Warsaw, 5 March 1946. Judge S. Rybiński, delegated to the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the gravity of the oath, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Karol Ogrodowczyk |
| Date of birth | 1 October 1890 |
| Names of parents | Józef and Tekla née Madejska |
| Occupation | official at the Capital City of Warsaw Tramway Company [Tramwaje Miejskie m.st. Warszawy] |
| Education | 4 grades of municipal school |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Hajoty Street 60, flat 1 |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Criminal record | none |
I have been an employee of the Municipal Transportation Agency [Miejski Zakład Komunikacji – MZK] since 1919. Before the war I was a senior inspector.
During the German occupation I was removed from the above-mentioned position, but was allowed to work in the Technical Department of the Tramways as a photographic lab technician. For this reason Germans would hire me as a photographer. They forced me to take pictures of many of their ceremonies and of various German officials. This is why I have numerous photographs depicting various Nazi criminals, starting with the city captain Leist himself. I have written down the names of the criminals I have recognized on the backs of the photographs.
I present to the citizen judge twelve 6x9 photographs. These are photographs of Ukrainians who acted as German policemen and were perpetrators of various crimes: murders of Jews in the ghetto, penal expeditions, and acting as security for public utility institutions. I don’t know their names. They were also used as secret agents and in such cases they wore plainclothes. They mostly came from Lvov. There were even graduates of the Lvov University of Technology among them. They spoke Polish well. Other than these, the seven 13x18 photographs are from various ceremonies, and there are notes on the back of each of them. I have written down the names of the criminals that I knew. I submit also these photographs (photographs submitted).
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Warsaw, 21 March 1946. Judge S. Rybiński, delegated to the Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations and of the gravity of the oath, the witness testified as follows:
Name and surname: Karol Ogrodowczyk (known in the case).
I additionally testify: I had no personal contact with the city captain appointed by the Nazi authorities, Ludwig Leist, but I know that all the draconian regulations concerning employees of public enterprises were issued on his initiative or with his approval. For example, all reductions of employees’ wages (already very low), as well as limitations on supplies, replacing Poles in higher positions with Germans or Volksdeutschen, were carried out on his orders, signed by him. Also the decisions to arrest the chief directors of the City Tramway Company, engineers Niepokojczycki and Synek, engineers Ignacy Rostek, Więckowski, and Stefan Mułupa, as well as many other employees of the City Tramway Company, altogether one hundred and sixty persons, went through his hands. These arrests were carried out by the Gestapo, but the material for these repressive measures was supplied by the local German authorities, and above all by Leist, whom I cannot fail to mention. These repressive measures were not dictated by some reason or caused by a fault of the detainees. They were only aimed at tormenting the Polish people and the extermination of the Polish nation.
Leist made decisions on the basis of reports fed to him by his subordinates: Oberbürgermeister Dürrfeld, German director of the Tramway Company Hipolit Alerz from Oberhausen, senior government inspector Ernest Majkiewicz, head of the Municipal Police, the so-called Werkschutz, Bollenbach, and senior inspector Karl Milcher from Kaiserslautern and his assistant Józef Wójcicki from Zabrze, a renegade (his wife’s maiden name was Stanek). All persons mentioned above should be punished for the harm caused to the employees and the Polish population, with Leist’s knowledge and approval.
Above all, I wish to recall the following incident. In summer 1941 Director Hipolit Alerz ordered that the tramway company’s employees from various departments who had a certificate from the medical board that they had a condition and should perform lighter work were to conduct tramways and assure, during the passage through the ghetto, that none of passengers threw food to Jews. The appointed employees requested to be released from this obligation and to be assigned more suitable work, in accordance with the decision of the medical board. Alerz, together with Dürrfeld, decided that these employees were guilty of a revolt. Dürefeld came with a Gestapo troop and arrested all of those employees (twenty-six in all), and then had them sent to Auschwitz, from where none of them ever returned. Director Niepokojczycki, engineer Ignacy Rostek, an employee of the workshops, Bem, and many others, whose names I presently cannot recall, also died in Auschwitz.
All of the above-mentioned accomplices of Leist’s tortured the employees of the Tramway Company and the Polish population. Bolenbach, together with his subordinate Werkschütz, would beat tramway passengers detained for illegally riding outside the trams or for not having a ticket, for which he had these persons brought to the basements of the Post Savings Fund [Pocztowa Kasa Oszczędności – PKO] building in Marszałkowska Street, where he would abuse them. Maikranz would beat, torture, and arrest Polish employees of the tramway workshops, and laborers [from] the Jewish brigade assigned to help. Wójcicki was sent to the ghetto; he would steal and kill people there. Talking to me, he himself boasted that during the uprising in Silesia and during the occupation in Poland he had killed several people with his own hands. He had the title of Oberscharführer.
I indicate the names of witnesses who can provide evidence with respect to Leist and his accomplices, mentioned above: 1) Tadeusz Karczewski, 2) Stefan Wieczorek – inspector, 3) Stanisław Dąbrowski, 4) Józef Szczepański – president of the City Tramway Company council, 5) Niewiadomski, a member of the Polish Socialist Party [Polska Partia Socjalistyczna – PPS] and of the company’s council.
Summons for all of these should be sent to the Management Board of the City Tramway Company (Młynarska Street 24). I also wish to indicate Eugeniusz Iwanowski, an engineer, as a witness, at the same address.
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