Radziechowy, 30 August 1947
Jan Klis, Radziechowy 672
Żywiec District
To
The Commission for the Investigation
of German Crimes attached to the District
Court in Kraków
Regarding the public display of photographs of SS men from the former personnel of the Auschwitz concentration camp, I report that, while I was a prisoner there between 24 February 1941 and 30 September 1944, in 1943 and 1944 I knew a German called Willy Büllow with the rank of SS-Rottenführer, who was assigned as a guard to Budy, a branch of the Auschwitz camp, which was a farm formed on land left behind by displaced Poles.
The then-commandant of work groups in Budy, SS-Oberscharführer Glaue, would assign Willy Büllow as commandant of the guards or as a guard to the work group where he wanted to obtain the highest work efficiency. In addition to a rifle, Büllow would also carry a thick stick, which he used for beating prisoners without any reason. He abused them in many ways and it was obvious that he really enjoyed it.
For example, when working on the construction of a drainage ditch, the prisoners used a beam as a footbridge from one bank to the other. Willy Büllow called over an elderly prisoner, who was weak and came from Hungary. He ordered him to hang a piece of turf around his neck. Then, he ordered the biggest and the heaviest prisoner, who was Greek, to climb the Hungarian prisoner’s shoulders. Büllow made them cross the footbridge, which was 18 centimeters wide, to the other bank of the ditch, which was about six meters deep. While they were trying to cross the footbridge, both prisoners fell into the 1.5-meter ditch, full of mud. They had to repeat this several times, but every time they fell into the muddy ditch. Then, Büllow ordered the Hungarian prisoner to lie on the ground, while the Greek prisoner was told to lie on him and simulate copulation movements.
He made them do it in front of a female prisoners’ work group consisting of 200 people.
Another time, he gave an order to pour mud over the slope of a ditch and made a prisoner slide down on his stomach into the ditch, lie in the ditch on his stomach and back, do somersaults, sit in the ditch, and hit the mud with a wooden pole. Since the ditch was filled with so-called quicksand, which is water mixed with sand, when the prisoner came out of the ditch he looked like a gypsum statue, covered in mud and blinded.
Büllow did not see prisoners, men or women, as people, and in conversations with other SS men, he treated them as mere objects.
Willy Büllow spread terror among the prisoners in Budy, the Auschwitz camp’s branch.