On 29 September 1947 in Kraków, a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, Municipal Judge Dr. Stanisław Żmuda, acting upon written request of the first prosecutor of the Supreme National Tribunal, this dated 25 April 1947 (file no. NTN 719/47) and in accordance with the provisions of and procedure provided for under the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293) in connection with Article 254, 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, interviewed the former inmate of the Auschwitz concentration camp, named below, as a witness, who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Irena Dubas |
| Date and place of birth | 19 October 1914 , Nowy Sącz |
| Parents’ names | Piotr and Natalia, née Brudna |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Marital status | unmarried |
| Occupation | Social Insurance office worker |
| Place of residence | Kraków, aleja Słowackiego 34, flat 8 |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
I was imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp as Polish political prisoner no. 6794 from 27 April 1942 up until the evacuation of the camp, that is, 18 January 1945, when we were transported to the camp in Ravensbrück. From Ravensbrück, I was transferred to the camp in Malchow, situated some 60 kilometers from Szczecin, and after almost a five-week stay there, I was sent to the camp in Buchenwald.
I worked in various kommandos in the Auschwitz camp: in the water kommando (Wasserkommando) in the Harmense subcamp, in Gärtnerei [garden farm], in the kitchen for prisoners in Birkenau, and at the experimental plant station in Rajsko, this from 11 June 1943 until the very end.
Since I was incarcerated in the above named concentration camps, I knew by name and by sight – and as a result recognized during the confrontation on 25 September 1947 in the Central Prison in Kraków – the following SS women.
I met Luise Danz in February and March 1945 in Malchow, where she held the post of Rapportführerin, as she organized and ran roll calls and assemblies. She was one of the exceptionally cruel SS women. She was a terror of the camp, always walking whip in hand and beating prisoners for no reason, as if out of habit. She reported on prisoners and carried out wearisome searches. I would like to add that, at the time, the women imprisoned in the Malchow camp suffered from great hunger. The daily food ration consisted of a slice of bread and some watery soup made of potato peelings, without salt. No wonder that the prisoners swelled from hunger and quickly became wasted [muzułmaniały, camp jargon], and there were many cases of hunger typhus. Although the prisoners lived in such harsh conditions, Danz tormented them without a touch of humanity; she must have been interested in finishing off as many prisoners as possible.
It was “thanks” to Danz that during the transport by train from Malchow to Buchenwald, which took some three days, we didn’t receive anything to eat or drink, even though there were food supplies for both the SS personnel and the prisoners stored in one of the cars. Danz, however, didn’t allow for the distribution of food among the prisoners before the transport set off from Malchow.
After we arrived in the camp in Malchow, it was also Danz who took our warm clothes away and didn’t hand out any blankets, so for the first few days we had to sleep in the cold without anything to cover ourselves with, two or three prisoners to one pallet. All these torments were the result of Danz’s orders.
I knew Maria Mandl as an Oberaufseherin [senior overseer] and Lagerführerin [head of the camp] in the women’s camp in Birkenau. She was a sadistic type who tormented the prisoners whose work she was overseeing and who made their stay in the camp even more burdensome by introducing various regulations. Mandl took part in all selections for gassing. She reported on the prisoners, as a result of which women were punished with confinement in the bunker or assignment to the punitive unit (SK [Strafkompanie]). She meted out many ad hoc punishments, for instance exhausting “exercises”, so-called “frog-jumps” or kneeling on coarse gravel with bare knees and with one’s arms raised and weighted down with stones.
Falling ill with typhoid fever meant death by gassing, and therefore the prisoners never admitted that they were ill, and if they chanced upon Polish doctors, they pretended to suffer from something else, for instance, flu or pneumonia.
I remember one of the disturbing searches conducted by Mandl with her camp retinue in Rajsko, which lasted from 5.00 a.m. until almost midnight. During this search Mandl literally went mad. She ordered that beds and entire blocks be turned upside down, and the prisoners were deprived of all their belongings, including food packages. She also beat up prisoner Genowefa Ułan and damaged her jaw. She kicked her and pushed her into hot soup spilled from a caldron.
I met Therese Brandl as an SS-woman employed in Bekleidungskammer [clothing storeroom] at the time when I was employed in the prisoners’ kitchen. Both I and other prisoners employed in the kitchen had great difficulty in obtaining any clothes or underwear from the storeroom which Brandl was supervising, and all the clothes that we received were full of lice. I heard from my fellow inmates that Brandl had the habit of hitting them with her hand, but I never witnessed such an incident.
Hildegard Lächert: I would come across her for about two months in 1944 in Rajsko, where she served as an SS-Aufseherin and lived in a little house for the Aufseherin. She was known for receiving SS men in her house. Due to these visits, she neglected her essential professional duties and disrupted the order of the day for the prisoners, as we often had to wait for two or three hours for the roll call. We used to send the block leader to fetch her, but then Lächert would explain that the delay was due to the fact that she had to receive guests on the orders from the head of Landwirtschaft [agricultural department], Caesar. She was completely unpredictable, and as a result she was very dangerous to the prisoners.
When I worked in Rajsko, I met Orlowski, who lived there with Aufseherin Herta but didn’t perform any functions in the camp in Rajsko. Orlowski would often come to our kommando during its working hours, and I often saw that she was drunk and that she wore heavy makeup. The prisoners nicknamed her “Dragon” due to her towering height. Orlowski would regularly beat prisoners with her hands, without paying any heed to where her blows landed and carried out irksome searches. I remember how Orlowski and Herta once stormed into a barrack after the evening roll call and, having noticed a pot with hot water in which a prisoner was cooking potatoes, poured this hot water on the prisoner’s head, causing her severe burns.
At this point the interview and the report were concluded, read out and signed.