On 12 September 1946 in Gliwice, Regional Investigative Judge Jan Sehn, a member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, at the spoken request and in the presence of a member of that Commission, Deputy Prosecutor Edward Pęchalski, pursuant to and in accordance with Article 4 of the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293), in connection with Articles 254, 107, 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, interviewed a former prisoner of the concentration camp in Auschwitz who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Feliks Myłyk |
| Date and place of birth | 3 February 1913, Charzewice, Tarnobrzeg District |
| Citizenship and nationality | Polish |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Occupation | clerk |
| Place of residence | Gliwice, Jaskółcza Street 2a |
I arrived at the Auschwitz camp on 14 June 1940 and I stayed there until 16 October 1944, as prisoner no. 92. It was the first transport from the occupied Polish territories, sent to Auschwitz by the commander of the Security Police in the Kraków district. I arrived there with over 750 Polish prisoners. The entire transport was placed in the monopoly building located near the railway track. The building was fenced off with barbed wire. On 20 June 1940, a second transport arrived at Auschwitz. It was a transport from Wiśnicz, consisting of about 300 prisoners. Prisoners from that transport were placed in former artillery barracks marked with the numbers 1, 2 and 3. The next transports came from Silesia. In the case of those transports, a special admission procedure was established which consisted in administering 25 lashes to each newly arrived prisoner.
Rudolf Höß was the commandant and the founder of the camp. Fritzsch was the Lagerführer, and Aumeier was his deputy. Already at that time, the following men served in the camp: Palitzsch as the Rapportführer, Hössler as the Arbeitseinsatzführer and Max Grabner as the head of the Political Department. Along with Grabner, the following men worked at the Political Department at that time: Kirschner, Dzierzan-Hoffer, Lachmann, Hoffman, Dylewski, Setnik [?], Wosnitz, Thilo, Broch, and Boger. In the first days, the Political Department occupied one room in the monopoly building, which was separated from the building where the prisoners from the first transport had been placed. Then, it was moved to a building located opposite the crematorium, which was later called SS-Revir, then to another barrack and finally to the headquarter building. The department also included the so-called Aufnahme office and the identification service Erkennungsdienst. The Aufnahme office was located in the so-called Blockführerstube next to the main entrance gate to the camp. The admission of prisoners (Aufnahme) took place in block 25, while the Erkennungsdienst, where prisoners were photographed, was located in block 26. The task of the Political Department was to register all prisoners arriving at the camp, and to register and record all changes in the number of prisoners, caused by their death, transfer, escape or release. Additionally, the department planned all extermination operations in the camp directed against its prisoners, both for offenses committed in the camp, and in many cases for acts performed outside the camp which prisoners behind the wires had no influence on.
For example, for acts of sabotage or resistance in the Zamość and Lublin regions, all prisoners from those areas were selected and gassed. The same happened to prisoners from Starachowice and the nearby areas, these also being selected and gassed as part of retaliation for acts of sabotage committed in Starachowice. The Political Department, just like all camp institutions, answered directly to the camp commandant, so for a long time to Rudolf Höß. All extermination operations were carried out on the orders of and in consultation with the commandant. Only later, when the world had heard about the Auschwitz crimes, the camp authorities tried to rebuild its reputation, attributing the blame for the crimes and atrocities committed there to the head of the Political Department, Maximilian Grabner. As a result, and probably also in connection with the misappropriation of former Jewish property, he stood trial before the Weimar police court, which, according to my knowledge, sentenced Grabner to 12 years in prison.
From practically the first days of my stay in the Auschwitz camp until 16 October 1944, I worked in the Political Department, so I had a chance to see and realize that all orders regarding the camp operation and regime, as well as orders and plans that resulted in repressive measures against prisoners, were issued by Höß, the commandant of the camp. The plans were developed and implemented by the Political Department, which also supervised the progress of their implementation.
The Auschwitz camp, which initially consisted of three blocks in the form of former artillery barracks, grew into a complex of 28 densely built blocks, and with time it expanded to include a huge camp in Birkenau and several dozen side camps scattered throughout Silesia. Initially, the whole complex reported to a single command office. In 1943, it was divided into three camps with separate command offices, however, the area of competence of the Political Department, always and in all periods, extended to the entire camp.
The same applied to Höß and his successor who were garrison commanders (Standortältester). This was a hierarchy not only of military dependence, but also of professional dependence related to camp affairs. Therefore, decisions regarding all matters and taken in all camps were still up to Höß or his deputy, even after the formal division of the Auschwitz complex into three camps. Some of the crimes committed in Auschwitz by SS men from the camp’s management, ordered by Höß, are the following:
1) In the early autumn of 1941, the first transport of Russian prisoners of war arrived at the Auschwitz camp. It consisted only of officers – about 600. All of them were driven into block 11 (according to the old numbering system, this was block 13), where they were gassed along with a group of patients selected from the prison hospital. The corpses of the people gassed at night were taken to the crematorium and burned. The crematorium was opened already at the end of 1940.
2) In the late autumn of 1941, about 11 thousand Russian prisoners from Lamsdorf were brought to Auschwitz. A separate camp was formed for them within the camp, the so-called prisoner-of-war camp (Kriegsgefangenenlager), located in blocks 1–3, 12–14, and 22–24. The camp was separated from the rest by high-voltage barbed wire. Within a few winter months at the end of 1941 and beginning of 1942, almost all prisoners from that group died. About a hundred Russian prisoners who remained alive were transferred to the Birkenau camp. They died because of insufficient food, lack of proper clothing and due to difficult working conditions. A large part of them was murdered in work details. Piles of corpses of Russian prisoners, who had been murdered at work, were carried on carts behind groups of their comrades returning to the camp.
3) In order to “cleanse” the hospitals and the camp from people unfit for work and those who had turned into Muselmanns [severely emaciated prisoners] due to difficult camp conditions, so-called selections were performed. The selected prisoners were killed with gas. The sick were also gassed as a method of fighting the typhus epidemic. Based on hospital records, all prisoners with typhus fever were selected, regardless of their condition. Therefore, apart from prisoners actually suffering from typhus, prisoners who had recuperated from the disease and the convalescents who had already returned to their details were often taken to the gas chambers.
4) In many cases, when the Gestapo sent prisoners to the camp, they wrote the words “Rückkehr unerwünscht” [return undesirable] in their files. When I worked in the office of the Political Department, I noticed that the files of such prisoners were marked with a red cross. Initially, I did not understand where it came from and why the files were marked in this way. It turned out that such prisoners were then selected and executed by firing squad. At first, the executions took place in the Kiesgrube [gravel pit] near the camp’s main gate. Then, it was done in the yard of block 11, where a special wall was built for that purpose, the so-called wall of death. In the Kiesgrube, prisoners were executed by a firing squad. In block 11, they were shot by SS men, most often by Palitzsch. They used silent guns there.
Apart from Palitzsch, people who performed executions in block 11 were: Kirschner, Florschütz, and Lachmann. All the executions were carried out in accordance with the plan by the commandant’s office and the Political Department, because no such order came from the outside. There were also cases when prisoners were brought to Auschwitz to be executed or specifically admitted to the camp for execution.
In the former case, prisoners brought for execution were not registered in the camp records at all. In the latter case, the prisoners received their own numbers, but they were shot dead within a short period of time. That is what happened to a group of officers and other people arrested in Kraków in connection with the shooting of some German military men. After the arrival of that transport, which consisted of about 200 people, a Gestapo officer from Kraków came to the camp and gave an order to write down the names of all prisoners from the transport who were still alive. After some time, that list was sent to Auschwitz along with an order to execute all the prisoners named in it by firing squad, with a clear indication that it was in retaliation for the murder of Lutz (Vergeltungsmaßnahme Lutz).
In all cases of executions performed by Höß and the Political Department on their own, the prisoner’s file was supplemented with his medical history and other hospital documents, which stated that the prisoner had died of natural causes, of a disease which was clearly indicated as the cause of death in the file. In the case of other executions carried out in the camp, the only document that was issued was an execution report. Therefore, Höß and all his subordinates acted on their own and hid such operations from their superiors by pretending and creating formal evidence. This is also confirmed by the fact that in the case of mass executions, when reporting the number of prisoners to Berlin, the commandant’s office divided the murdered prisoners into groups and reported them as executed on different days.
5) From March 1942, the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt) started sending transports of prisoners to Auschwitz. They usually consisted of Jews, although Aryans were also sent to Auschwitz by order of the RSHA. By such an order, a group of over a thousand French Aryans and Poles from the Lublin region arrived at Auschwitz. I believe it was in June 1942. Most of the prisoners who were brought to the camp by order of the RSHA were taken from the railway ramp straight to the gas chambers. Only a small percentage of professionals who were fit for work and were reported as needed by the Arbeitseinsatz [labor deployment] were sent to the camp and given numbers, initially in accordance with the general numbering system, and later on included in special A and B systems for Jews. All prisoners sent from the ramp directly to gas chambers were mentioned only in transport lists sent by the police unit carrying out the RSHA order for a given region or a given group of people. The lists were stored in the Aufnahme office in the Blockführerstube, and the names of people who were gassed were not crossed out. The names of people who were brought to the camp were marked with red pencil. I know this from my own observations, because Berlin often asked about Jews who had been brought in such transports. If a prisoner whom Berlin asked about was not included in the register of numbered prisoners, Kirschner sent me to the Aufnahme office to find out whether the person had ever been brought to Auschwitz and what had happened to them. If I informed Kirschner that the person was on the transport list but their name was not marked, he wrote to Berlin that the person had indeed been brought to Auschwitz, but had died in the camp. In other cases, that is when the records indicated that the given prisoner from an RSHA transport was admitted to the camp, Berlin was told that the prisoner had arrived at the camp and was alive, but it was impossible to release them because they knew the camp’s secrets (Geheimnisträger). Correspondence with Berlin related to such matters usually concerned Jewish prisoners who were to be released as a result of the efforts by allies of Nazi Germany. I would like to point out that the term Geheimnistäger was used to describe all prisoners who, due to the tasks they performed in the camp, were familiar with matters that the camp management wanted to keep secret. That was also the case with all prisoners employed in the Political Department. Therefore, almost all Aryans were dismissed from work in that office and only Jewish women were employed there, because they were not supposed to leave the camp anyway. I remained in the Political Department because I had worked there from the beginning. Despite my efforts, I was not fired. A special category of Geheimnisträgers were members of the so-called Sonderkommando [special unit] that worked in the gas chambers and crematorium. Such work was performed only by Jews. A few Aryans, Czesław Moraw and others, who worked in crematorium I in Auschwitz in the first period, were later transported to Mauthausen, where they were murdered. The Jewish crew of the Sonderkommando was replaced from time to time: the old members were gassed and new Jews were assigned to the job.
I believe Höß is a criminal who used others to commit crimes, tyrannically ruled the entire camp and, outside the camp, pretended to be a decent man.
The report was read out. At this point, the interview of the witness and the present report were concluded.