Kraków, 24 April 1945. At 9.00 a.m., Kraków District Investigative Judge Jan Sehn, a member of the Commission for the Investigation of German-Nazi Crimes in Oświęcim, at the request, in the presence, and with the participation of a member of said Commission, Edward Pęchalski, Deputy Prosecutor of the Kraków District Court, in accordance with the procedure outlined in Art[icle] 254, as per Art[icles] 107, 115, 138, 230 and the following of the Code of Criminal Procedure, heard prisoner no. 138,828 of the Auschwitz concentration camp report to the Commission Office and testify as follows:
| Name and surname | Otto Wolken |
| Date and place of birth | 29 April 1903 in Vienna |
| Names of parents | Joachim and Teodora née Beck |
| Profession | doctor |
| Religious affiliation | Mosaic |
| Nationality and citizenship | Austrian |
| Place of residence before the arrest | Spiegelgasse 2, Vienna |
| Current place of residence and employment | hospital of the former Auschwitz concentration camp |
As I have testified before as part of my extensive explanations made before the Commission, I was arrested by the Gestapo on 21 March 1938 in Traisen. I was held in the following prisons and camps: Sankt Pölten, Vienna, Sankt Pölten again, Stein an der Donau, Mauthausen, Stein again, Papenburg, Stein for the third time, and Zweibrücken. I left Zweibrücken with a transport on 21 May 1943. The transfer took 23 days, so after 20 June 1943 I arrived at the Auschwitz camp. Here I was placed in block 8, room 2. This was the quarantine block. Freiseisen was the blokowy [prisoner in charge of the block], and the block clerk was a one-armed Pole whose name I do not remember; the room senior was Hans, a Reichsdeutsch [ethnic German] whose last name I cannot recall. That one-armed Pole was a homosexual, and Hans was a beast in human form. Both of them abused prisoners. I was in quarantine for five weeks and after that time I was moved to block 17a, room 3. I do not remember the blokowy ’s name, the block clerk was Helmut Krügler from Poznań. It was he who sent me to the gas. I was in that block only for around ten days, working in the water supply kommando [work detail] (Wasserversorgungskommando) and at constructing barracks for the Italians.
At the end of July of 1943 I was transferred to the Birkenau camp. Once there, I was first placed in sector BIId, block 18. The blokowy was a Polish Gypsy named Józef Żółty, the clerk was a Polish Jew from Kraków, whose name I do not remember, SS-man Polaczek was the Rapportführer [SS man in charge of reports and roll calls], the Unterscharführer (Uscha) [SS NCO rank] and Blockführers [SS men in charge of blocks] were Barecki, Wolf, who came from the city of Łódź, and Pawlik; all three were SS men. The senior camp functionary prisoner was Damisch – a Volksdeutsch from Silesia marked with a green triangle as a professional criminal. I was in this block until 2 October 1943, working first in the gravel pits, then in block service, finally as a night watchman. Both Żółty and Damisch abused the prisoners of this block in a particularly brutal way. I saw Żółty personally murder two people.
On 2 October 1943 I was transferred to camp sector BIIa, where I was employed in Block 16, the infirmary for that sector. It was a quarantine camp. The senior camp functionaries there were, in order, Tinn, a Reichsdeutsch, Leo Schiwe, a Pole, and Herman (I do not remember his last name), a Reichsdeutsch. The last two were very decent people and treated prisoners correctly. The head doctor was prisoner Kleinberg, from Łódź (no. 64,293), the Rapportführer was Johann Kurpanik (an SS-Uscha), and the Blockführers were, in order, the following SS men: Dargelis, Weiss, Buer, and Barocki. In this block I was employed as a doctor in the infirmary, then as the main clerk for the infirmary. At the end of my stay in that block I worked as deputy head doctor. The senior blokowy was a French Jew with Russian roots, Gorin Awrum (no. 28,247). He was an old prisoner, who, among other things, told me about the conditions in the former BIa hospital, particularly its block 17, during the typhus epidemic. The senior blokowy there at the time was Józef Garbarczyk from Poznań; his helpers were Wiktor Mordarski, a Pole, Gotzel, a French Jew, and a Russian prisoner (of war) named Andrej (I do not remember his last name). The sick were kept on the concrete floor, crowded, one upon another, as a result of which mortality was very high. Moreover, Garbarczyk and his assistants murdered several dozen sick prisoners every night. Their victims were mostly prisoners who had gold teeth or who had asked Garbarczyk to treat them humanely, offering to pay, as they had money. Garbarczyk was very greedy, he would murder such people on that same night, pulling out the golden teeth and taking the valuables. He was considered the richest prisoner in the camp: people said he had large sums of money and gold buried somewhere. Garbarczyk, Mordarski and Gotzel were taken to Germany during the evacuation, as they did not want to stay in the camp without German protection; Andrej was shot by the Germans in January of 1945. Garbarczyk was a kapo [prisoner in charge of a work detail] in camp BIIf, Mordarski was a senior blokowy in camp BIId, block 31.
On 10 November 1944 I was transferred from camp BIIa to camp BIIf, where I remained until I was liberated by the Red Army. At first I worked there as a regular doctor, ultimately I became the chief prison doctor of block 12. There were 280 sick in that block.
I have described the arrival in Auschwitz and the entire procedure of prisoner intake, meals, delousing, selection, and the fate of the Hungarian Jews in Auschwitz in detail in German in over eight pages of typescript. I present that text as an attachment to this testimony. Any corrections in ink are made by my hand, I have signed the text and every individual page of it. (Attachment no. 1.)
I explain that the numbers I have given in the “Lager-Bilder” section of the text only refer to the quarantine camp BIIa. I was given the first number, i.e. 462, upon my arrival to the camp’s hospital office. All the following numbers – from 3 October until the last selection on 29 October 1944 – are taken from my notes, which I took personally when preparing daily reports. The statistics I present show that 15 selections were performed in quarantine camp BIIa between 29 August 1943 and 29 September 1944. This is reflected in the notes by the prisoner count suddenly dropping on days when selections were performed, even though there are no mentions of prisoners dying or being transported away. These notes are written down in a small notebook with blue covers and in a notebook titled Tägliche Meldungen. I present the notes to the Commission. (The witness presents: a softcover notebook, front cover lilac, back cover grey, containing nine pages, not numbered, perforated, written in pencil and, on later pages, in ink, with dates and figures under the following headings: date, prisoner count, clinical treatment, lice control, transfer to the hospital, security, referred to the hospital, typhus control, referred to delousing, and notes – Dat. Belegatarke, Ambul. Behandl. Lausekontr. Zur Kotlassung, Bemerk. Starting on the reverse of page five of the notebook, there are more headings, namely: Zur Sauna, Zugang, Abgang. The same sections, as well as Skabies and Todesfulle, are present in the second notebook presented by the witness, starting on 1 May 1944 and ending at page 18 under the date 3 November 1944. Pages 19 and 20 of that notebook are blank, the pages after them through the end of the notebook are covered with entries starting with 13 May 1944 at the back end of the notebook and ending with 17 October 1944.)
I received the figure of 468 prisoners selected on 29 August 1943 from the office of camp BIIa, the other selection numbers compiled by me in section 4 of the text I have presented (attachment 1) are the totals of numbers for various dates covered in the daily report notebooks (Tägliche Meldungen). Specifically,
on 2 October 1943, the prisoner count
in camp sector BIIa was: 5971 persons
by 8 October 1943 it was down to: 5832 persons
difference: 139 persons
As the number of patients sent to the hospital and fatalities had already been subtracted from the prisoner count for 2 October 1943, and none of the prisoners were transported away on 3 October 1943, the figure of 139 prisoners is the number of those selected and sent away to be gassed.
The prisoner count on 9 October 1943 was: 7356 persons A transport of Russians from Vitebsk
arrived on 10 October 1943, numbering: 270 persons thus the prisoner count on 10 October 1943 was 7626 persons; by the evening of that day only 7298 persons were in the camp, including one death; [thus] 327 persons were selected and sent to the gas on that day.
As for the selection from 20 October 1943,
the number of victims results from the following:
prisoner count on 19 October 1943: 6205 persons; prisoner count on 20 October 1943: 5909 persons; taking into account the deaths of three prisoners, 293 persons were selected and gassed.
The number of those selected and sent to be gassed on 14 November 1943 results from the following:
prisoner count on 14 November 1943 was 4707 persons; arrivals – Russian prisoners of war: 75 persons; arrivals – Poles from Radom (a transport): 364 persons; total: 5146 persons From this total, we must subtract:
transferred to other camps: 200 persons; sent to hospital: 34 persons; and dead: 3 persons; total: 237 persons the result is therefore 4909 persons actually in the camp on 14 November.
As the prisoner count on 15 November was 4690 persons, therefore the difference of 219 persons were selected and sent to the be gassed.
On 14 December 1943, the prisoner count was: 5071 persons; On 16 December 1943 it dropped to: 4685 persons, which, considering 48 prisoners were shipped away in a transport gives 338 persons selected and gassed.
In my notebook I marked a cross over the date 15 December to denote that there was a selection on that day.
The prisoner count on 1 January 1944 was: 3924 persons; on 3 January 1944: 3759 persons; which, taking into consideration 12 prisoners sent to the hospital
(HKB [Häftlingskrankenbau]) and 12 sent to the Schonung
[convalescence] block gives a difference of 141 persons selected and gassed.
In my notebook I wrote down 144 persons under Abgang, adding a note that this meant the selected ones. However, only 141 persons were gassed, as three prisoners were removed from that group based on a request from the Political Department.
On 14 January 1944, the prisoner count was: 2975 persons; and arrivals were:
Russian prisoners of war – 77 persons, Polish Jews from Będzin, Sosnowiec and Stutthof – 343 persons, total: 3395 persons. The prisoner count on 15 January 1944 was: 2995 persons, which, taking into consideration the loss of 37 persons
(22 persons HKB, 13 sector BIId, 2 dead) gives us 363 persons selected and gassed.
I marked that figure in my notebook under “Notes,” underlining it with a copy pencil.
On 21 January 1944, the prisoner count was 2880 persons On 22 January 1944 it was only 2221 persons considering that 117 prisoners left the camp on that day
(100 in a transport, 15 to HKB, 2 died), the remaining difference of 542 persons was selected and gassed.
I wrote down under “Notes” that those people were sent to the bathhouse and underlined that note.
On 14 April 1944, the prisoner count was 2842 persons. On 15 April 1944, it dropped to 2658 persons As there were no losses on that day, 184 persons fell victim to selection and gassing.
On 16 April 1944, a transport from Lublin arrived in our camp, numbering 299 women and two Jewish infants, for a total of 301 persons. They were placed in block 2 of camp BIIa. The people from that transport were registered by the Political Department, provided with number tattoos, inspected by a doctor, declared by him to be in good health and capable of work, and were to be transferred to the women’s camp. On 18 April 1944, at 7 p.m., they were brought out of the camp by the so-called Paia Kommando to be gassed. These persons had been marked with numbers in the 77 000 series. Their numbers were later given to Aryan women, also from a Lublin transport, who were in the camp at the time. I also write about that selection in my report listed under the date Auschwitz, 18 February 1945, which I present as an attachment to the testimony (attachment no. 2), and in my camp chronicle, which I present as attachment no. 3 to this testimony. That this selection was conducted is also shown in the figures taken from my daily report notebook.
Specifically, the prisoner count on 18 April 1944 was 4949 persons. Of this, 169 persons were transferred (11 women to HKB, 155 persons to women’s camp, 3 men to camp BIId) and 35 died, for a total loss of 204 persons, leaving, in the camp, a total of 4745 persons. The prisoner count on 19 April 1944 was only 4444 persons, meaning that the difference of 301 persons went to the gas upon selection.
The next selection, on 19 September 1944, is written down in the second notebook of daily reports. In that notebook, under “Notes,” I tallied the number of Jews in quarantine.
On 18 September 1944, there were 1630 Jews in the camp.
On 19 September 1944 the number dropped to 1299 Jews, which, including 1 dead, gives a number of 330 Jews selected and gassed.
On 1 October 1944, the prisoner count was 3689 persons. On 2 October 1944, it increased by 411 persons, meaning that the count on 2 October 1944 should have been 4100 persons, but in reality it was only 3999 persons: the difference of 101 persons was therefore gassed.
On 6 October 1944, the prisoner count was 3861 persons. On 7 October 1944 it dropped to 3835 persons, which, taking into consideration 6 Aryans sent to the hospital (F),
gives a difference of 20 persons selected and gassed.
I present here the materials and notes regarding that selection. Based on those notes, I remember the following details: Lagerkapo [camp kapo] Olasen Hans from Hamburg complained to Dr Tilo [Thilo] that I was sending too many prisoners to Schonung, thus sheltering them from work in the camp. Based on that accusation, Thilo ordered me to present all the prisoners I had sent to be protected and to write down their numbers, then declared that all was fine. Then he went to the office, where he ordered all those people be kept at attention in the evening. There were 15 of them, including 3 Jews from Łódź who did not have numbers. They were prisoners whose names I had written down next to the number list made for Thilo. I added those names based on the office records (the witness presents a note, written by hand in ink on the last page of the Fragebogen für Euftlinge [Questionnaire for ?Prisoners?], comprising sixteen entries. Each entry includes a number, first name, last name, and date of birth. Items 2, 4, and 11 are marked ohne Nummer [“no number”]. The first entry on the list is “B-7435 Leon Nissim – 9 April 1927”, the last is “B-2784 Burak Józef – 17 July 1929.” To the right, next to the names, there is a stenographic note in pencil, which the witness reads: “Lagerartz lieus sich de Schonungskranken verstellen. Schenungskranken wurden vergast.”) Two days before that, Thilo had conducted an additional selection of prisoners who had arrived in the camp in a transport from Annaberg [Góra Świętej Anny]: at the time, he said it was for the purpose of determining if they were fit for transport. He then picked 12 numbers, which a nurse marked on the reverse of the record office cadaster file I presented. Under that note, I wrote “Fabrikarbeiter Bl. 11/IIa” in pencil. In the evening of 7 October 1944, Thilo sent a car, took all 12 numbered prisoners from that Schonungliste, as well as those 8 selected for factory work. It turned out that Thilo forgot that he had picked 12 persons from the Annaberg transport to work in the factory, and as a result four of them managed to survive. All the others – 20 people in total – were gassed. (The witness presents a pink record sheet, filled in typescript on page one, with the last name and number of the prisoner masked with black ink. Still legible is the name Kurt Izr., b. 16 September 1925, followed with personal data. On the reverse is a column of twelve numbers written one under another by hand in ink. The column begins with the number B 10,729 KsfA and ends with 10,690. Next to no. 10,719 is a note: “K – bis 16 J. Alt.” The witness explains that KsfA stands for Korperschwache vom Annabergertransport, the other note for Knabe bis 16 Jahre Alt).
On 29 October 1944, before the camp was disbanded, 64 persons were selected and gassed. Since my assistant no longer kept an accurate headcount at that point, I noted that loss under the date 3 November 1944 in the ad Abgang section, with the note that these people were sent to F. I must explain that the larger groups of prisoners meant for the gassing were taken there directly from the individual camps, while the smaller groups were first assembled in the baths of camp BIIf, from where they were taken to the crematorium.
I present here 54 daily reports, which were made every day to the sanitary service assistant (SDG [Sanitätsdienstgrad]). Those reports were either made by me personally or by my assistant Krause, M.Sci., from Będzin. They regard the period between 1 and 30 September 1944. The first report lists the sick listed by their diseases, the second aggregates the entire camp crew by function and race, Aryans and Jews separately. These are original documents that I have taken from the infirmary office. I present them because the comparison of reports from 18 and 19 September 1944 shows that 222 Jewish prisoners were selected from the hospital on 19 September 1944. On 18 September 1944 there were 305 sick Jews in the hospital, on 19 September 1944 only 83 remained. The rest were sent to be gassed. I already listed those 222 as part of the selection of 19 September 1944, which I have already discussed in detail. As I have testified, 330 persons were selected on that day. Therefore, 222 prisoners were taken just from the hospital of camp BIIa, and 108 came from other blocks. As can be seen in the numbers I present, between 29 August 1943 and 29 October 1944 a total of 3824 persons from just the BIIa quarantine camp were gassed. That number, however, does not include all the prisoners taken to the gas from the quarantine camp. As my notes show, many of the sick were sent to be treated in the BIIf camp hospital. Many of these were selected there and sent to the gas, and my statistics do not include them. From the infirmary records you can get some picture of those sick who fell so ill they could no longer be treated in the infirmary. Those were not untreatable diseases, just serious ones, calling for hospital care. I present notebooks listing the names of those sick. The first starts with no. 38 under the date 20 September 1943, and ending with no. 1749 on 31 December 1943, the other begins with number 1 on 2 January 1944 and keeps a running count until no. 1562 under the date 2 August 1944; the third contains numbers 1563 through 2173 between 3 August 1944 and 3 November 1944. The third notepad shows, for example, that on 1 October 1944, 20 prisoners were sent to the hospital (BIIf). I recall that this happened under orders from camp doctor Thilo. We were fielding a transport that was supposed to be sent to another camp. Thilo then looked at those people, picked 20 of them, and ordered them sent to the hospital. The first sixteen from that group of 20 were sent to the gas the next day. The survivors told me about it in detail, and I was interested in the fate of those people because one of the gassed was Hans Brodnitz, the well-known director of UFA [Universum Film AG].
There is more information of this sort in my notes. There were cases where people sick with typhus were sent to the hospital, treated for weeks, then sent to the gas as convalescents. Usually the selections were performed more frequently in the hospital, once every three weeks on average. The infirmary book from early 1944, ending with number 1562, is also a book of the deceased, listed starting on the other end with number 1 and stopping on the date 28 April 1944, at number 813. This is continued in the large book of the deceased which I have presented, starting at 29 April 1944 with no. 814 and running up to no. 1746 on 5 November 1944. The first part of the book contains a list of medications provided to prisoners. The book is titled Medikamenten Verbrauch. The last pages include statistics of diseases, provided by the camp hospital. I present my own statistics of the sick and deceased with my personal commentary, wherein I discuss and explain the tables in detail. I made those statistics based on the books of sick and dead that I have presented. I consider both the statistics and the commentary to be complimentary to my testimony; I attach them to the present protocol and sign them personally (attachment 4).
Selections in camp BIIa were conducted by SS doctors Helmerson [Helmersen], Thilo, König, and Mengele. The procedure was that all prisoners had to step outside of the block, form up in lines of five, then the doctor, marching in front of the first line, would pick out people who were not to his liking for whatever reason. I cannot describe it in any other way, as no medical examination would be conducted. Having a boil or being wrapped in a bandage was enough to get one sent to the gas. My friend Paul Krüger, a Viennese, was sent to the gas just because of an old scar from an appendectomy. Let it be a testament to how the selections were performed that over a ten minute period a doctor would examine all the prisoners from a block, so around 500 persons on average. Aside from selections of this kind, selections for gassing were also performed during block checks. The prisoner doctor, looking after the sick in a block, had to report any new cases of disease to the SS doctor in charge of the inspection. I remember that when I reported to Thilo that I had children suffering from scarlet fever [in my care], he immediately marked them for the gassing and they were in the crematorium that same afternoon. On another day, when checking on BIIa, our camp, Mengele noticed a Frenchman from Lyon with a child of about eighteen months in his arms. Seeing this, he sent that Frenchman – although he was a completely healthy, strong man – to the crematorium together with the child. Scarlet fever or chickenpox were enough to get one sent to the oven. In relation to my testimony thus far I also wish to add that the one-armed block clerk in block 8 of the quarantine camp was named Staszek Kulczycki and came from Warsaw. The room chief [izbowy] in room 5 of block 17a in Auschwitz was Józek [first name?] (no. 17,777). On the ground floor of that block, marked as block 17, the senior block prisoner was August Glas from Königsberg (no. 21,385). All of them committed barbaric abuses of prisoners, they would beat them and torture them, Józek was notorious as a strangler. Staszek was a homosexual, he would commit various transgressions and excesses against young boys.
I would like to supplement the part about selections with the remark that Helmersen performed two selections in the blocks. They usually took place in front of a block. Prisoners would try to hide under their bunks, but this was noticed and the SS men accompanying Helmersen fired blindly towards those hidden [prisoners], killing very many. In response to questions from prosecutor Pęchalski I explain that SS camp authorities kept their own books and statistics, where they carefully noted any decrease in headcount of every given camp. Those books naturally did not match the books and statistics made by us, the prisoners. We could not show victims of selections and gassing in our books. But they did account for them and that was why they did not question our headcount when presented with our reports, even though that headcount did not match the previous day’s. Besides, the daily roll call, conducted before nightfall, was held with the Rapportführer and Rapportschreiber [report clerk] in attendance. The Rapportführer would compare the count from the roll call book, which was kept by block senior prisoners, with the BIf counts, presented by the SS-Rapportschreiber, and if the two numbers did not match, an alarm siren was sounded. In such cases the outer perimeter guards remained in their posts for 48 hours while special patrols used dogs to search the entire area of the camp. I recall that one time I was suddenly called to the bathhouse, failed to return to the block before roll call, and an SS man arrived by bicycle to make sure I was there. All prisoners from my camp had to wait for the cyclist to return, of course. Whenever the selections were performed, when, according to our books, even several hundred people would go missing, those precautions were not taken. This means that SS camp authorities knew exactly how many people were sent to the gas.
Now, I shall illustrate, based on the material I have, the matter of transports arriving in Birkenau. All transports with prisoners for the Auschwitz camp stopped in front of the ramp, on a siding of the rail station. From there, full transports were sent to either the Birkenau camp or the Auschwitz camp, or sometimes to one of the side camps, for example Buna [Buna Werke chemical plant]. All those transports would, due to the track layout, go past the BIIa infirmary, where I worked, and so I could observe them. As you known, the first selection was performed on the ramp – usually by Mengele. The transports sent to the camps had many people selected right away and immediately put to the gas; the rest, bound for the Birkenau camp, arrived in the quarantine sector, where I worked. My duties included registering them. I did that on unbound sheets, which I now present. I wrote down the date of arrival of the transport, the type of prisoners arriving for quarantine, the date they left quarantine, the block they were assigned to, and, under express orders from the camp doctor, the prisoner count on the given day. In the field meant for the block number I wrote, for my own use, in pencil, the number of persons that were sent from the transport straight to the gas. I determined that number based on information gathered from prisoners placed in the quarantine camp, whom I constantly encountered due to my functions. (The witness presents a list starting with the transport of Dutch Jews on 24 October 1943 and ending with the transport of Slovakian Jews on 3 November 1944. The list consists of six unbound, unnumbered pages held together with a clip. The writing is only on one side of them, on the reverse of a part of the official Fragebogen form.) I stress that I only wrote down men from each given transport that were sent to the gas – I have not yet performed any exact calculation or aggregation of the data, I will present it to the Commission tomorrow, in approximation of my calculations. No more than 20 percent of the men arriving in any given transport were sent to the quarantine camp, the rest were gassed. I did not want to deal with the data on women at all, as I did not have the necessary material, and was not able to determine specific numbers through induction. It happened, especially after the siding was built to the Birkenau crematoria, that transports would arrive without anyone coming to the quarantine camp or being sent to any other camp; entire transports, such as they came, were sent straight to the gas. The registry of such transports was outside any supervision. Moreover, prisoners from outside the camp were brought to the Birkenau crematoria every day in cars and burned there; obviously, they are not featured in the camp registries either. Camp registries also lack any data for transports of Hungarian Jews, Jews from ghettos liquidated as the Germans retreated, or for Jewish transports from Teresienstadt [Theresienstadt]. Most of those people were put in the former Gypsy camp and not registered; instead, the largest part of them were sent straight to the gas. Some were put in the quarantine camp, but they were not registered here either, but taken away in transports after a few days.
It seems that in May of 1944 a transport of Frenchmen arrived in Birkenau, being given numbers in the 185-186,000 series. There were around 2,000 of them, of which all the healthy ones were placed in the camp next to ours, that is, BIIb, while the sick were sent to our camp, BIIa. After a few days the Frenchmen were taken away both from our camp and from BIIb, allegedly to be transported – but no one saw such a transport leave. I am convinced those people were also gassed. Everyone in the camp shared that opinion. It may be relevant for me to mention that one of the transported Frenchmen sent to our camp was a Catholic clergyman. Rapportführer Kurpanik spotted a large cross on his chest, tore it off, threw it on the ground, and stepped on it with Blockführer Weiss amid mockery and profanities. They abused the clergyman until he fell to the ground, bleeding.
With that in mind I would like to note that Kurpanik’s right hand was the infamous senior block prisoner Mietek Katarczyński, from Warsaw, 24 years old, black haired. I shall demonstrate his character by recalling the following event: One day two SS sentries were placed in the camp to prevent the prisoners from contacting the women’s camp. Katarczyński had run out of vodka that day, so he approached one of the sentries and asked him to bring him some the following day in exchange for a watch. The sentry agreed and brought vodka the next day. Because he could not find Katarczyński, he approached one of the camp boys, told him the entire story and sent him to find Mietek. The boy did as he was instructed and [also] informed Katarczyński what he was ordered to do. After a moment, Kurpanik approached the boy and asked him what he had been discussing with the sentry. The boy, trying to save the sentry, said he had discussed his home country, that is, Yugoslavia, with the sentry, as both the boy and the sentry came from there. Kurpanik gave him 15 lashes after that reply, and when the boy nevertheless stuck to the story, he threatened to get him shot. Someone nearby got involved and explained to the boy that Kurpanik already knew about everything, so the boy repeated to Kurpanik what he was ordered to do by the sentry. Kurpanik approached the sentry, took the vodka from him and drank it with Katarczyński in full view of the sentry. Of course, the sentry never received the watch. He did get an opportunity for revenge a few days later – although not on Katarczyński, but on camp senior prisoner Herman Domański. He carelessly came too close to the wire fence and was shot in the leg by that sentry. This shows that Katarczyński had told Kurpanik what he had discussed with the boy. I think this fact sheds some light on his character.
As Blockältester [senior block prisoner], Mietek Katarczyński would steal sausage meant for the prisoners by allocating them smaller portions. He would then sell that sausage to buy vodka, which he drank with Rapportführer Kurpanik. One Sunday he lacked vodka. Katarczyński did have sausage, though, so he made the following exchange: he ordered the izbowy to ask Dawid Fischel from Sosnowiec, who was known among the prisoners as one of the recipients of the sausage, if he would like to buy it. Fischel agreed and then the izbowy brought him two sausages from Katarczyński, and he paid for them. The izbowy took the money back to Mietek. Meanwhile, Kurpanik put on Katarczyński’s prison jacket, put on his hat, and, thus disguised, went to the senior blokowy ’s room. He then called Fischel to that room, took the sausage away from him, and threatened to punitively transfer him to the penal company in another camp. He did not follow up on that threat because Fischel managed to bribe him with a gold watch and two pairs of pantyhose for Kurpanik’s wife.
Dawid Fischel was a resourceful and inventive man, so he made money even in the camp. He found one opportunity when the prisoners from Theresienstadt were put in camp BIIb, next to our camp. It was a family camp, where the prisoners were allowed to keep their belongings at first. In the night, trade flourished between the camps, mostly bartering. Valuables were exchanged for bread, sausage, or margarine. But there was also some money traded, for even in spite of the strictest searches some people always managed to keep a bit of money. It was indeed quite difficult, as Kurpanik paid a lot of attention to it, as did his helpers, senior block prisoners Mietek Katarczyński, the Pole Franciszek Karasiewicz (no. 1825), Albert Hemerl, Rudolf Oftringer (no. 15,477), and the Jew Finkus, as well as the camp kapo Hans Clasen. Kurpanik would call on prisoners arriving in the camp to give up their money. His helpers would beat and abuse those prisoners for as long as it took to make them give up their money. But there were some tough people, who, in spite of all these attacks, never admitted they had money, and in this way cash made its way into the camp – in all forms of currency.
I recall the case of a Jewish doctor, Arkadij Petrowicz Mostowoj, who arrived alongside a transport of Belgian Jews, and who did manage – in spite of Kurpanik’s searches – to smuggle in 2,000 dollars in his boot. For 900 dollars he bought the position of infirmary doctor from Gorin Awrum, whom I have already mentioned and who worked there. Oftringer’s reasons for notoriety included volunteering for the position of camp executioner – he personally hanged many people. Out of my good friends he hanged Dr Jakub Wagschal from Tarnopol and Józef Kenner, also a Polish Jew.
Franciszek Karasiewicz had a girlfriend named Grunwald in the neighbouring Czech Jew camp. He could maintain a relationship with her through bribing Kurpanik and other SS men and getting them drunk. After the Czechs were gassed on 9 March 1944, he attempted suicide by ingesting corrosive sublimate. We sent him from the infirmary to the hospital at BIIf. Over there all the nurses were Poles and they treated Karasiewicz the way he deserved. One day Mietek Katarczyński visited Karasiewicz there. Once he learned how he was being treated by the personnel, he complained to Kurpanik, who contacted the hospital block doctor Thilo, and as a result Karasiewicz was moved to the Reichsdeutsch block to protect him.
Here I should present the camp officials by rank: the lowest ranking prisoner was the so-called Stubendienst (izbowy), next was the Blockshreiber (block clerk), after him Blockältester (block senior prisoner), then Lagerkapo (camp kapo), Rapportschreiber (report clerk), and Lagerältester (camp senior prisoner). Moreover, every camp had a Kuchenkapo (kitchen kapo), but an SS man would be in charge of the kitchen. The lowest SS rank in a camp sector, for example in sector BIIa, was the Blockführer, his superior was the Rapportführer, and above him stood the Lagerführer, who was in charge of all camp sectors of the men’s camp in Birkenau. In labour kommandos [details] the lowest rank was a Vorarbeiter (work leader), above him was an Unterkapo, subordinate to a kapo, who in turn answered to the Oberkapo. Moreover, the work kommandos are tied to the institution of the so-called Arbeitseinsatz. This made surveys and lists of specific kommandos. Directing work and distributing people between specific kommandos was the job of SS men: the Arbeitseinsatzführer and Arbeitsdienstführer.
Back to the matter of transports, which I have mentioned before. I would add that men sent straight from the rail ramp to the crematorium, that is, the ones who did not arrive in the quarantine camp at all and who were not registered, were written down on my list based on information obtained from the survivors of the given transport who arrived in the quarantine. I wrote it down in pencil under the heading “block” on the first page and under “ Stand” on the second page; on that page I also wrote down four transports under “ Block”. To avoid misunderstandings, I have now written down from my registrar the number of those sent to the gas and to quarantine from individual transports: in particular, from the 21 October 1943 transport 347 persons arrived in the camp, and 1116 were sent to the gas straight from the ramp. The data for all transports in my list are as follows: Date of transport Arrived in quarantine Sent to the gas 21 October 1943 347 1116 22 October 1943 149 446 28 October 1943 72 276 3 November 1943 463 1379 3 November 1943 284 896 3 November 1943 120 476 6 November 1943 952 2889 6 November 1943 9 48 15 November 1943 13 49 18 November 1943 243 778 19 November 1943 275 803 23 November 1943 241 782 2 December 1943 13 56 18 December 1943 92 314 13 January 1944 119 386 19 January 1944 224 896 19 January 1944 8 37 7 February 1944 3 37 10 February 1944 141 587 24 February 1944 24 86 25 February 1944 3 26 26 February 1944 4 37 27 February 1944 10 54 1 March 1944 2 8 5 March 1944 6 21 5 March 1944 179 98 15 March 1944 8 31 31 March 1944 10 46 4 April 1944 24 103 7 April 1944 9 38 13 April 1944 320 1067 25 April 1944 3 18
7253 24 688
7253
31 941
The list shows that the transports enumerated above brought 31,941 men to the ramp in Birkenau. Of that number, only 7,253 were sent to the quarantine camp BIIa, the remaining 24,688 were sent straight to the gas from the ramp. Therefore, only about 22 percent of the men arriving in the Birkenau ramp were sent into the camp, and the rest, in other words around 78 percent, went to the gas. As I have already explained when discussing the selections, very many camp arrivals went to the gas. Others fell victim to shootings or the so-called Sonderaktionen, special actions. I did not include these victims in the numbers selected for gassing from the camp or in the list of those sent to the gas straight from the ramp. This regards first of all the transport of Russian prisoners of war, which arrived in the camp on 28 November 1943, numbering 334 men, all of them heavily injured war invalids.
On 10 December 1943, late in the evening, trucks arrived and picked up the entire group of 334 Russians, supposedly in order to ship them to Lublin. In April 1944 a great many prisoners from Lublin arrived in our camp, including camp doctors, kapos, and blokowi from the Majdanek camp, who said without a doubt and unequivocally that such a transport had never arrived in Majdanek. I am convinced that the entire transport went to the gas, as attested by the circumstances in which these Russians were taken away from our camp. It happened after nightfall, and the SS only performed such special actions during the night.
As I have already listed in the above figures, 13 persons were directed to our camp from the transport on 2 December 1943. After a week or so, they were taken away, supposedly to the bathhouse, and never returned.
On 26 February 1944, a transport of 84 Russian prisoners of war came to Birkenau from Lamsdorf. That transport went past our block on the way to the bathhouse, and so we could get an accurate count. On the next day, only 66 prisoners arrived in our camp from that transport. We later concluded that the remaining 18 were shot in the bathhouse.
At the end of March of 1944, a transport of Dutch Jews arrived in our camp – men, women, and children. That transport was placed in block 4 of our camp, BIIa. The block was locked down, no one was allowed out, only camp functionaries, including myself and the infirmary doctor, could enter. I was told in the camp office that the entire transport was just a “ depot” in our camp and that those people would not be included in the prisoner count. After ten days the entire transport was put into cars, taken to the bathhouse, and gassed. Those people were moved with all the precautions and methods used when shipping people to the gas.
On pages 3 and 4 of my chronicle I described the fate of the prisoners arriving in the quarantine camp from Flossenbürg on 5 December 1943. I now present materials regarding that transport, in particular the first weight list of the prisoners, the second weight list of the prisoners, and notes regarding the health and capacity for work of the prisoners in that transport. I conducted that last registry upon orders from the camp doctor. The first field is the date, the second (a) all those capable of work after a time, the third (b) those who probably could be capable of work in the future, the fourth (HKB) those sent to the hospital, the fifth (+) the dead, and the sixth is the prisoner count at the day’s end. I note that in November and December of 1942 a transport of 5,000 prisoners from series 87,000, 90,000, 92,000, 93,000, and 95,000 were sent to Flossenbürg from Auschwitz. On 5 December 1943, only 81 prisoners from that transport arrived in Auschwitz. They are the prisoners numbered 1-81 on the first weight list. The rest of those 5,000 died in Flossenbürg.
In January 1944, a typhus epidemic broke out in our camp sector, BIIa. We had to send prisoners afflicted with the disease to the hospital in camp sector BIIf. I present a list of typhus sufferers, containing 66 names, starting at the date of 7 January 1944, and ending on 31 January 1944. We were interested in the fate of those sick, because we wanted to find out if the typhus test result was positive. In any event, we learned that prisoners number 13, 17, 39, and 50 on [my] list died of typhus. Prisoners number 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 14, 15, 16, 18, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 51, and 52 were sent to the gas on 21 January 1944. Some among them actually were diagnosed with typhus, while others were essentially under observation. From a medical point of view I must state that all the gassed, whether sick or suspected of being sick with typhus, were capable of recovery. Natural mortality among typhus sufferers was very low: my statistics, which I have presented, shows that out of 180 typhus sufferers six persons died a natural death as a result of the disease.
Brzezinka is a malarial area, and the SS men were well aware of it, so they tried to combat the disease for their own sake. To that end, malaria sufferers were sent to other camps, located in non-malarial areas, especially Majdanek. On 9 and 15 April 1943, two large transports arrived from Lublin, containing malaria sufferers and convalescents. On 25 November 1943, a written order – which I now present – was issued to have all the malaria sufferers registered. We only received that order in the MIIa sector in April of 1944. To comply with it, we created lists of prisoners suffering from malaria in individual blocks of our camp sector. These sick – numbering 212 persons – were placed in block 8 at first, later on in block 13 of camp sector BIIa, and on 10 August 1944 were sent to Flossenbürg in a transport. Block 13 had 227 persons just before the transport. 15 Russian prisoners were removed from it at the last minute, so 212 persons left in the transport. I present the order to remove them, dated 15 August 1944, alongside other documents referring to malaria sufferers.
I present here eight copies of various documents which I composed and handed to the SS camp doctor, requesting they be presented to superior camp authorities. I referred to those documents in memoranda I wrote, which are attached to the testimony. They concern improving the livelihood of the camp prisoners. Naturally, the aforementioned SS man signed the documents and took them, but I do not know if they were passed on, in any case none of them had any effect, even though they were fully legitimate in view of the prisoners’ health conditions.
The two further documents signed by camp doctor Thilo (they are copies, Thilo signed them by oversight in a hurry) refer to transferring people present in our camp as “ depot” to the former BIIa (Gypsy) camp. Those people were sent to the gas.
In October of 1944, Dr Thilo ordered me to examine prisoners in a transport from Warsaw. I examined them and on 6 October 1944 made a list of 256 names, which I now present. I do this to show what sorts of invalids were placed in the camp, and, moreover, to take the opportunity to bring to light the activity of a prisoner, a Pole, Dr Zenkteler from Poznań. Unforced, by his own free will, in his capacity as the senior prisoner of camp sector BIIf, he made that list and among the invalids, which I had shown had suffered bodily injury, he decreed prisoners enumerated in entries 23, 26, 41, 50, and 52 as capable of work. From the second list of prisoners incapable of labour he decreed fit to work prisoners listed under numbers: 1, 22, 70, 80, 91, 106, 125, 171, 176, 189, 190, 193, 206, 208, 209, 212, 214, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 224, 223, 229, 230, 231, 234, 238, 240, 242, 246, 248, 247, 253, and 256. Even a cursory look at the diagnoses says a lot about the meticulousness of doctor Zenkteler. I had the chance to make a more extensive report about his person during the plenary commission [meeting].
Moreover, I present a file of lists, statistics, and documents to enable the Commission to determine the names of the people who had been in the camp. The file includes figures and lists of medical personnel and nurses, a list of invalids, a list of mentally ill, certificates from the hygiene institute, and other documents from the infirmary office.
To supplement the written reports I have attached to the testimony, I would like to give the following explanation: on 24 October 1943, Birkenau received a transport of so-called American Jews from Warsaw. Whether they were real Americans or Jews who obtained false American passports, I do not know. These people had been told that they would be going to Switzerland. Through the indiscretion of someone in the Sonderkommando who was handling that transport on the Birkenau ramp, they learned that they were going to die in the crematorium. There were 1700 men and women in that transport. One of the women grabbed an SS man’s revolver and shot dead Lagerführer Schillinger and another SS man from his entourage – I never learned the man’s name – and wounded three others, including Schillinger’s successor, future Lagerführer Schwarzhuber. After the shots rang out, the SS men ran away, returned with reinforcements and machine- gunned all the arrivals in the transport; on the next day, that is, on 25 October 1943, they fired on our camp. From that I can recall the exact date of the events. I learned the details of the incident in the crematorium from Kurpanik himself, who told Oftringer about it in my presence.
At the time of my arrival in Birkenau, crematoria I and II were already in operation, crematorium IV was being finished, and crematorium V was just being built. The people employed at building the latter two crematoria were housed in block 18 of camp sector BIId. The gassing and burning in the crematoria was the task of the so-called Sonderkommando. The people placed in that kommando were chosen by the camp doctor or the Rapportführer from among the prisoners arriving in transports to the BIIa quarantine camp. Most usually entire transports were marked for the Sonderkommando. And so, from 446 Greek Jews arriving in the quarantine camp on 30 June 1944 in transport no. 49, Thilo chose 434 prisoners on 21 July 1944 and sent them to camp BIId. Once there, 400 prisoners were chosen and sent to the Sonderkommando for the crematorium. The next day, that Sonderkommando was taken to the crematoria to work, and when they refused to work, the entire kommando – 400 prisoners strong – was gassed and burned. I learned that from the corpse counter, a Slovak Jew named Neumann, who worked in camp sector BIIf and kept a registry of corpses of people who died in the hospital and in other sectors. That Neumann told me about it in person; he had found out about the gassing of those Greek Jews on the spot in the crematorium, where he was to ensure the right count. Besides, the SS made no secret of it, the entire camp knew about that action. The SS men would spread the story to scare others off of refusing the work they were ordered to perform – it was a frequent occurrence that people would refuse to work in the crematorium Sonderkommando. Such Sonderkommandos were all gassed in their entirety.
Until August of 1944, the people employed in this Sonderkommando lived in block 11 of camp sector BIId. That block was always kept under tighter guard than other blocks, but it was possible to communicate with them nevertheless. At the end of August, they were transferred permanently to the crematorium and no longer returned to the housing blocks for the night. In September of 1944, the crematoria were not working at full capacity, as the urgent Hungarian transports were no longer coming. Therefore, the SS authorities decided to reduce the size of the crematorium kommando. This meant that those people would go to the gas. Having found out about it, they decided to defend themselves: even if they were to die, it would not be willingly, but with a fight. An altercation started, the SS brought in reinforcements, and on Saturday, 21 September 1944, around 1 P.M., they shot all the prisoners. Many were shot on that occasion, I do not know exactly, in any case the kommandos employed in the crematorium numbered around 200 prisoners at the time, and the SS men would later brag that none made it out alive.
At the time when the crematorium Sonderkommando would still sleep in block 11 of sector BIId, Zisner, a Polish Jew from Sosnowiec employed in that kommando, told me how the gassing and burning of corpses in the crematorium took place. This is how I know that the people meant for death were first sent to a locker room, where they stripped, then they were forced into an airtight chamber. When the chamber was full, the iron doors were closed and cans of Zyklon-B were dumped through holes meant for that exact purpose. The gassing went on for around 15 minutes, then the people of the Sonderkommando took the bodies out of the gas chamber and moved them to the ovens, where they were burned. Before the corpses were thrown into the ovens, a special group shaved their hair, the dentists pulled out golden teeth fillings, and a third group checked the women’s genitals for hidden valuables. I saw the cans of Zyklon-B with my own eyes, as the poison was also used for delousing blocks. The delousing was conducted by an SS man named Glaire [Klehr], the chief of the bathhouse. The crematoria were under an SS man named Moll.
To complete the picture of life in the camp, I shall also briefly outline the matter of replacing prison underwear. As the Commission may learn from the site itself, Auschwitz had warehouses full of underwear. However, the underwear was not distributed to the prisoners and dirty underwear was not replaced. Due to the lice infestation, we asked camp doctor Thilo to take care of the matter and issue relevant orders, but our requests had no effect. In these conditions, a change of underwear was a big event for the camp and therefore I noted them in the book of daily reports (Tägliche Meldungen). As that notebook indicates, prisoners were given fresh shirts on: 15 April, 30 June, 22 August, and 20 September 1944, and on 21 October 1944 they received fresh shirts and long underwear. In women’s sections the situation was even worse. The women were not issued underwear at all, they wore primitive, thin robes, so they walked around almost naked.
I suspect my protégé Luigi Lerri has told his story in detail in his testimony, so I shall only briefly outline it. In early June of 1944, a mixed Italian transport arrived in Birkenau. The men went to the quarantine camp, the women were sent to the women’s camp sector. Luigi went with the women. However, once there, he was declared an adult and transferred to our camp by force. Before he arrived, orders were given to gas the entire transport. The women were taken away from the women’s camp sector and the men from our camp. Luigi was already struck off the women’s camp prisoner list, but had not yet reached our camp. He arrived after the Italians had already been shipped off. Seeing him in tears, I placed him in block 2, where the block doctor was a Polish Jew, Dr Bergmann. Since Rapportführer Kurpanik knew about Luigi’s presence in the camp and came twice to get him, I had to hide the boy and move him to blocks 7, 10, 12, and 13. I was helped by two Poles – Gaczyński from Kraków and Bohdan Cynka from Poznań – and the report clerk, a German Jew named Frank. In the meantime, I managed to register the boy under a Jewish number and then officially employed him as the infirmary runner. After the quarantine camp was shut down, we were transferred to hospital BIIf, and I took Luigi with me there. I hid him there until the end.
I would note that the doctors among prisoners in the camp would help children and try to save them from death inasmuch as it was possible given the camp conditions. I recall that a boy was even saved from burning when he was already on the crematorium grounds: he was hidden for a time in the so-called Effektenlager BIIg, I do not know what happened to him later. A Polish doctor from Warsaw named Malinowski did a lot in this regard. He was very precise when examining the children in his charge and could thus diagnose a disease at a very early stage and combat it effectively, even saving children from being burned – for, as I have stated, even chickenpox was reason enough to gas a child. He would not report cases to the camp doctor if a German doctor would see them as grounds for gassing. He would send such children to my block after I was transferred to sector BIIf, where I took care of invalids and convalescents, and could therefore hide the children there as well. Malinowski’s first name was Jan, he was in the camp under no. 125,739 (born in 1900).
I will also mention that in the camp we had the latest English radio news. We knew facts that German radio would only broadcast a week later. We heard it from a Polish Jew, Józek Kenner, who was later hanged after a failed escape attempt. I have written about it in my attached chronicle. Józek never revealed to us how he got the news. At the same time, the world knew exactly what was going on in the camp, as proven by the English radio congratulating Captain Nowotny as early as 10 March 1944 on his ex-wife being burned with the entire transport of Czech prisoners from Theresienstadt. This was also confirmed by Dr Brodnitz, whom I already discussed. He came from Berlin and told us that people outside knew exactly how many Hungarian Jews were gassed every day. I suspect that somewhere in the camp there was a way to communicate with the outside world by radio. I do not know any details, in any case if it were messages taken out of the camp by runaway prisoners, we would only learn that they had spread around the world after some longer period of time, not the next day. One such runaway was Walter Rosenberg, a 19-year-old Slovakian Jew, who managed to escape on 8 April 1944, made it to Slovakia, joined the partisans there and, according to my information, is still alive today.
The men’s sector of the Birkenau camp had within it the so-called Political Department, located in the Blockführerstube of sector BIIe. This department was run by SS men. I do not remember their names. I suppose Gaszner can provide details in that regard. The department had a special kommando of prisoners. Its kapo was a Ukrainian named Bohdan (I do not recall his first name). The unterkapo [subordinate kapo] was Katzengold, a French Jew. The political department had direct contact with the Berlin headquarters. It conducted the registration of prisoners, issued them with numbers, assigned them to penal companies (SK [Strafkompanie]), ordered special actions, issued commands to gas, picked out prisoners that had to be kept in the camp for some time in groups that were going to be gassed, kept a photo album of prisoners (in particular, Reichsdeutsch Jews were photographed). It was also there that prisoner forms were filled out, records were kept, and correspondence was censored.
Here I would like to present a plan of the Birkenau camp, found in the Auschwitz camp cartography workshop after the Germans had left. The workshop was situated in a special block in the part of camp where the SS men lived. (The witness presents a plan titled “ Lageplan des Kregsgefangennenlagers Ausschwitz O/S ” in a 1:2000 scale. The labels on the plan indicate that it was made in order to build a sewage system. The lower right corner contains the following notes: “ Schmutzwasserkanalisation eingetragen am 12.VIII.1943”, “ Eingetragen im Planausgabebuch unter Nr. 2895/25 sierpnia 1943 ”. A further note indicates that the plan was drawn up by prisoner no. 471 on 18 June 1943.) The plan shows the Birkenau camp, where I was held prisoner until the Germans left the camp. To explain my testimony, wherein I referred to numbered markings of individual camp sectors, I explain as follows: The buildings located within the entire area marked on the map as Bauabschnitt 1 were referred to in camp correspondence officially as the BI segment, with the eastern half of the segment being labelled BIa, and the western half labelled BIb. That segment was built in 1942 and served as the women’s housing (Frauenlager). Until August of 1943, blocks 7 and 11 of sector BIa were used as the men’s hospital, and the bath of sector BIb was used as the men’s baths until October of 1943. This bathhouse was called the alte Sauna [“Old Bath”] to differentiate it from the new large bathhouse built near the crematorium. The entire BI segment was encircled with high-voltage electrified barbed wire and watchtowers.
Sectors BIa and BIb were separated by a camp street, which also had fences connected to high voltage electric current. The area marked on the plan as Bauabschnitt 2 and the entire compound located there was called the lager BII. This segment also included the area taken up by the crematoria, including the crematoria themselves, the new bathhouse, and the so- called Effektenlager. The easternmost line of blocks of that segment was called lager BIIa, the entry gate had a large sign reading “Quarantine camp” (Quarantenlager). It included 16 housing blocks and three blocks marked on the map with “W,” which were half washhouses, half toilets. The barrack marked on the plan as no. 12 was the kitchen. The following two lines of blocks, between which ran camp street no. 6, were marked as lager BIIb, consisting of 38 blocks and 2 kitchens. This is where people brought in transports from Theresienstadt were kept, and from July 1944 onwards it was a women’s camp. The following sectors, moving westwards, were labelled lager BIIc, lager BIId, then BIIe, lager BIIf, and BIIg. sectors BIIc through BIIe were built up the same as BIIb. Sector BIIc was completed in May of 1944 and housed Hungarian girls. Sector BIId was completed in August of 1943 and it served as the Arbeitslager, this was where kommandos gathered to leave for work. Sector BIIe was completed in May of 1943. Until the end of July it served as the Gypsy camp (Zigeunerlager), later on as a so-called Stammlager for Hungarian Jews and Jews from liquidated ghettos, finally as a women’s hospital (HKB für Frauen). That last sector was unique in that it did not have bunks and people slept on bare concrete. Sector BIIf, completed in July of 1944, contained 18 blocks and served as a hospital for men from sectors BIIa, d, and g. This sector did not have its own kitchen and food was brought over from the kitchen of sector BIId. Sector BIIg, marked on the plan as Effektenlager, was completed in November of 1943 and served as a warehouse for things taken away from prisoners arriving in transports. Those items were sorted there and shipped to the Reich on trains. That sector comprised 30 blocks, two of which were housing for people employed in the Effektenlagerkommando, and the rest were warehouses. In January of 1945, the Germans burned that sector. The area marked on the map as Bauabschnitt 3 was called lager BIII, Mexico [Meksyk] in prisoner parlance. This camp was never finished, the Germans only built three quarters of it. They kept there 50,000 naked Hungarian girls, to which I have already testified. In September, the Germans started demolishing the barracks of that segment and moved some of them to Groß-Rosen. The mechanisms of the crematorium ovens were also shipped there in November of 1944. The camp area marked on the map as Truppesunterkünfte and Lazaret was restricted to SS men and inhabited by them. I note that to the west of the new bathhouse is the so-called Old Birkenau. I use this name for the old country cabin where people were gassed before the gas chamber in the crematorium was set up. Next to the cabin were ditches, where the corpses of gas victims were burned. After the crematoria were finished, the cabin was taken out of commission; it was reactivated for the Hungarian Jew transport. The plan I present does not include the area of the cabin and the ditches.
The world talks pretty much exclusively about the Auschwitz camp. But one has to remember that it was Birkenau that was the real hell on Earth. It was there that the crematoria stood, it was there that people lived in inhuman conditions, housed in stables, as I can give the blocks meant for people no other name, they were fed and clothed worse than in Auschwitz. The food for Birkenau prisoners came from the Auschwitz I main warehouse and was stored in a central warehouse in BIId. From there, dry provisions were distributed to the other sectors. It was picked up by sector warehouse workers and taken to depots of those sectors, for example BIIa. The block clerk and the prisoners employed in the food kommando would take the dry portions to the block warehouse, from where it was passed to izbowi, who distributed it among the prisoners. All those through whose hands the food passed stole. Not just prisoners, but also the SS men, who stole straight from the warehouses. As a result, a prisoner would receive not 300g of bread a day, but 200- 220g; instead of a regular portion of sausage (40g) they would get 15g. The supplementary sausage ration, issued twice a week, was supposed to be 85g; in reality a prisoner would receive no more than 20g. A margarine ration was officially supposed to weigh 40g – no more than 15-20g. Instead of two tablespoons of marmalade, a teaspoon was issued. There were also cases where all dry rations other than bread were stolen and the prisoners received nothing aside from bread. Before distributing bread, the following procedure was performed: the smallest loaf was selected, and the others were cut down to its size before being divided into portions.
The witness testified in German, understood by the Court, and therefore was heard without a translator. After the protocol was read out and translated by a judge into German, the witness stated as follows:
Die vorstehende Protokollniederschrift wurde mir von dem Richter in Gegenwart des Staetsanwalts und der Protokollführerin in polnischer Sprache, die ich ziemlich gut verstehe wortlich vorgelesen, und in die deutsche Sprache Ubersetzt. Ich annerkenne die Aufname als richtig, meine Aussagen wort – und sinngemass wiedergebend, demnach auch weinen Willen entsprechend und unterzeichne das Protokoll eigenhandig. Die beigeschlossenen 4 Arbsiten /Kommentar zu dem Kranken und Todtenstatistiken sammt baigeschlossenen Statistiken, Lagerbilder, Chronik des Lagers Auschwitz 2 Lager BIIa und Frauen und Kinder – schickeule/, habe ich auf Grund statistischen Materiales selbst abgefasst und uberreiche sie der Kommission in der Uberzeugung, dass die darin augefuhrten Teils eine wesuntliche Erganzung meiner Aussage darstellen und erst ein richtiges Bild uber die Lagerverhaltniese vermitteln konnen. Fur die Richtigkeit der darin gemachten Angaben stache ich jederzeit voll und ganz ein und habe zum Beweis dessen die Anlagen Blatt fur Blatt eigenhundig unterzeichnet.
At this the proceedings and the present testimony were concluded on 27 April 1945.
The documents presented by the witness were placed in a separate file, which was marked with a description of its contents.