Warsaw, 31 May 1948. Member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Warsaw, Judge Halina Wereńko, interviewed the person specified below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Karol Franciszek Branny |
| Date of birth | 26 September 1896, Ropicz, district Cieszyn Zaolzie |
| Names of parents | Andrzej and Maria née Kubek |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| State and national affiliation | Polish |
| Education | Warsaw School of Economics, Management Faculty |
| Occupation | Head of a department in a work cooperative |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Gimnastyczna Street 3 |
The outbreak of the uprising caught me at the post of the administrator of the estate of the Warsaw School of Economics in Warsaw, at Rakowiecka Street 6. The neighboring estate had been occupied by Wehrmacht units already since October 1939. In winter 1940, SS men occupied that estate and placed a huge sign in capital letters: Stauferkaserne on the middle building. In June, the Germans also occupied a residential building for professors from the Warsaw School of Economics placed closest to the Stauferkaserne and separated two remaining buildings. Both buildings were occupied by the authorities of the Warsaw district (for the archive of Polish authorities and the warehouses created from book collections). These buildings were fenced by a wire net fence up to the path.
In late July 1944, the SS unit occupying the Stauferkaserne up until then had left, other SS units arrived, and on 30 July, 11 heavy tanks came and were placed under the chestnut trees in the vicinity of the former professors’ house (by the fence dividing the Warsaw School of Economics area from the barracks). The insurgent attack on the Stauferkaserne on 1 August 1944, at 4.30 p.m., broke up before entering the barracks area. Already from 3.00 p.m. all buildings of the Warsaw School of Economics and trenches and fortifications in our area were occupied by the SS units, which put machine guns on the roofs of the front buildings of the Warsaw School of Economics, where the archive and the library were located. At the moment of the outbreak of the uprising we were staying in a shelter under the library, together with the residents of the school.
In the evening, the SS men in the Stauferkaserne ordered us to make a list of the civilian population present in the school. The lists were made by Mrs Jankowska and Lidia Kleszczyńska - the wife of a former caretaker of the Warsaw School of Economics buildings - employed in a German institution on Aleje Ujazdowskie (I don’t know her current address). The SS men ordered us to take five more people into the shelter (four men and one woman). These were young people, probably insurgents.
On 2 August, at 12.00, an SS officer came to the shelter and gave the order for the civilian population to immediately go to the Stauferkaserne. Only professor Grodek (currently in Warsaw) and janitor Piotrowski (who later died in a camp) remained as anti-fire and anti- aircraft protection. Our group of around 60 men and women was taken to the courtyard of the barracks. The men and the women were separated. Women with children were allowed to return home, we were stopped in the yard, where new groups of men were continually being added from the nearby streets (from Aleja Niepodległości, Kazimierzowska Street, Wiśniowa Street, Narbutta Street, Sandomierska Street and others). Men brought in were placed on the right side of the gate, women on the left. Everything was happening in a heavy rain. We were being tormented as they shot machine guns over our heads.
When it got dark, the women were released home, the men were segregated, got their IDs checked, and were placed in halls in the left or the right wing of the Stauferkaserne building (the Volksdeutcher were placed in the building to the right from the entrance). A group of Poles was put in that building. I was in that group for a moment, as someone speaking fluent German, but I didn’t try to stay there, I underlined that I was a Pole and because of that the SS men led me out to a room on the ground floor in the left wing of the building. There were men without ID cards and a few people having an Ausweiss there. From among my friends, Dr Ładyński (currently residing in Łodź, on Piotrkowska Street 145) and Wierzbicki were there. At the same time, my nephew, Władysław Branny, who died in the Neudorf camp (in April 1945), and Prokulski – a member of the Cooperative board – were in the same wing, but in a different room.
Only on 3 August, in the evening, did the SS men bring the remains after a meal given to the SS men, a cauldron with barley flakes. They did not, however, give us any dishes, which none of us had. We could not use it, so the cauldron was taken away. On 4 August, an SS man demanded people for work. I volunteered in a group of around ten men. We carried ammunition scattered around the courtyard to a garage, and moved it to a different garage. While I was in the yard, I saw SS men leading a young man, around 20 years old, without shoes or a hat, tired. Those leading him told the other SS men in my presence that that they had found him among the potatoes near the Warsaw School of Economics . They led the man to the barracks, exited after a while and went in the direction of the shooting grounds at the back of the building. I heard shots after this, and the SS men returned to the courtyard alone.
On 4 August, in the morning, a young SS man came to our room – in his twenties, of average height, well-built – and said that we would all be executed, stating that Poles, as people of honor, would willingly go to death, and would not ask for consideration or mercy. He approached individual men and said: Komm, and chose a group which he led out. These men never returned to us. In the morning and during the day he chose 32 people in this way.
I don’t know their surnames. He chose a young Home Army soldier who had not made it in time to his post and was stopped in the barracks vicinity, and an orthodox priest. That group was executed in the evening, a few men from our room were called on to take the corpses.
I don’t know the surnames of those men, but at night, when they came back from work, I heard their conversation from which it appeared that they had taken the corpses of the men taken from our room from before the wall of the building, to the right of the entrance. Then, they brought them to one place and buried them in the area of the prison on Rakowiecka Street.
I don’t know the names of the Germans stationed in the barracks. A burly German dressed in civilian clothes was an éminence grise.
After a few days, women were allowed to bring us diners from 12,00 to 1,00 p.m. We made contact with families then, and with the help of Kleszczyńska, who knew the German language, and who had already made contact with the local Germans, we managed to get a release for a group of men from the Warsaw School of Economics. I was released then along with Regulski[,] professor Królikowski with his son, Piotrowski, and a few more people. Our group was allowed to stay only in the shelter under the library of the Warsaw School of Economics. The women had the right to exit during the day into the yard, or to the allotment for vegetables. We were released on 11 August. We remained in the rooms in the school area until 27 August. On that day, at 10.00, the SS men from the barracks ordered us to leave the shelter with our families within half an hour. A stoker, Michał Karaluch, with his wife and children, who had a German Ausweiss – I know that he came back from Germany in 1945 to Warsaw – professor Grodek and director Grycz – the commissioned head of the National Library – were allowed to remain.
I exited with my family onto Rakowiecka Street, and we carried my seriously ill sister, Maria Branny, on stretchers. We were told to leave the sick on the street and we were joined to other groups of civilians from the neighboring streets and from the Stauferkaserne. Thanks to efforts of Dr Tarkowski and an inspector of the Polish Red Cross, Wierzbicki, my sister was transported by car to the hospital on Chocimska Street; she eventually - as I learned later - died in Częstochowa, because of the lack of care, in unsanitary conditions.
I was led with a group of civilians to the Warsaw West station, from which we were transported to the transit camp in Pruszków. I met there groups of civilians brought from the Old Town. During the segregation, I was assigned to departure for Germany, and a transport was formed very quickly.
Residents of the Old Town were the majority in the transport, with a small group from the Mokotów district; men were predominant, but there were women as well, I even saw four young girls. We were loaded into covered freight cars, around 80 people to each. Men and women were going together, there were no toilets in the cars. There were over 20 cars. Up to Częstochowa, the Main Care Council brought us food at the stations (Skierniewice, Piotrków, Częstochowa). We left on 1 September 1944, on Saturday.
Three men escaped on the way, the escort shot at the escapees. They announced that after another escape they would choose men for execution from a car. On 2 September, at 10.00 p.m., in Vienna, we were given groats, without anything to drink. On 3 September, the transport arrived at the concentration camp in Mauthausen. The women were separated from the men. A part of the women, including my housemaid, Józefa Sochacka (currently residing in Łódź, on Kopernika Street 67/69), was sent to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück. Our group of men, numbering around 2 thousand, was placed in five barracks for quarantine. We were taken naked to the bathhouse, being given the order to take only shoes with us. There was no water in the bathhouse, so we were not cleaned, but they only shaved our heads and gave us underwear in an unusable condition. The directing board of the camp took our things. In this way, the Warsawians in Mauthausen lost the remains of their possessions.
We were driven half-naked to the block for quarantine. I was not given anything to eat for that entire day. On 4 September, we received soup at midday. We were handed out numbers. I got number 94,711. Our Warsaw transport started at around number 90,000, ours and other transports from Warsaw later reached 140,000. We were kept under quarantine for a week. It was tightly packed there. In the evening we were given pallets, we sat one next to another, there was no space to lie down. Going outside for bodily needs was a tragedy. One had to walk on the heads of others and bear the beating of the kapo, which even woke up inmates.
In the morning we were given coffee, but there was not enough for everyone; soup for diner, coffee for supper, 300 grams of bread and a piece of margarine. German prisoners were the block leaders. They beat us for everything, but we were not working, and thanks to that there were not so many deaths as there were later. Apart from that, the system of roll calls and camp regulations ruled.
On 9 September 1944, the transport was divided. One part (around ¼) stayed in Mauthausen and worked in the quarries, the other part went to other camps. In a group of around 1500 men dressed in striped clothes, I was sent to the Gusen I camp. There, a commander of the Ziereis camp and deputy commander Beck examined us and assigned us to the Gusen I camp. That camp was administratively subject to Gusen II. Every day we were transported to the village of Sankt Georgen, five kilometers from the camp, where there were underground factories for Messerschmitt planes, which were constantly being expanded.
In Gusen II our transport was divided into different barracks, I, along with Henryk Bonaszewski (currently residing in Wrocław, Konstytucji 3 Maja Square 4a) and two others, got to barrack number 12. I was transported every day to Sankt Georgen for work in a group of 12 to 20 Warsawians. We built adits, dug into a mountain, in order to build tunnels for fabricating aircraft parts. The work was hard. Among others, Borkowski from the Old Town died at the age of 24. Other groups of Warsawians worked at making concrete. Prisoners had to carry bags with cement weighing 50 kg. There were many groups of Warsawians employed in expanding the factory, building the adits, I cannot estimate a number.
The majority of the prisoners died after some time of phlegmon because of too hard work and poisoning. I don’t know the names of the prisoners from that group.
Other prisoners, mainly from Warsaw, worked in transporting bricks. We worked in two shifts, day and night. Around 5 thousand prisoners, including many Warsawians deported during the uprising, went to work in the first shift. The production of machine weapons and parts for Messerschmitt aircrafts was conducted in the Gusen I camp. Prisoners worked under a roof there.
Apart from that, groups of prisoners also worked in the quarries. Warsawians were used there as well, but normally all transports went to Gusen II.
I don’t know the statistical data of people transported from Warsaw, the number of transports, the death rate. The data above can be provided by Józef Żmija (residing in Bytom, Puławskiego Street 17), a prisoner of the Gusen concentration camp from 1940, who wrote diaries. Żmija worked for some time in the Gusen I camp office.
I memorized the following surnames of prisoners from the Gusen I camp: Kłobuszewski, Markiewicz - alumnus of the Warsaw School of Economics – Osładek, and the fifth, Józef Lewandowski (a janitor in the Warsaw School of Economics ): they all died.
On 6 October 1944, thanks to the efforts of my friends - old prisoners in Gusen I - I was transported in the Gusen I camp to the hospital, whence I was discharged after two weeks, initially assigned to the invalids’ block, then to work in the transport column.
I heard later that starting from December 1944, in the Gusen II camp, mass murders of Warsawian prisoners transported during the uprising had begun. I heard that the block leader had received a notice from the camp board that on the next day he would receive 100 or 150 fewer portions. Then, the “functionary prisoners”, in exchange for these portions, murdered a given number of prisoners with a hatchet or a hammer, or drowned them in a barrel or a bucket. Prisoners who were read out from the list by the block leader had to queue up for their deaths naked. At that time, the majority in the Gusen II camp was Polish, mainly Warsawians. I heard about the murders in Gusen II among other sources from friends: Żmija, Józef Szymańczyk, a train driver (currently residing in Kobyłka near Warsaw). In Gusen I, Warsawians were not specifically liquidated. However, the weak, the “Muslims”, were kept in the invalids’ block, where a constant liquidation was being conducted. The invalids were given smaller portions, as they were not working. They were harassed by being kept long in a queue before the bathhouse, naked to the waist, and then windows were kept open in winter.
In the Gusen I concentration camp I was employed in the Transport Kolonne in Steyr’s factory by the camp. The factory produced machine pistols. I worked as a writer. The transport column, apart from the quarries, was the hardest department of employment. I saw that a prisoner lasted on average 20 days, because the work was outside without proper clothing. The food for those working was better there than in Gusen II, they received 500 g of bread (200 g more) and soup, apart from coffee in the evening.
Under the influence of the approaching front line, the conditions worsened. Starting from 1945, there were no packages from families, horrible famine reigned in the camp.
On 22 April, prisoners from both Gusen I and Gusen II were gathered in the adits and the entrances were walled up, apart from one. We were kept like that for five hours, and then let free. I heard that the German authorities had been intending to poison us, that the gas cylinders had been prepared, but the camp authorities had opposed this. Żmija can give some more precise details.
On 5 May 1945 we were released by the Americans. I returned to the country on 2 August 1945.
At this the report was concluded and read out.