Eighth day of the hearing, 19 March 1947
The witness has stated the following regarding his person: Mieczysław Kieta, 33 years old, journalist, married, Roman Catholic, no relation to the parties.
Presiding Judge: What motions do the parties submit regarding the questioning procedure?
Prosecutor Cyprian: We release [the witness] from [taking] an oath.
Defense attorney Umbreit: We release [the witness from taking an oath].
Presiding Judge: By mutual agreement of the parties, the Tribunal has decided to question the witness without an oath. I hereby instruct the witness that he is required to speak the truth and that false testimony is subject to criminal liability.
Under what circumstances did the witness arrive in the camp and what can he testify in the matter?
Witness: My father and I were arrested in Kraków on the night of 23 June 1942. After being interned at the Montelupich prison, my father and I were transported to the camp in Oświęcim on 17 August that same year. The transport carried five political prisoners and forty-some criminal prisoners from [the prison in] Święty Krzyż who were serving punishments handed out by Polish courts. One of the prisoners was brought to the transport in handcuffs; he had been charged with matricide by the Polish court. The transport arrived in Oświęcim. After the initial formalities had been sorted [by the SS-men], both the political prisoners and the criminal prisoners were given red triangles – everyone was classed as a political prisoner. After the initial formalities had been sorted [by the SS-men], we remained in front of block 28, stripped naked, where the weighing, the counting of gold teeth and the filling out of our camp records were all done. A huge truck covered with a tarp stood behind block 28. Blood was gushing from that truck and flowing in a torrent into a drain. That caused some consternation in our transport. There was talk that it was meat for the kitchen; later, there were comments that they were body parts after amputation as it had happened by the window of the operating theater in block 20. All of a sudden some German kapos ran up to us and chased us away with sticks. The truck moved off; the wind blew off the tarp. The truck was filled with a heap of corpses soaked in blood. There were over a hundred people who had been shot before noon that day in block 11.
We did not go through quarantine. We were taken to work the very next day. As we were Zugangs [new arrivals], we did not receive any food for three days. It was a custom in the camp which the SS authorities tolerated.
Initially, I worked on the maintenance of the Soła river up until the first large selection took place. All the inmates with typhoid fever were chosen, all the older men in the camp were chosen. It was evening. I don’t remember if the defendant was there. I saw Lagerführer Aumeier and the Rapportführer. They were both looking around near the kitchen. The chosen people were healthy. The selection included everyone who had a minor scratch or a slight leg injury. It was 27 August 1942. It did not happen to me because it happened in the night after the roll call, with a manually operated spotlight. People were loaded into trucks and transported in the direction of Birkenau. Rumors, fueled by the German prisoners, swept through the camp that the selection was being carried out to choose people to be assigned as senior block prisoners, clerks and other such positions in the newly established camp in Birkenau.
I learned about the fate of those people later on. My father was among those who had been taken away, and so I tried to learn [something] from the drivers and installers who were going to work there. After, when I was working in the infirmary’s office, I found a record that that first transport to Birkenau had been gassed on 30 August. All of the records, not only my father’s, but also those of people I had known from Kraków, listed the cause of death as either Fleckfieber [typhoid fever] or Herzschlag [heart attack]. After I had left the camp, I learned that my mother had been notified of father’s death, but the telegram said that he died of Fleckfieber, while the cause of death entered into the file was Herzschlag.
After that selection, at the beginning of September, I was moved to the half of the camp that the female prisoners had once occupied. The first part of the camp, the male prisoners’ camp, had been emptied as a result of the selection. Disinfection was supposed to take place in order to get rid of the typhoid. I was assigned to block 10 which had just been renovated. The painters’ ladders were still standing, the floors were covered with lime and it was very hard work to clean them. That block was beside block 11. The window on the courtyard was covered with wooden boards [between] which were quite large spaces. I saw the executions taking place at block 11. None of the personnel was allowed to be on the right side of the block during an execution. The block was divided into two parts: right and left.
The superior was a German criminal – I don’t remember his name – who had spent 12 years in a concentration camp and who especially maltreated me. I was running late with my work. I had two rooms to put in order and I wasn’t managing it very well. I was afraid of him, so I stayed in the right-hand side of the block despite the orders of the senior block prisoner that nobody was allowed to be there. I saw one execution through the cracks. A few people were shot. Palitzsch was in the courtyard. Lagerführer Aumeier was also there; he had arrived a little later. The shooting didn’t take place by the wall but near the steps leading to block 11. Palitzsch was standing behind the concrete doorframe such that a prisoner coming down the steps would get a bullet in the back of the head. I saw one such moment, after which I left that room, that is to say when one of the shot prisoners, a Czech, cried out in Czech: “Jesus, Mary,” threw himself at Aumeier’s feet and visibly begged him for mercy. Aumeier kicked him, drew his pistol and shot him on the ground.
I was ill at that time and so I was assigned to other work by Lagerführer Bruno. I was assigned to the building of the waterworks. It was behind the storehouse with the bakery. I saw the defendant [there] for the first time. It was some kind of inspection; SS-men and Kommandoführers [work detail leaders] said that there was going to be a big Besuch [visit] and we had to work more efficiently.
It was in the beginning of September, a few days after that first big prisoner segregation. After the roll call, Aumeier spoke on behalf of commandant Höß, standing on the steps of block 5 or 6. He told us: “We don’t want your death — we want your work.” Two days later, gallows were erected in that place and prisoners were executed in direct contradiction to those words. There was an incident once — I don’t remember the date — when a man was being led out of block 11 to the gallows and, as he was passing the lines of prisoners standing for roll call, he joked that his week was starting rather badly. Then I fell ill; I contracted a number of diseases — from typhoid through erysipelas and scarlet fever to typhus. When I wasn’t sick, I worked at block 20.
In the spring of 1943, I was reassigned to the Hygiene Institute. The Institute’s founding was widely spoken about in the camp. Block 10 underwent repairs; large machines, huge high-voltage cables and booths layered with concrete were brought in. We were expecting something new to be built there. Furthermore, a group led by assistant professor Fleck from Lwów arrived in the camp with their wives and children. The kids were two or three years old; they were not taken away and the women weren’t separated from the men — they all came to the men’s camp. The camp administration had quite a problem with the whole group and didn’t know what to do, exactly; we suspected they’d received inconvenient orders from above. There was no other way to accommodate that group, so they were housed in the infectious patients’ block, i.e. block 20 — where I was. They told us they’d come to work in a laboratory and were workers, not prisoners. They were, reportedly, assured of this by the Lwów Gestapo, even though they’d received prisoner numbers and striped clothes on arrival at the camp. In practice, things didn’t turn out the way they thought.
Meanwhile, another important thing happened in the camp in connection with the other two: a group of forced blood donors was formed from recovering typhoid patients housed in block 20. Unknown SS men came to the block and started performing prisoner blood tests — all the patients on block 20 were tested. A group was then segregated, put in a separate room and assigned their own male nurse. Only the unknown SS men had access to that group of prisoners.
A young Untersturmführer started showing up at our block — he was the chief of the newly formed Institute. I was assigned to it by happenstance: they were looking for a typist. When I said that I knew how to type, the Untersturmführer took me downstairs to see Weber. When Weber heard I was a Pole, he made a grimace but ultimately he took me on. Thus, I began working at the Institute.
Initially, it was located in block 10 — the wives of Dr. Fleck, Dr. Seemann and others were relocated there. It housed a water testing station, a histological lab and a bacteriological lab, headed by Professor Tomaszek from the Czech university in Brno. This was the initial core of the Institute. I worked in the administrative section, located in the attic of the building next to the Political Department. Various devices for the Institute were shipped to the camp, including precision scales. The instruments came mostly from Paris, some from Bergman and Altman in Berlin, some from Athens and Thessaloniki; there was also a considerable number of Dutch devices.
In the spring of 1943, right after Easter, our laboratory was relocated to Rajsko, five kilometers away from the camp proper. A huge villa was quickly finished there, to serve as our base of operations — it had some of the newest technical solutions available, as well as water pumps and central heating. The rooms intended for laboratory work had gas and electricity. Within a month, Weber closed down all the labs in block 10 and left only one small lab in block 20. He thus created [a few words in German], that is the Hygiene Institute. The Institute was supposed to do all the relevant work for the whole of Southeastern Europe. The SS headquarters in Berlin oversaw a couple of such facilities: in the north — in Finland — then in Wroclaw, in Auschwitz, in Lwów and in Kiev. The one furthest to the east was supposed to be established in the Caucasus. I personally saw many brochures discussing the Caucasian climate, relevant anthropological topics, etc. However, due to the way the war tides turned, that particular institute was never established.
Our facility was supposed to work primarily for the SS and the police. At the end of 1940, it had a staff of 120, including: various university professors, the group led by Dr. Fleck, the group under Lewin from the Pasteur Institute in Paris, as well as physicians from Amsterdam, Athens and Thessaloniki. There were also Polish professors, such as the mathematician Ślebodziński who is now a professor in Wrocław. We were tasked with performing tests for all the hospitals in Kraków, Tarnów, Krynica, Pustków near Poznań and Wrocław. We also serviced the local camp prisoner population to some extent — stool, urine and blood samples would be analyzed as requested and the results would be sent back to Auschwitz.
I’d like to describe some of our work now. In 1943 Weber had the idea of mass testing Auschwitz prisoners for malaria. All prisoners had to get tested and there were consequences for refusing. Afterwards, the names of all prisoners who tested positive were put on a separate list and — in the summer of 1943 — all of them were sent in a huge transport to the camp in Majdanek near Lublin. There, they were gassed.
Besides diagnostic work, the Institute was primarily expected to perform experiments. Weber wanted to devise a new method of blood type testing; it was supposed to be much easier and better than the existing ones. It involved separating globulin out of the blood so that use of liquid serum wouldn’t be necessary. The relevant discovery was made by Dr. Lewin, a scientist-prisoner formerly employed at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He managed to separate the globulin, such that blood type testing could be performed using pills. He sent the results of his work to Berlin and even received some compensation for it from the main Hygiene Institute. However, large amounts of blood were needed to produce that globulin and it had to specifically be human, not animal, blood. Therefore, the SS men who were on the Institute staff would go once or twice a week to block 11 in Auschwitz and participate in prisoner executions. They would harvest blood from the corpses right after the execution, using sterilized bottles or jars. These containers would then be wrapped in gauze and cotton wool and taken back to the Institute laboratory; the blood would be centrifuged and the resulting serum would be used to produce separated globulin.
That particular project aside, the Institute’s fundamental area of research was bacteriology. The bacteriological lab had many bacteria cultures, from various types of scarlet fever to all the different types of typhoid. The idea was to create good conditions for them — give them the right atmosphere, environment and suitable media cultures. That required meat stock.
To acquire that meat stock, Webber, Unterscharrführer Fugger and SS man Fabel [Zabel] went to Auschwitz once or twice a week with gauze-covered buckets. They went in the direction of crematorium I and then to block 11; they returned with bucketfuls of meat. I’d estimate a single haul was 30–60 kilograms. Initially, we had no idea what type of meat that was — it was just normal, skinned muscle tissue. It would be chopped up into pieces, put in the autoclave and boiled. The clear broth that resulted from this process would be poured into huge, 10 to 15 liter, glass flasks. As regards the meat, the SS men either told us to throw it out or didn’t say anything at all. Our living conditions were bad, so all the prisoners ate that meat for quite a while — I’d say somewhere between four weeks and two months.
One day, when another batch came in, I noticed a piece of skin on the meat in the bucket. Since it looked similar to pig skin, I told everyone about it and they were all happy to know that they’d eaten pork. However, upon closer inspection it was obvious that the skin couldn’t have come from a pig: it was too delicate, completely white and seemed to be covered with a light golden fluff. I informed the Slovak Dr. Korn — who was our kapo — and Dr. Janusz Mąkowski, a histologist from Poznań University. They investigated the tissue and discovered that it was human skin. A woman’s skin, to be precise. After some more work we established that Weber, Fugger and Fabel [Zabel] chose body parts that had the most muscle, i.e. buttocks, thighs and women’s breasts. This was later confirmed by the testimonies of prisoners who lived in block 10.
After that discovery was made, all the prisoners who’d previously eaten the meat were extremely nauseated.
A somewhat similar story involved the blood we processed. As I’d already stated, it was taken either from recuperating prisoner-patients or from corpses immediately after an execution by shooting. I know a little about the process of obtaining blood because I had to prepare a suitable set of containers for Weber before each harvesting trip. If he was going to draw blood from recovering prisoners, I had to sterilize a couple dozen glass flasks that could hold either 700 cm3 or one liter each. They usually came back full. According to the stories told by the physicians working on the block where the blood was drawn, people would faint on operating tables during the procedure. It was done using the thickest needles we had, which would otherwise be used to draw blood from the neck aorta of a ram. We also had four rams and two blind horses for blood drawing.
After the blood was centrifuged and the serum was taken out, coagula of red blood cells would be left over. Only 12 people on the Institute’s staff received packages from families back home; those were mostly Poles. The others, and most especially the Greeks, had no outside food aid, so they’d often mix the coagulum with margarine and eat it that way with bread.
The head of the Institute’s SS staff was Weber. In 1943 he came in bearing the rank of Unterscharführer and was soon promoted to Hauptscharführer. A professor from Berlin, who was the head Hygiene Institute headquarters, visited our facility around that time and I remember Weber proudly showing him a row of flasks labeled “Menschenbouillon ” [human meat stock].
As I’ve said, the Institute had some animals for experimental purposes. There were four rams, two horses, many guinea pigs and white mice. We drew blood from the rams for the Wassermann test station but we were allowed to draw at most 30–50 cm3 at once, while 750 cm3 or even a full litter would be drawn from people in blocks 19 and 9 [sic!]. Prisoners who “donated” blood were supposed to get extra bread and sausages, but quite often they’d never see the extra meat — the SS men employed at the laboratory would share it amongst themselves instead.
I’ll describe the Institute’s staff now. First, there was Weber — the boss. He had a doctorate and was the son of a professor from Munich. Specifically, he had a doctorate in medicine and also, reportedly, in biology (the thesis for which he supposedly defended in the United States). His deputy was Dr. Münch, a reader and assistant professor at one of the German universities. He came to us in the summer of 1943 as a simple Sturmmann. Within a week, he was promoted to Scharführer and shortly thereafter left for a ten day training course. It wasn’t scientific training, since he had all the relevant qualifications to work in our laboratory, but most probably SS training to teach him how to treat prisoners. He then advanced to Untersturmführer and finally to Hauptsturmführer.
Münch had the idea of treating rheumatism with injections and a section headed by him was formed in the Institute to deliver these experimental injections. People developed acute fever, rheumatism and, finally, bone deformities.
While bacteriological research was of fundamental importance to the Institute, there was also a large chemical section. Its work included food testing, performed both on food for the prisoners’ as well as the SS kitchen. Each testing request sent to the lab from an SS hospital or any camp food-related facility had to be accompanied by a Lieferschein [delivery slip], was deposited in the Schreibstube [typing room] and entered into a ledger. Once the requested test was performed, the results would also be entered into the books. On that basis I discovered that the meat intended for prisoners — specifically the liver sausage — could, in the most extreme cases, contain over 80% water, while the same type of sausage intended for the SS men would be at most 50–60% water. The prisoners’ sausage contained substantially less protein than the variant for the SS. Each week camp bread would also be tested and a very positive reaction was noted when it was exposed to zinc — three or four plusses — which indicated huge amounts of cellulose in the product.
I found all these documents, which give an overview of the lab’s work, in Auschwitz in the spring of 1946. They’d been hidden. I brought them to Kraków and handed them over to the Commissions for the Investigation of German Crimes. While I was reviewing them, I confirmed that my memories were correct. During my imprisonment, I’d also made some photographs in the serological lab on the second story. The jars of blood were given to me by Sturmkapo Filip Meier. I had film because we were supposed to open a photochemical lab that would develop photographs for scientific purposes. That never happened, so I was in possession of a whole set of film rolls of varying sensitivity. Meier knew about that — he was my direct superior but he was on relatively good terms with the prisoners. He was a courier and once a week he took letters to Kraków. I took only two photos and managed to send them by post to Kraków — through him but without his knowledge.
I saw the defendant quite often on the road from Oświęcim to the laboratory in Rajsko. We met the defendant while he was riding his horse between 6 and 7 a.m. in the company of his adjutant and son. He usually took the road through the fields not far from the tracks near Birkenau before going around via the road from the Rajsko Gärtnerei and returning to his villa along the road we took to work. Everyone was struck by a certain fear at the sight of the defendant. We were afraid of encountering him and of conflict at any moment on the way to work. Once it happened that the defendant was holding his horse, it was in the summer of 1943, and he was angry with the kapo that he had given the order for us to take off our hats too late. I don’t remember if he hit him, but he berated us and threw a great many insults at us before whipping his horse and riding back to the villa with his son and the adjutant.
While working for the laboratory, I saw many different sets of chemicals and preparations. Their intended use was a secret, but I remember being quite surprised that Weber had me order substantial amounts of serum with the Bang bacillus from Berlin. That was Brucella abortus [text missing] to induce abortions in horses. He’d request a package of this serum from time to time. I later found out that it was used on block 10 to induce abortions; I was told this by the physicians who worked there. Besides, I also met many of the female patients from that block, since quite a number of them were also experimental subjects for Weber and Münch. They complained of ill health after the injection; the dose was calculated to induce an abortion in a mare and when used on a human it would naturally lead to bleeding, heavy hemorrhages and — quite often — death.
As regards the other senior staff of the Institute, all of them besides Weber and Münch were just knuckleheads given high positions. Zabel was a house painter by trade but was given the job of independently drawing blood from prisoners. I saw him doing that a few times, when Berlin sent down an order to investigate the noma disease that had spread in the Romani camp. Noma is rare in Europe so Berlin ordered the Institute to do research on it. Here’s what that looked like: Romani children, famished and exhausted to the point of death, often with noma on their lips, would be laid down on a table and blood would be drawn from their veins with the largest needle — one that didn’t even fit in their veins. Romani children were often inspected and segregated. Additionally, Weber made himself a head collection — he preserved four heads in formalin, in huge jars originally intended for mice breeding. The SS men made veritable pilgrimages to the Institute to see that thing.
Another leading SS man of a similar sort was the chief of the chemical lab — he was a wheelwright by profession. A third one, the head of the meteorological station, was a stonemason. The Institute was equipped with many instruments that were worth millions of German marks. For instance, we probably had the only ionometer in all of southeastern Europe, which was used to measure soil acidity. It was used by the neighboring Pflanzenzucht [plant breeding facility] to measure the acidity of the soil in Auschwitz, in the area where the Germans grew Taraxacum kok-saghyz — a plant of Russian origin used to produce artificial rubber. The initial measurements showed that the soil in Auschwitz was significantly acidic, so ashes from Auschwitz were sprinkled on the ground in the area belonging to the Pflanzenzucht to make it more alkaline. The next measurements, in 1944, showed no acidity and Obersturmführer Caesar, who was the head of the Pflanzenzucht laboratory, boasted that he grew the largest heads of cabbage on that soil that had lost its acidity and become alkaline because it was sprinkled with human ashes.
In 1944 Weber took steps to keep his whole SS team in Auschwitz, because none of them wanted to go into combat. He came up with the idea of testing the whole camp for syphilis. Because the Wassermann test station had a limited capacity, both on account of its limited space and for lack of the extremely expensive reagent, i.e. the gold suspension, the tests were done using the following method: [text missing].
There were no particular consequences of those tests, say similar to those of the malaria testing project, because the war front was quickly approaching. Speaking of malaria, I recall that after transports of Greeks and the Romani came in, we noted three or four cases of tropical malaria, which is very rare in our geographic area; we usually deal with quartan or tertian malaria. As a result of the work done by our Institute, significant efforts were made to fight mosquitoes in the area on account of the malaria — planes were used to drop mosquitocide, which had the side effect of killing many fish in the Harmęże lake.
Regarding the diagnostic tests, I’d also like to add that the prisoner team working at the Hygiene Institute remembered what’d happened after the malaria testing initiative and they often falsified the results to save the lives of their fellow prisoners. There was also a reverse situation, involving an SS man: an analysis came from Kraków with a request to establish if this higher SS officer had testicular cancer. There was no cancer but a cancer-positive result was sent back and a week later we received notice that the man had had the testicle removed. This was one of the ways we fought back. We worked under strict SS supervision, we couldn’t really save our fellow prisoners, so at least this way some of the doctors could get back at the enemy.
That would be all.
Defense attorney Ostaszewski: I would like you to explain that horrible incident with prisoners eating human flesh. Why did that happen?
Witness: Because the people were famished. Our scientific work was exhausting. Much more was demanded from us than from an average prisoner working in the fields, with a pickaxe or a shovel, who could always find some opportunity to take a rest or hide. We worked under constant supervision by the SS men: Münch, Delmotte, Liebehenschel. Any trivial error or mistake in analysis could lead to death on charges of sabotage. We were also always in grave danger from working with cultures of live typhoid, scarlet fever, malaria and tuberculosis bacteria — always at risk of infection. Despite this, we never got any extra food and had no opportunities to “organize” it ourselves. A prisoner working in a warehouse or, say, with beets could pilfer something. We could’ve tried to steal a chemical reagent or some potassium cyanide but that would’ve been pointless. People were starving. We received no packages. The distance from the main camp was so big that we got back from work very late and we lived in the infectious patients’ block — we basically had no contact with the camp proper. We couldn’t “organize” anything and our options were limited. The people might’ve not understood.
Once, Unterscharrführers Schumann, Fige and Fagner came into the room with the autoclaves and saw the prisoners eating that meat. They laughed and asked: “ Guten Appetit, wie schmeckt es? ” [Enjoy your food — how does it taste?]. It seems that they knew it was human flesh.
Young miscarried horse fetuses were delivered to the Institute from a horse breeding facility — they weren’t yet formed and were still half gelatinous. We were supposed to establish the cause of the miscarriage. In normal circumstances, that kind of thing would’ve been thrown away or buried. We’ve also had rabbits infected with coccidiosis that didn’t land in the trash but went into people’s stomachs. All out of hunger. The same thing happened with Liebehenschel’s duck: it died and got sent to us for an autopsy. Our analysis showed that it probably died of cholera. It was not fit for consumption, and yet it was plucked clean, boiled and eaten. No one got sick.
Defense attorney Ostaszewski: What is your profession? You seem very well informed.
Witness: I’m a journalist. When I arrived in the camp, I quickly realized how things looked there and what sort of fate awaited a professor, administrative worker or other member of the intelligentsia, so I claimed I was trained in electromechanics and had worked as a stoker. I did have some basis for that claim, since I’d had some practice in that during the occupation. Then, when I realized that the only way to stay alive would be to work in the hospital — not as a doctor but as a nurse, who emptied bedpans and wiped the patients — I said I’d completed a year of medical studies.
Defense attorney Ostaszewski: You’ve said something about removing someone’s testicle and killing somebody? Expand on that.
Witness: An SS-Lazarett [SS military hospital] in Kraków sent us a request for analysis regarding one of the German SS officers. We had no hope of every leaving the camp, so I’m certain that if we could’ve gotten our hands on rifles, we would’ve put them to their proper use. But since we had no means of fighting that way, I’m not surprised that some of the doctors found a measure of satisfaction in falsifying the test results.
Expert Kowalski: You’ve told the court that women were experimented on with serum containing the Bang bacillus. Are you sure that was what the serum contained?
Witness: I worked in the administrative office. Twice a month, around the first and fifteenth day, I had to make a long list of reagents for the Institute, according to Weber’s orders, using relevant order catalogues (I had to learn some things on the fly). One of the items that was ordered was a serum containing the Bang bacillus — Brucella abortus. Later, a package from a German factory would arrive, with signage on the parcel and an Rx inside. German factories wouldn’t have delivered an ersatz product, since it could’ve been intended for use not just at our facility but somewhere else.
Expert Kowalski: Are you sure the serum was used to administer injections?
Witness: I didn’t see it being administered, but requests for flasks of the serum with that bacillus — specifically for 25 or 50 cm3 flasks — came from lab 10, that is the urology lab.
Expert Kowalski: Were histopathological experiments performed at the Institute?
Witness: Yes. They were done primarily by Monkowski [Mąkowski], a former reader or assistant professor at Poznań University, and Dr. Kowalczykowska. In the spring or summer of 1943, she was released from the camp on account of getting pregnant, thanks to the efforts of Switzerland. Afterwards, a courier would go now and then to Kraków, bringing to the camp bits of histopathologically relevant tissue and diagnosis documents, to be signed by Weber.
Expert Kowalski: Did you see uterus fragments among those tissues from Kraków?
Witness: I can’t say — I don’t know these kinds of things. That kind of data might be in the materials I’d brought.
Expert Kowalski: Were there any contrast agents among the chemical preparations?
Witness: I saw some contrast agents. I don’t remember the names but they had “torax” in the middle.
Expert Kowalski: No iodipin or iubrodol?
Witness: We had iodipin. In 1944, in the period when the largest numbers of Hungarian Jews were being gassed, a large supply transport came to the lab in Rajsko. It was five or six crates 100 kilograms each and also some boxes of glassware from Vienna that was intended for our laboratory. The transport was sent from the Berlin Zoological Garden; the crates had large labels with a skull and crossbones symbol and the word “Achtung” [Caution] written on them. One of them was damaged and I saw a can of Zyklon lying on wood wool. At the same time, we were sent a few crates of fecal matter specimen containers. Münch ordered me to sort the supplies: some of them were for us and the others would be sent elsewhere; he didn’t specify where. The next day I got a huge talking to because I’d sorted out some of the glass instruments but forgot about the specimen containers — there wasn’t enough time. Münch was furious that the supplies hadn’t been sorted yet. I intentionally asked him ambiguously: “Is the Zyklon intended for us?” He looked very surprised, ran out of the administrative office and only later informed me by phone that it was to be sent to Pustków. It was a huge amount of Zyklon. It was loaded onto our car and sent somewhere — I don’t know the destination. No address was given at the Schreibstube so there’s no telling where it was sent.
Presiding Judge: Do the parties have any more questions for the witness? (No.)
The witness is dismissed.