Ninth day of the hearing, 20 March 1947.
Witness has stated with regards to himself: Dr Władysław Tondos, 46 years old, married, Roman Catholic, no relation to the parties.
Presiding judge: What are the motions of parties with regards to the mode of interview of the witness?
Prosecutor Siewierski: We relieve [the witness] of the oath.
Defence Attorney Ostaszewski: We relieve [the witness] of the oath.
Presiding judge: The Tribunal has decided to hear the witness without an oath. Please say what the witness knows about the case.
Witness: I arrived in Auschwitz in July of 1941. After a bath, a disinfection, and a pest control procedure, we were lined up in the square the next day. We were received by Lagerführer [camp leader] Fritzsch. 64 of us had arrived from Tarnów on that occasion. I note that two men of that transport are still alive today. Lagerführer Fritzsch had a speech for us. He said that we had come to a German concentration camp, that if we would be disciplined, obedient, hard-working, it may come to pass that some of us might get out of the camp. He advised those who were under 20 years old and those who were over 50 years old to go to the [barbed] wires right away. I note here that the camp was surrounded with four lines of wire beyond which were guardhouses with machine guns, and the wires were connected to high voltage electricity. If one approached the wires, or even made it past the first wire, then before making it to the high voltage electrified wire one would usually be hit by an SS-man’s bullet.
After a few days of work in the camp I got into the hospital at Block 28. I was given Ward 9 to manage as a nurse, as there were no Polish doctors at the time. My duties included examining the patients, managing the medical records, bringing the patients food in barrels from the kitchen, washing floors, windows, all kinds of maintenance in the ward. The ward had 90 beds, or, rather, 3-level bunks. There were up to 180 patients. They were usually laid two to a bed.
I would like to mention here that the ward could perhaps have had special significance inasmuch as the view from the windows was on the Kiesgrube, the gravel mine some 50 meters away. That mine was the workplace of the penal company. I saw how that work went on from the windows many times. The people were exhausted and horribly beaten. They were beaten and killed with sticks amd shovels. I remember it as if it was yesterday: a 16 year old boy, on his knees, his hands clasped together, begging an SS-man for his life. [The SS-man] beat him with a stick over the head until he had killed him. The penal company usually returned from work carrying a dozen or several dozen corpses, but it always came back singing. They had to come back singing.
Going back to my work in Ward 9 now – it was the place for the seriously ill, many of them with pneumonia and especially with the then-most terrifying camp disease – starvation diarrhea. I would like to highlight that the medication did not help as far as the diarrhea was concerned. The medication that did help the patient was usually protein in the form of meat or cheese or quark or perhaps raw sauerkraut. The patients were usually checked up on once or twice a week by an SS-man doctor or the German nurse, a cobbler by profession, or perhaps even by the block elder, a German. I must note that in the very beginning, before the German block elder understood the procedure of the examination, one time, when checking up on me doing the examinations in order to make sure I was not keeping healthy people as sick ones, he started examining the patients himself. As it was in the very beginning, he did not understand the examination procedure yet, so he put the stethoscope earplugs around his neck and examined the patients like that.
I quickly understood the so-called selections of patients – these were conducted by the doctors or German nurses – and what happened to those patients afterwards. They would go to receive a [lethal] phenol injection. Those injections were performed, at the time in 1941, in Block 28, the bathhouse. From there the bodies were immediately carried to the basement and taken to the crematorium every evening.
Before I return to the phenol injections, I would like to mention – as it was in the autumn of 1941, specifically in September – the matter of the first gassings in the camp. During a so-called medical commission, 280 patients from the hospital were selected. We had to carry the ones who could not walk to the front of the hospital on our backs. There, their numbers were checked and we were told to carry them to Block 11, the penal company block – I stress that the penal company had been moved to another block a few days earlier. We carried the patients downstairs to the bunker. They were taken from us in the hallway and laid in the bunkers on the concrete, on top of each other, in layers, like chopped trees in a forest. Later that afternoon we watched from the block as some 600 Russian prisoners of war were brought to Block 11. In the evening, we saw SS-men sneaking around the bunker in gas masks. After four or five days, at 11 PM, we, 30 prisoners from the hospital – I was among them as well, were taken, lined up in fives, and led to Block 11. We knew gas had been used. We did not know if they would want to have witnesses. We only knew we were going to work. After descending to Block 11, we dragged the corpses of the gassed from the bunkers into the yard and stripped them. The bodies were slimy, filled with subcutaneous putrefaction gases. I remember a small room where some 60 Russian prisoners of war had been sitting. It was like this: they were all sitting as if they were asleep, as if death surprised them in their sleep. Two were holding their caps to their noses. One was lying across the others.
When we were stripping both prisoners and Russian prisoners of war, we wondered why they were gassed. As regards the prisoners of war, we wondered what kind of people they were to have been gassed. We managed to pull documents out of the pockets of more than a dozen prisoners of war. We looked through those papers later. It turned out they were kolkhoz [collective farm] workers, locksmiths, drivers – in a word: regular people, not commissars, as we had expected, because at first we thought that maybe they were gassing the commissars.
Later, we loaded the bodies onto truck beds which took more or less 70 each, and in the night, quietly, so that the camp would not find out, we hauled them through the camp to the crematorium. In 1941 there was still only one crematorium in the main Auschwitz [camp]. That crematorium was too small, so a new electric one was built.
Now, going back to Ward 9, Block 28. Aside from phenol and gas – which had made a terrifying impression on the entire camp, as we suspected they would liquidate the camp that way at any moment – there were very frequent mass shootings. At first the shootings were performed by firing squads, later on, the Genickeschuss – a shot to the back of the head – was used. I saw the bodies of the dead being hauled out of the Block 11 yard. I saw with my own eyes how a truck loaded with corpses drove off the yard, across the pavement and onto the road. The pavement was much higher than the road, which caused a strong bump. I saw then the blood of those freshly shot [prisoners] leak out literally by the bucket load. The blood flowed through the streets – as we would say back then.
After such shootings, I saw defendant Höß himself leaving that spectacle alongside civilians and military men, or even German women.
I return now again to Block 28, Ward 9. The patients generally received worse food than the [rest of the] camp. The seriously ill, with a fever of 39 degrees [Celsius] or more, did not receive the so-called work supplements. Aside from the selections, which took place every week or sometimes twice a week, the sick were pulled out of the infirmary. The sick who reported to the hospital were first received by a prisoner doctor, who would diagnose their condition very briefly, as they would have to examine and diagnose 600-700 patients during two morning hours. Then the SS-man doctor would arrive. The sick, appropriately prepared – given haircuts and shaved – were lined up, naked. They would pass in front of the SS-man doctor, one after another. He would decide: those less sick, who looked better, were taken to the hospital, those who looked unwell – with him the deciding factor was less the diagnosis and more the looks of the patient – were taken aside. Those went for phenol injections straight out of the infirmary.
There were days, I remember, when there were 300 to 700 of such patients who went for the injections.
The phenol injections were first administered intravenously, later on, since the point was to inflict mass death, and finding the vein was occasionally difficult, they began administering the injections intracardially.
In 1942, an epidemic of typhus broke out in the camp. The camp was terribly infested with lice. The sick were taken to the hospital. The typhus block was overcrowded. The patients were piled up three, four to a bed. Moreover, the entire floor was covered in patients. At the time, nothing was being done in Auschwitz to combat the epidemic. Only once the SS-men and even doctors (such as Dr. Schwala) started coming down with typhus, a thorough pest control of the camp was conducted.
I remember that the labor blocks were subjected to pest control first. The hospital was cleared last.
It was a time when I had already been assigned as the head doctor of the infirmary in part of the camp after the delousing had been completed. There were still some typhus sufferers. Their numbers were not decreasing for the moment, as the period of incubation of that disease is three weeks. As there were no lice, there was no threat of infection. The hospital was overcrowded. While in charge of the infirmary, I presented the patients not to a doctor, but the so-called Arbeitsdienster, the man assigning work in the camp, would show up. He made the decisions. The patients who had typhus went to the hospital. As it later turned out, all those patients went to the gas chambers. The other patients – with pneumonia, diarrhea – were locked up in the basement during the day. They were allowed to return to their block for the night. Why were they locked up in the basement? The concept resulted from the fact that Durchfall [diarrhea] patients fouled up the blocks. The problem was solved by finding a big basement where they were locked up during the day.
After the delousing of the camp, the time came to purge the hospital. All the patients, even those who were convalescent and should have gone to camp the next day, were loaded from Block 20 – the typhus block – onto cars and hauled away to the gas chambers. On that occasion the German doctor conducted a check-up of the weaker patients, those who had been sick longer, in all buildings, as a patient could not be sick for more than six weeks. Those patients were selected for the gas chamber.
Inflicting death through gassing or phenol injections happened not only to the sick, exhausted older people who had wounds, whose legs had swollen from starvation. I remember how in 1944 two groups of boys fit, 16 year old boys hailing from the Lublin region and Zamość region (one group numbered 48, the other 86) were brought over from Birkenau to Block 20 and there they were injected with phenol. One of those boys, talking to us when they were still standing in the yard, said: “I know what they will do to us. We are the boys whose parents were deported from those lands and taken to Auschwitz. Our parents have all died, now we are to die.”
As for typhus, in Block 20, where I later worked for a longer period as a senior prisoner doctor, they conducted amateurish experiments with no scientific underpinning. Those experiments were conducted by German doctors. They consisted of drawing five centimeters of blood from a typhus sufferer who was already after the crisis, who already had their fever drop, and injecting it into the veins of healthy people. Why did they do that? Really without scientific basis, as a patient after such a blood injection had to fall ill, so the point was to find out how many days would that take. Many of those patients died.
One day, after the pest control period, I was in Block 19. It was the block for the Durchfall sufferers. It is the most terrifying camp disease. The patients were laid out 300-400 to a room, in the morning 20-40 corpses were carried out of beds. I remember one time there was a selection of patients. 700 patients from the whole hospital were selected for the gas chamber and loaded onto cars. The Rapportführer [report officer] at the time was Palitzsch, who picked up those patients. At some point he told us that there were too few, that if there were not enough he would take all of us doctors and nurses. He went to the block. An Älteste [elder], a block secretary, was leading a few dozen patients from the sick ward to the infirmary, all with smaller or larger wounds. They were going to the hospital. Palitzsch ran into them, took them all, including the secretary, to the car and they were taken to the gas chamber. Any SS-man could conduct a selection. If he did not like a kommando, then he could take prisoners from it to the gas.
I often worked as a physiologist in the camp, since that is my specialty. From the very beginning, as far as I can remember, since 1941, that is, from the first year of my stay in the camp, the tuberculosis sufferers with disseminated TB were taken for the phenol injection. In 1941, with the permission of the German doctor, I treated three patients by means of an artificial medical pneumothorax. The Revier [hospital] did not have a separate tuberculosis section. In early 1942, under the orders of the German doctor, two tuberculosis wards were established in Block 20. Three Germans with interest in it [TB] arrived. They put it forward that they wanted to learn to perform the pneumothorax. The Germans even agreed to having the patients receive double food rations in those wards. This happy period lasted three months. After three months, I arrived one day in the morning, like normal, to those two tuberculosis wards and there was not a single patient. During the night all of them had been “needled” – killed with phenol.
It was only later, in 1943, that we were allowed to start a tuberculosis section in Block 20, the infectious diseases block. The patients were treated as well as they could be under the circumstances, but the tuberculosis wards were frequently subjected to selections. It was believed that a tuberculosis sufferer should not be sick for more than three months. If they were there any longer, they were selected and went to the gas. We managed it in such a way that a patient with one or two collapsed lungs would go to work, remaining in the hospital risked selection, death by gas. With feverish patients we were helpless.
I will also mention here that tests were conducted in the hospital and the tuberculosis section. They were conducted by an SS-man, Dr. Vetter, a representative of the Bayer company. He tested a mixture of unknown composition, called Rutenol. The patients reacted poorly to that substance and it caused vomiting. The mixture was later improved by serving it not as powder, but as pills. I was tasked with preparing detailed medical records of the persons treated with Rutenol. Unfortunately, there were no cases of recovery, all patients died. Besides, all of those patients were later selected by Prof. Olbrycht under the orders of Dr. Vetter. He himself left for other camps later on. He came back one day. He instructed me through a German doctor to prepare materials on results. The results were negative. He was surprised. He noted that in other camps the patients would gain 10–20 kg of weight. I asked how they were fed. He said they were given camp food.
Presiding judge: I call a recess. The hearing will continue at 4 p.m.