on the day of 9 February 1945, which I found myself in, was dispatched by train. It carried a cargo of more than two thousand people, including the mildly ill from rewir. The severely ill, numbering 800, stayed in the camp’s premises, along with Dr. Józef Fritz.
I could not determine what their fate was. I went to Gross-Rosen last year and learned that the surgical and the trachoma wards had been burned down, I did not find out about the fate of the patients, however.
My transport was supposed to reach Flossenburg via Dresden, but eventually it landed in Litomierzyce, where the Soviet army freed us.
I am listing below the surnames and addresses of the prisoners from Gross-Rosen known to me: Dr. Kazimierz Biały, a doctor from the rewir II;
Dr. Walenty Popek from the surgical ward, where he was the head of laryngology section; Dr. Kotarbiński, an ambulance optician;
Dr. Pieszek from tuberculosis block V;
Dr. Bernadzikowski from surgical block VI;
Medics acting as nurses:
Kaliński,
Kazimierz Martynowicz (Kraków University),
Pilecki.
Block doctors:
Dr. Szadurski,
Dr. Mazurek,
Stanisław Różycki (residing in Piotrków, Słowackiego 22 Street).
Torliński, a dentist who treated the SS men, could provide more information concerning the
camp’s authorities.
The report was hereby ended and read out.