On 15 November 1946 in Gliwice, the investigative judge for the District Court in Gliwice, Judge Zygmunt Świtalski, heard the person named below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the wording of Art. 107 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Władysław Plaskura |
| Age | 41 |
| Parents’ names | Józef, Maria |
| Place of residence | Gliwice, Daszyńskiego Street 20/5 |
| Occupation | engineer |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
| Relationship to the parties | none |
I arrived in Auschwitz concentration camp on 20 June 1940, in a transport from Wiśnicz which had been filled with prisoners from Kraków on the way. I stayed there until mid‑June 1943, and then I was released and forcibly handed over to the Central Construction Office within the camp, and worked there until the end of 1944, when I was deported for labor to Germany, first to Wrocław, then to [illegible] and Łambinowice. In March 1945, I returned to Poland. As a prisoner I had the number 1000.
When it comes to the person of the commandant of the Auschwitz camp, Rudolf Höß, he was an intelligent, elegant man, generally considered a devil in disguise. He didn’t beat the prisoners himself, but it was happening with his approval and by his instructions, as he was aware of all the orders issued by camp overseers, sometimes issuing them himself.
He was a ruthless man, loathing Poles. For him the worst German criminal was better than the most intelligent Pole or Jew. He took special care of the German criminals, making attempts to release them, and even establishing friendly relations after they were released (Kurt Müller, Karl [illegible] and Grönke). A prisoner of Polish or Jewish origins was nobody to him, and that’s how he treated them. Höß’s main aid and his right hand in the process of exterminating Poles and Jews was the Political Department’s chief, Ustuf [Untersturmführer] Grabner.
I can recall some of the orders issued by Höß which show him to be a master criminal. He ordered a 24‑hour standing punishment [stójka] in July 1940, after the escape of prisoner Wiejowski, during which the prisoners were especially tortured by the SS men guarding them and by German prisoners. It wasn’t until the inmates started to collapse from exhaustion that Höß ordered it to be stopped. Then he reported ten prisoners to Berlin as accomplices to the escapee and they were sentenced to whipping and death, which was then mercifully changed to transport to Mauthausen camp by Himmler, which actually equaled a death sentence. These people were absolutely innocent and knew nothing about the escape. As a result of these orders, for some time all subsequent escapes were punished in the following way: 10, 20 or 30 prisoners picked from the cell block or working group where the escape happened were locked up in the cells, leaving them to starve to death. The selection was conducted by Ustuf Grabner, Ustuf Fritsch [Fritzsch], and once, according to engineer Krzetuski’s (Gliwice, Styczyńskiego Street 1) account, Höß himself.
I must point out that during the executions by shooting, prisoners were extraordinarily tortured and beaten. It would even happen that [illegible] Palitsche [Palitzsch] would whip the sentenced prisoners with 10 to 25 strokes and then chase them in the “frog” position 500 meters distance to the bunker, where they would wait for the execution for a few hours being harassed and tortured throughout that time. Prisoners were being executed naked, no matter what time of year, being kicked and spat on. The SS men, for example Palitzsch, were bragging how many prisoners they had shot and how quickly, and it would happen that SS men would attend the roll call with their boots soaked in their victims’ blood.
Regarding other special directives enacted by Höß or with his approval and knowledge, the following require mentioning: introducing the punishments of whipping, “the post”, and Stehbunkers [standing cells]; prohibiting footwear in autumn 1940, ordering that all work within the camp be done while running, as it happened for example during road rolling, where the roller was pulled by Catholic priests and Jews and while they were being tortured in a horrible way, which resulted in a couple of them hanging themselves or killing themselves by running into the electrified wire.
I’d like to stress that Höß issued a strict order, based on which we weren’t allowed to take care of our bodily needs during worktime, from 6.00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., including the one‑ hour break for lunch, not mentioning the prohibition of smoking or eating during that time. Actually anything that a prisoner did was a reason for rigid punishment, even such minor things like carrying paper in one’s underwear to protect one from the cold was enough to get a beating.
Commandant Höß refused the Oświęcim RGO’s request to allow delivery of food supplies for the prisoners at Christmas time in 1940, and the parcels that arrived from the Red Cross were given out to German prisoners.
The “post” punishment and Stehbunkers were usually equivalent to a death sentence, as a prisoner after the post punishment was not able to work and would be killed for that during worktime, and a prisoner who had been confined in the Stehbunker at night and had to work during the day would expire very quickly.
I should mention that the prisoners suspected of trying to escape or caught while escaping were shot, and their corpses were purposefully massacred and put on display as a memento for other prisoners. Other executions, such as whipping or hanging, were also carried out publicly, in front of the whole camp and with Höß personally taking part. With his consent and knowledge, the Political Department was carrying out arbitrary executions of prisoners without a sentence handed down from Berlin. It happened that, for example, in 1943, after three prisoners had escaped from the Construction Office, 25 engineers and technicians from the office were picked out and 13 of them were immediately shot, while 12 were hanged a few weeks later based on a sentence given by Himmler. The shootings were performed personally by the following SS men, among others: Palitzsch, Grabner, Klausen [Clausen], Boger, Kaduk, Fryz [Fritzsch], Lachmann.
Operations of mass liquidation of the prisoners were as follows: mass shootings, killing with injections in the hospital (an operation led by Uscha [Unterscharführer] Kler [Klehr], the number of victims reaching up to 200 a day), killing by gas. Gassing the prisoners began in 1941, when about 700 people were gassed in the basement of block 11, including 500 people brought from the Russian territory occupied by the German military after the outbreak of war, and about 200 people selected from among the hospital patients. Then the gassing was carried out in gas chamber of Crematory I. The chamber was constructed according to personal instructions from Höß. Further gassing operations were performed in a specially adapted residential house in Birkenau, the last mass executions being carried out in the huge gas chambers of Crematoria II and III. Overall there were 5 crematoria in the Auschwitz camp premises, where 6000 bodies could be burnt a day. That kind of capacity was still insufficient whenever special operations were conducted, and in such cases they would burn giant pyres in the Brzezinka forest. Of course these actions were done with Höß’s knowledge and he was managing them personally. The best proof of him being trusted by Himmler and Pohl is the fact that he was nominated Sonderbeauftragte für die Umsiedlung der Ungarischen Juden by them in 1944. In order to perform that operation he was first sent to Hungary, and after organizing the transports he came back to Auschwitz and supervised the whole operation which took the lives of 400 thousand people in the span of three weeks. During the operation, children were thrown alive into the fire, and I heard that Höß was to throw a child into the fire himself.
I need to point out that the interrogations in the Political Department were dreaded among prisoners, because the interrogated were tortured in the most horrible ways. There were cases of inmates being taken to the hospital, or sometimes to a crematory, directly from the interrogations. Especially tormented were the prisoners of the penal company from the “death block” (block 11) and the bunkers situated in that block. Engineer Jan Pilecki (Polish Radio in Katowice), who has just come back from abroad a week ago, could provide many details and surnames, since as a block clerk he came into contact with the data every day. The same number of details and surnames could be found in the letter of engineer Artur Krzetuski, sent earlier this year to the Ministry of Justice, to the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland. A copy of that letter is in possession of citizen Krzetuski and he could submit it on request.
I must mention two more special operations – selecting the most wretched people to be gassed, and getting rid of typhoid fever and other contagious diseases by removing the sick on trucks and gassing them. The details of the operations carried out in the hospital and experimental block, where they were experimenting on lab rats – men and women – could be disclosed by Dr. Fejkiel, residing in Kraków (a former Auschwitz prisoner). Selecting the so‑ called ‘muslims’ was especially horrid, and claimed a couple of hundred victims picked from among men and women.
In the light of the above facts I can state that due to commandant Höß’s actions, Auschwitz camp became a death camp and that the people inside were destroyed by the heavy labor, beatings, drowning, burning, breaking of bones, hanging, being beaten to death, freezing, starving, shooting, gassing, injecting and by scientific experiments.
This is all I have to say.
The report was read out.