On 27 February 1947 in Kraków, District Investigative Judge Jan Sehn, a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, 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 relation to Art. 255, 107, and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, heard the person named below as a witness. The witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Dr. Adam Zacharski |
| Date and place of birth | 9 April 1899, Kraków |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | department director in the Ministry of Work and Social Policy |
| Place of residence | Warsaw (Bielany), Karska Street 1 |
I stayed in the concentration camp in Auschwitz from 18 July 1941 until 27 October 1944, as prisoner no. 18,239. At the beginning, I worked in various kommandos. I spent the longest period of time carrying bricks. Around September 1941, having passed out, I was taken from a roll call to the hospital block 21. After recovering I assumed the function of a clerk’s assistant in the hospital administrative office.
As in other department offices, such as the administrative office of the Department of Employment, a precise index of all camp prisoners was kept there, including the healthy prisoners, as well as those staying in the hospital. The purpose of this index was to record the number of prisoners and to facilitate the daily roll calls.
The majority, I would say 95 percent, of prisoners admitted to the hospital were indeed seriously ill, that is, those suspected of epidemic disease due to high temperature (with the risk of spreading the disease), severe surgical cases, and the prisoners who were physically exhausted. They would be first examined by a prisoner-doctor, who would treat a part of them as outpatients, rationing out – according to availability – appropriate medicine. The rest were designated to be examined by an SS doctor the next morning. The prisoner-doctor was also present during that examination, reporting each case to the SS doctor. The SS doctor looked closely at the ill prisoner and decided whether they were to be admitted to the hospital as seriously ill (Stationare Kranke), allowed a few days of rest (Blockschonung) or sent to their death by means of lethal injections. Those selected by the SS doctor to be injected were led to block 20, where they would be killed by an SDG [Sanitätsdienstgrade, auxiliary medical personnel] SS man, such as Klehr, Scherpe or Mierzwicki, and sometimes by pathological persons ordered by them: Mieczysław Pańszczyk, Szymkowiak – nicknamed “Perełka” – and Alfred Stessel [Stössel]. In the initial period, intravenous phenol injections were used, later these were replaced by injections to the heart. In principle, those murders were committed in the laboratory in block 28.
From former prisoner no. 46, Feliks Walentynowicz, who worked at the prison hospital, I heard that those seriously ill were also killed with phenol injections in their hospital beds. From my own observation, I know that in many cases seriously ill prisoners were ordered by the Political Department to be brought to the Rapportführer [report leader] (Palitsch [Palitzsch], Stiwitz [Stiewitz]) at 6.45 a.m. on the following day and then taken to block 11, where they would be executed. The prisoners who could not be brought to the Rapportführer due to their health were carried from the hospital on a stretcher straight to block 11, where they were killed with a phenol injection.
An entire contingent of prisoners who had died or who were possibly murdered on a given day at the camp would go through the hospital administrative office. This contingent included those who had died a “normal” (meaning non-violent) death in the hospital, those who got injected and those executed in block 11, gassed, or killed at work. Those who died in the hospital were included in the hospital records and they could be removed from those records and reported as dead for the roll call. As for the other deceased, the hospital had to first receive their cards of admission to the hospital (which took place after their death).
In other words, they had to be added to the record, so that they could be later removed on a given day, based on the death reports (Totenmeldung).
On the occasion of larger homicidal acts – such as the elimination of typhus at Auschwitz in the summer of 1942 or the massive selections of prisoners from the hospital records, where in both cases all selected prisoners were gassed on the same day – the hospital received a compiled list of all murdered prisoners. As ordered by the command, they were then removed from the record by batches over a period of several days. The removing of such people from the record sometimes took 10–14 days, even though all of them had been murdered on the same day. The process was regulated in this way, so that the number of those who died on a given day wouldn’t be too large and therefore it wouldn’t attract attention. Thanks to this manipulation, the number of people reported as dead oscillated around a single norm, on average reaching up to 200–250 per day.
At the hospital administrative office, there was a group of prisoners comprised of Jerzy Czubak, a junior high school teacher from Poznań, Wojciech Barcz (addresses unknown), and Slovak Jews Andrzej Mittelmann from Humene and Jakub Bistric from Bańska Bystrzyca. They occupied themselves making up fictional diseases for the prisoners who had died or who were murdered on a given day. When I started working at the hospital administrative office, all these prisoners were already equipped with notebooks, which included templates of medical history for various types of diseases. Each notebook constituted, as it were, a separate volume of a general catalogue and included types of diseases different from those included in other notebooks. Since the Political Department, which received a duplicate of such medical history, was complaining that the causes of death were too monotonous and lacked variety, the catalogue was added to during my work at the administrative office. Czubak or Barcz would be working on a medical history template for a new type of disease, which hadn’t appeared in the catalogue before. They were using Domarus’s textbook on internal medicine. A medical history outline for a given disease entity was then discussed with an SS doctor, most often Entress. Having been approved, the template became part of the catalogue. The above-mentioned prisoners would fill out the medical history and cause of death for each dead person according to those templates. The disease and cause of death were matched to the body at random, which – along with negligence – sometimes led to cases in which a young prisoner died as a result of an itch common among the elderly.
All prisoners who died on a given day and who were removed from the hospital record, were also added to the register of the deceased on that same day. In cases where the deceased had never actually been to the hospital, the inscription in the register was just a mathematical operation. In order to avoid making mistakes, we put special check marks in the register of the deceased, as well as in the hospital file.
In August 1943, the SS doctor Dr. Entress came to the administrative office, with SDG Hantel. He removed all the prisoners employed in the administrative office from their posts, except for myself and my friend Paweł Reincke (currently residing in Bydgoszcz). Entress ordered me to show him the registers of the deceased and when I did, he asked how I marked the cases of unnatural death (injections, gassing, execution). Trying to avoid consequences – death for being a Geheimnisträger [bearer of secrets] – I told him I knew no cases of unnatural death. Entress smiled and, pointing to the check marks in the register, asked what they meant. I answered that they were meant to help us with keeping the register and compiling the monthly reports of epidemic diseases. He then ordered me to work at night. During the next few nights, I was to draft all files marked in that way from the register and, along with all registers of the deceased, hand them over to the SDG. Working at night, under the surveillance of an SDG on duty, we completed the task given to us by Entress and we gave all of the requested documents to SDG Hantel. He took them in a cart to Crematorium I in Auschwitz, where they were burned. Having completed the work, I was summoned by Entress to his office. He told me the following: Wenn ich jetzt noch eine einzige Karte finde, so wirst du was erleben.
Conscious of the danger and knowing, at the same time, that the documents destroyed on Entress’s orders were important evidence, I took a pack of documents from the archive. Those concerned prisoners I knew personally and whom I knew to have been murdered. I remember that I picked the documents concerning the deaths of Tempek (attorney), Stefan Żabicki (doctor), Wilhelm Turschmidt (doctor), Ullman (bank clerk), Wojdalski (student), Julian Kozioł (doctor), Władysław Joniec (clerk), Stanisław Hodorowski (deputy head of a savings bank in Kraków), Henryk Suchnicki (doctor), Leon Kukiełka (student), Marian Gieszczykiewicz (professor from Kraków), Alfred Stössel (prisoner) and the death certificates of two boys from the group of 120 murdered children from the region of Zamość. These are the documents that have been presently shown to me (documents described in the inspection protocol of 14 September 1946, volume 4, pages 116–124). The documents were bricked in at the top of the attic in block 21, facing blocks 10 and 11, by a fellow prisoner, Franciszek Klenk (residing in Katowice, 3 Maja Street 10). I fully recognize these documents and confirm with absolute certainty that these are the authentic documents taken by me from the archive of the prison hospital at the main camp in Auschwitz. I purposely chose the documents concerning prisoners whose deaths, as well as the circumstances in which they died, were known to me.
Both of the underage boys, Rycyk and Rycaj, along with a group of 120 of their peers, were injected with phenol by SDG Scherpe in block 20. Tempek and Hodorowski were first staying in the main camp. In the summer of 1942, along with a group of other prisoners, they were moved to the camp in Birkenau and sent to the penal company. Not too long after that, the SS men organized a massacre among the prisoners of said company, chasing them out into the yard and shooting at them with revolvers. Tempek and Hodorowski were shot by the first Schutzhaftlagerführer [camp leader] Aumeier himself. They both died on the same day. The different dates written on the stamp in the questionnaire mean that they were removed from the register of prisoners on different days. The diagnoses provided as causes of death in both questionnaires are false and made-up. Both of them were healthy and they were murdered. Adam Ullman was murdered in a deceitful manner during the general elimination of typhus at the camp in Auschwitz in June 1942. As a convalescent, almost fully recovered and fit for work, he was ordered to bring other sick prisoners to the doctor and then to the car, which would take them to the gas chamber. Having completed that work, he was also thrown into the car and taken to Birkenau, where he was gassed. Żabicki, Turschmidt, Wojdalski, Kozioł, Joniec, Suchnicki, Kukiełka and Gieszczykiewicz were executed in block 11. The execution was performed by Rapportführers Palitzsch and Stiewitz. Stössel was also executed in block 11, where he was taken from the hospital. In conclusion, all medical records included in the documents that I managed to save contained fake causes of death.
At irregular intervals, which did not exceed the period of one month, an SS doctor would select prisoners from the hospital blocks, picking the patients with no prognosis of a speedy recovery or those who did not seem fully fit for work due to their illness. All the selected prisoners were (usually) gathered in block 19. From there, they were taken in trucks to the gas chambers in Birkenau.
I would like to state explicitly that not only Jews of all nationalities were selected to be gassed, but also prisoners of non-Jewish origin. Tadeusz Szantroch, a junior high school teacher from Kraków, whom I knew personally, fell victim to such a selection. He was selected by Entress from block 21, where he was staying with a heart disease. The decisive factor in choosing Szantroch was the fact that his legs were swollen due to his illness. The same symptom (swollen legs) also brought Adam Stawarski, Deputy Prosecutor at the District Court in Kraków, to his death. He was a victim of a nighttime selection led by Entress in the potato storehouse. A larger group of prisoners recruited from the intelligentsia and employed at the potato storehouse at the time were selected along with Stawarski. I also remember the case of the death of the Kraków voivodeship’s former Governor, Mikołaj Kwaśniewski. As ordered by the Political Department, due to his bad health condition, he was carried on a stretcher to block 11, where he was injected with phenol. Or – I don’t remember exactly – he was injected in his hospital bed.
The report was read out. At this the procedure and the report were concluded.