Auschwitz, 7 August 1946, District Judge Jan Sehn, acting in accordance with the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws No. 51, item 293) on the Main Commission and District Commissions for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, as a member of the Main Commission, pursuant to art. 255 and in relation to art. 107, 115 of the Criminal Code, heard the person named below, who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Ludwik Rajewski |
| Date and place of birth | 16 December 1900 in Łódź |
| Parents’ names | Jan and Kunegunda née Horoszewicz |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Nationality and national affiliation | Polish |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Radzymińska Street 23 apartment 7 |
During the first months of the occupation I was working as the headmaster of the Lorenza Junior High School in Warsaw. In connection with the celebration of 3 May 1940, I was summoned—together with my colleagues from other schools—on 10 May 1940 to Daniłowiczowska Street, where, after confirming who was present, reading the list and releasing several people, the Gestapo arrived and the rest of the group, including myself, were taken away to Pawiak. I stayed in this prison until 22 September 1940. No investigations were conducted against me throughout this time. On 22 September 1940, I was transported on the second Warsaw transport to the concentration camp in Auschwitz, where I stayed until 25 October 1944, when I was sent to Oranienburg. Subsequently, I passed through the concentration camps in Sachsenhausen and in Barth near Rostock.
From the moment of our arrival at the Auschwitz camp we—including our comrade Dębski (Dubois)—tried to establish contact with the outside world, carefully observing everything that was going on in the camp. Contact with Kraków was established by the late Kostek Jagiełła, and in this way we could inform the outside world about what was happening in the camp. Initial contact was very ad hoc until the time from 1943, when the international underground organization ‘Auschwitz’ was established, and permanent contact was made possible with the help of comrades Cyrankiewicz and Kuryłowicz. Working in an underground organization enabled me to assess the living conditions in the camp on a deeper level than was permissible or possible for the average prisoner, as my book, Auschwitz w systemie RSHA [Reichssicherheitshauptamt] [Auschwitz in the RSHA [Reichssicherheitshauptamt] system], testifies. On this basis, I declare the following:
The German occupiers came to the Polish lands with ready-made concentration camp apparatus refined down to the smallest detail. This institution, tried and tested over many years by the national-socialist system, primarily served in Germany to destroy— purposefully and consciously—all opponents of this system. It was a well-thought-out apparatus, directed from above by the headquarters of Berlin, and run within a framework of individual concentration camps by people specially trained for this purpose. We knew—and today I have the impression that it is now universally known—that SS men and concentration camp officers underwent special training in Dachau. The methods for destroying the prisoners kept behind the wires of the concentration camps were: murderous work carried out on the double (each of us today can still hear the calls of Laufschritt, Bewegung) [run, move], the so-called sport carried out on the command and under the supervision of SS men and their helpers, transformed into absolutely horrendous harassment and ruinous to the physical health of prisoners, special punitive units (SK [Strafkompanie]) designed for the fastest possible destruction of any prisoners assigned to these units, an entire system of disciplinary punishments imposed by the camp command, such as the bunker, the standing cell, flogging, or starvation.
Those with weaker moral standards were more easily susceptible to persuasion by the SS men and, for the price of a few scraps thrown their way, they gradually became a tool in their hands, a tool that followed from the mode of the SS men’s thinking. With these small incentives, I can see the genesis of the camp senior, who in many cases relieved the SS of the burden of carrying out the dirtiest work, and above all, of those tasks most compromising for the German concentration camps. How far a hungry man can stray is proven by the fact that not only professional criminals, but also political prisoners in many cases became willing assistants to their SS bosses.
The first commandant of the concentration camp in Auschwitz, Rudolf Höß, began working in this camp with a ready-made apparatus and according to an old program tried and tested in Germany. Both the SS men under him and the first thirty of the old German KZ men had all had years of practice in camp life. This life was organized in Auschwitz and was immediately adopted right from the outset into the functioning system they wished to create, imposed and orchestrated from above. This resulted in a rapid mortality rate among prisoners in the first period of the camp’s existence. That this wasn’t just a coincidence is proven by the fact that the first Lagerführer of the camp—Fritsch [Fritzsch]—announced to the prisoners arriving at the camp that they could ‚expect to survive here three months at the most’.
While the prisoners who arrived at the camp in the first period were supposed to survive, according to the SS guidelines, for a maximum of three months, the groups sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp by the Reichssicherheitshauptamt from March 1942 on, designated ‘RSHA transports’, were sent to the camp in order to be wiped out as soon as possible. In this case, the camp served as a place of execution. From these transports only a certain number of arrivals were chosen who were necessary to fill any vacancies in the labor kommandos that existed when the transports came in. This was a very small number— according to our assessment, this was a maximum of five percent of the total transport.
On the basis of general directives for the RSHA transports, which bore one number for all those who arrived within a given group, the following groups arrived at the Auschwitz camp: Jews from the Protectorate [Czech and Moravian], Romanian Jews, Hungarian Jews, Jews from Germany, Jews from France, Jews from Belgium, Jews from the Netherlands, Jews from Theresienstadt, Jews from Yugoslavia, Jews from Greece, Jews from Bialystok, Jews from Poland and Polish Aryans. The latter group of so-called RSHA transports to Auschwitz included people deported from the Zamość region. RSHA transports were crowded: each of them comprised between 1,000 and 2,500 people. From among those arriving on such transports, at the very most five percent were admitted to the camp and entered in the camp records, as I previously mentioned,. The rest went straight to the gas without any records. There were cases where no one was admitted to the camp from some RSHA transports. Such transports don’t appear at all on the list of transports arriving at Auschwitz which we have in our possession. This list only includes transports from which at least a few prisoners were admitted to the camp and were included in the register. The number of people transported where some were admitted to the camp can only be approximated. The numbers of those transported and sent directly to the gas can’t be determined at this time.
For the same purpose, over 10,000 Russian prisoners of war were sent to the Auschwitz camp. They arrived in Auschwitz in the autumn of 1941 and within five months, by the beginning of 1942, they were murdered there. The first group was killed within three days in the Kiesgrub before the Blockführerstube of the mother camp. A further 600 were gassed in October 1941 in the basements of block 11. The rest—with very few exceptions (not more than one hundred), starved to death or were worked to death, shot or given injections.
My work in the reception office (Aufnahme) gave me the opportunity to move freely around the camp and study it. Besides, due to my work in the underground camp organization I was informed about what was going on in the camp. On this basis, I am of the opinion that camp commandant Rudolf Höß was interested in all aspects of life in the camp, often looking into even the tiniest details. The members of the SS crew were subordinate to him, disciplined, afraid of him, and they obeyed his orders to the letter. Therefore, everything that was happening in the Auschwitz camp was carried out with the knowledge and consent or at the request of Höß. His influence on the affairs of the Auschwitz camp didn’t stop even after he left its command. This is proven by the fact that it was Höß who, as the head of one of the official groups of the Wirtschafte und Verwaltungshauptamt in Berlin, sent Hungarian Jews to the Auschwitz camp to be executed. In order to carry out this operation, in the summer of 1944, he returned to Auschwitz to oversee it personally.
The stigmatization of Höß’s rule in the Auschwitz camp by the authorities was made known to the prisoners via the decrees of his successor, Liebehenschl [Liebehenschel], where Liebehenschel branded the treatment of prisoners by the camp authorities as harassment and abolished a full gamut of extreme directives. The necessity felt by Liebehenschel to repeal these directives shows that such directives from the Höß period were still in force and were being carried out by his subordinates. The fact that Liebehenschel was able to soften the conditions and create the pretense of a more lenient approach towards the prisoners does not indicate that he had a more humane attitude towards them. This was a tactic imposed upon Liebehenschel from above. One reason for this is seen as the necessity to rescue the reputation of German concentration camps, discredited at that time around the world as a result of a propaganda campaign run by underground organizations working in the camps. Another reason was the need to maintain the work force required by the German arms industry. That the central authorities were concerned about their reputation among the rest of the world, and were primarily afraid of retaliation and the reprisals threatened by the allies is proven by the following fact: in the summer of 1944, a meeting of SS officers from the Auschwitz garrison was held regarding the liquidation of the camp in the event of an emergency evacuation. Moll then suggested liquidating the camp by bombing it with planes and bombarding it with heavy artillery. Our organization heard this news and we forwarded it to the outside, and shortly afterwards the governments allied with England threatened severe retaliation in a radio announcement.
The threat was effective and the camp survived. We took Moll’s project quite seriously and therefore we were looking for ways to prevent it. That our fears were well founded is proven by the fate of the prisoners from the Neuengamme camp, who were sunk on cruisers in the open sea.
The report was read out and concluded.