Lublin, 28 November 1947
Zdzisław Sikorski
Lublin, Kościuszki Street 8, flat 4
former prisoner no. 44048 at the Gusen concentration camp
Number of the card of
the Association of Former Prisoners of the Concentration Camps, Lublin Section: 227
To the Prosecutor’s Office
of the Supreme National Tribunal
in Kraków
As for many years (from April 1940 to May 1945) I was a political prisoner at the concentration camps of Dachau and Mauthausen-Gusen, I feel obliged to state as follows: in the report about the Kraków trial against the Hitlerite war criminals I found the surname of Herman Kirschner, Hauptscharführer, one of the accused. In 1940, I met an Oberscharführer of the same name and surname on the premises of the concentration camp in Gusen. At the beginning of 1941 he was allegedly transferred to Poland, as the camp rumor had it – to Auschwitz, from where he fled in the autumn of 1944 at the advance of the Soviet troops. Then, he came back to the Gusen concentration camp as a Hauptscharführer and soon took the position of Arbeitsdienstführer [work manager]. When he held this post, he tormented the prisoners during their work. I remember him well from that period, since I myself received a beating from him on several occasions.
One of his greatest crimes, which I personally witnessed at the time, was the murder of two of my friends in the winter of 1944/1945. One of them was a teacher by profession and the other was a seminary student; both were no older than 30 years old. Unfortunately, I don’t remember their surnames, but I well recall the case itself. They were murdered for having a map of the Reich with the front line of the Allied forces marked on it. Kirscher himself interrogated them; he kept them for three days by the wire and tortured them by beating, kicking, and pushing them on the wires; finally, when they were already unconscious, he personally dragged them to the Revier [camp hospital], where they were murdered with gasoline injections.
Description of Kirschner: 1.8–1.9 m tall, bulky, elongated face with protruding cheekbones. Age: 25–32 years old.
As I learned from my friends who remained on the camp premises longer than I after we had been liberated, Kirschner was recognized in Linz by a former inmate at Gusen, Jerzy Lewandowski, and arrested by the American gendarmerie and transferred to Dachau.
Since the defendant Kirschner from the Kraków trial doesn’t plead guilty, I feel all the more obliged to submit the above information to the Prosecutor’s Office, since it might be of help in confirming his identity and detecting the crimes he had committed in the Gusen camp.
I can repeat the above under oath.