Warsaw, 24 February 1947. Acting Investigating Judge Halina Wereńko heard as a witness the person specified below. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Marian Franciszek Weiss |
| Date of birth | 28 January 1899 in Rzeszów |
| Religious affiliation | Evangelical Reformed |
| Marital status | married |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Olimpijska Street 31, flat 1 |
| Education | Doctor of Laws |
| Occupation | manager of the Koźmin estate |
| Nationality and state affiliation | Polish |
During the Warsaw Uprising, I lived in my own house at Olimpijska Street 31 in Warsaw. This street is part of the Mokotów fort, where the command of the military airport in Okęcie, the Flughafen Kommando Warschau, was stationed during the German occupation. On 1 August 1944, the Flughafen Kommando was headed by General Doerfler. Doerfler was in command of an air guard company of about 200 people. In the houses at Olimpijska Street 1, 3 and 5, which were on the premises of the Mokotów fort, there was also a unit of the Geheime Feldpolizei (GFP), which was under Doerfler’s command during the Uprising. On 1 August at 3.00 p.m., the GFP brought in a reserve of a hundred GFP soldiers by car, I believe, to reinforce the fort staff. On that day, therefore, Doefler commanded – apart from the GFP unit – his staff, consisting of Colonel Stüzle, Major Brauer, Captain Rudolf, and the commander of the air guard company, as well as other air force officers whose names I do not know. As far as I know, Doerfler was in charge of the airport in Okęcie, which means that the bombardment of Warsaw could not have gone forward without his order.
I don’t know whether he received any instructions concerning this matter and, if he did, from which command. I do know, however, that Doerfler was the only commander of the Mokotów fort, in which he was stationed. A few weeks before the outbreak of the Uprising, he began to reinforce the fort by fencing it with barbed wire, building shelters and evacuating civilians from the following houses: Płatowcowa Street 2, Olimpijska Street 21 and 19, Karwińska Street 1 and 21, and two houses on Racławicka Street, in which Luftwaffe posts were set up. During the first days of the Uprising, for about ten days, Doerfler was cut off from other German combat units in Warsaw, as the insurgents hunted German units in the vicinity of the fort.
The insurgents attacked from the east, from the direction of aleja Niepodległości, while the highway from the Mokotów fort to Okęcie was cleared after 2 August and communication with the airport resumed. Transports of food from the west or from Okęcie only began to arrive a week later.
On 1 August 1944 at around 4.00 p.m., the insurgent attack on the Mokotów fort was repelled, and as a result the Germans turned – viciously – on the remaining civilians.
Shortly after, the Luftwaffe – if I remember correctly, under the command of Feldwebel Katelbach (description: short, thin man with trimmed mustache and dark hair), of German origin – killed a dozen inhabitants of the house at Racławicka 97 (if I remember the number correctly), which had housed Maria Konarska’s grocery store. The Germans drove all the inhabitants into the basement and then killed them with grenades. Seriously injured, Maria Konarska was dragged outside and killed by Captain Schultz of the Luftwaffe. As far as I know, none of the inhabitants of that house survived. I learned the details of the execution from the inhabitants of adjacent houses and Poles who were tasked by the Germans with taking the corpses out of the basement to bury them. The corpses were taken out by: Józef Judek (currently domiciled in the Mokotów fort at Racławicka Street 99, if I remember correctly) and Adam Boch (domiciled in the Mokotów fort). At the same time, a Luftwaffe unit, after forcing its way into the house at Chodkiewicza Street 4, murdered Kokosiński, a Polish Army colonel. The unit shot at any passers-by in the streets surrounding the fort.
And so at around 5.00 p.m. my brother Jan Weiss (61 years old, currently domiciled in Dobrodzień near Lubliniec in Silesia) was shot while he was in the garden of my house.
In the evening, the same unit launched attacks on houses in the streets surrounding the fort, which were occupied by civilians. And so inhabitants – men, women, children and old people – were forced from houses on Racławicka Street (approx. 40 houses), Karwińska Street (approx. 8 houses), Balonowa Street (approx. 5 houses), Miłobędzka Street (approx. 8 houses), Płatowcowa Street (approx. 5 houses), Olimpijska Street (approx. 20 houses), Głogowa Street (approx. 30 houses), and Miączyńska Street (approx. 4 houses). Wherever the Luftwaffe troops encountered a closed gate, they demolished it with hand grenades, injuring many people.
As the civilians were being forced from their homes, others were also murdered, especially in the area of Syryjska, Bachmacka, and Baboszewska streets, where civilians who didn’t know what was going on began to run, and as a result the Germans were literally hunting these people down. Many were killed, as evidenced by the number of graves in that area – exhumed by the Polish Red Cross in the fall of 1945 – and the number of injured people arriving at the dungeon in the Mokotów fort.
Further information about the abovementioned events can be provided by: Feliks Solecki (currently domiciled at Olimpijska Street 17), Stefan Konarski (domiciled on Bełska Street), Józef Kozakiewicz (domiciled at Płatowcowa Street 13), and Jaworski (domiciled at Miączyńska Street 3).
As soon as the civilians were forced from their homes, on 1 or 2 August, General Doerfler began to set fire to and blow up the houses on Płatowcowa Street, although there were no insurgents there and there was no strategic reason for it. The houses were set on fire first at Płatowcowa Street numbers 15, 17, 19, 21 (corner of Racławicka Street), and numbers 21 and 15 were mined and partially bombed with grenade launchers and set on fire manually; the houses on Syryjska, Bachmacka, and Baboszewska streets were set on fire in order to clear the foreland between the front-line insurgent troops and the German troops in the Mokotów fort.
Along with my family and tenants, I was forced from my house at around 8.30 p.m. The civilians, some 300 people, forbidden to take anything with them, were marched to a dungeon in the Mokotów fort, which was packed, damp and cold. There, General Doerfler announced to us that we were captives and threatened to execute all the men should any German soldier be shot in the vicinity of the fort. At that time General Doerfler was taking care of everything himself, he was the alpha and omega of the whole operation.
We stayed in the fort dungeon for several days without food, eating only the things that we had managed to grab when leaving our houses. After three days, Doerfler began to send groups of men under escort to the neighboring fields to harvest potatoes and other vegetables for the army and civilians. From that time on we began receiving unsweetened black coffee and some soup. As I had left cows back home, and since I spoke German well enough, I asked General Doerfler for permission to go back home to attend to the cows, feed and milk them. General Doerfler not only didn’t give me permission, but ordered me put under special guard, since I was suspected of taking part in the insurgent operation. Instead, he issued a decree that my wife and two other women should go to my house twice a day under escort in order to bring back milk and tend to the livestock. I distributed the milk myself free of charge among babies and younger children. There were a dozen babies and several dozen children aged up to 12 in the dungeon. After a few days, however, on Doerfler’s orders, my cows were taken from me, and I lost them, although the army was getting half of the milk.
When the civilians were gathered in the dungeon, Luftwaffe patrols began to catch chance passers-by in the Mokotów fort. Brought in under a strong escort and kept in separate custody inside the fort, they were tried by a field court martial composed of Doerfler and a judge-advocate in the rank of captain who was wearing a Wehrmacht uniform with green facings and whose name I don’t know. I saw this two-person court handle some dozen men, who were never heard from again.
Sick and lying in the grass in the fort near the dungeon, Józef Kozakiewicz could the German soldiers taking corpses on blankets out of a shelter in the north-eastern part of the fort and burying them on a mound in the north-east corner. As I know this place well, I can assert that there was no grave on that spot until the Uprising.
During an exhumation carried out in the fall of 1945, the Polish Red Cross uncovered several dozen corpses on that mound.
I didn’t know the men who were brought in; they wore plain clothes, were of all ages, without insurgent armbands. As I heard from the German soldiers, the outbreak of the Uprising had caught these people away home and they were trying to get back. None of us had seen any of them released by the Germans.
Seven or ten days later, Doefler ordered that due to the spread of diseases, the women and children from the dungeon were to be moved to an open-air shack in the fort, while the men were to stay in the dungeon. A few days later, the women and children were released home and the men were moved to the shack. During their stay in the dungeon, all suffered from colds and tonsillitis.
Around 15 August, General Doerfler handed command over to an air force colonel, Stützle (Oberst), and went, I think, to the West. He didn’t forget to take valuables with him, including carpets, paintings and furniture from the house of the first lady, Maria Mościcka, at Racławicka Street 126, and these things were loaded onto trucks by people from the fort, including Mazur (currently domiciled at Miłobędzka Street 20).
The new commander, Oberst Stützle, sent all the inhabitants of the fort – children, women and men – to the Pruszków transit camp on 21 or 22 August, and ordered more houses razed to the ground. Near the Mokotów fort, they set fire to houses on Miłobędzka, Balonowa, Racławicka, Gimnastyczna, Chodkiewicza, Olimpijska, and Turystyczna streets. Before setting fire to the houses, Stützle let the soldiers loot them, and each soldier had the right to send packages weighing several dozen kilograms back to Germany. The GFP withheld the order for several days to get the most valuable things and only then passed it to the Luftwaffe, who then also had their share of the looting.
On 7 October 1944, I came by my own cart to collect information about the course of events in the fort, hoping to uncover the things I had buried to save them from being looted. I encountered Colonel Stüzle himself and he told me that he would order his soldiers to execute me on the spot for coming to the fort. I told him that I had come to reclaim the saddle which he had borrowed from me previously, so he checked himself and even issued me a receipt, a copy of which I hereby submit. He declared during our conversation that he had burned my house and that he would proceed to blow it up.
When Warsaw was liberated by the Polish troops in January 1945, I went to my house and found the remnants of German flammable bombs and a strongbox in the attic – I have kept them. At the same time I found out that my flat was burned and the strongbox destroyed with explosives.
As the civilians from the fort were being evacuated through the Pruszków camp (on 22 August 1944), I was placed, along with my injured brother and a terminally ill baby, as unfähig (unfit for transport) on a farm beyond the fort, in the direction of Okęcie, owned by my neighbor Polec, from where I was able to watch the action of the Luftwaffe unit in the Mokotów fort. After 22 August, rocket launchers were brought in (“cows” or “Katyushas”) and Stüzle’s soldiers used them to bomb civilian houses in upper Mokotów, launching 30 rockets at a time, without aiming. This was known as siany ogień (scattered fire). The Germans thus destroyed the whole district from Racławicka Street to Wierzbno.
As for the Luftwaffe men from the Mokotów fort, a senior Feldwebel Keller, who wanted to get rid of me (as I knew his name from times before August 1944), would send me to the battlefront to get oats for the horses, which in these circumstances meant certain death. Capt. Rudolf and the above mentioned Keller conducted executions of arrested men (about whom I testified above in connection with the court composed of Doerfler and the judge- advocate), as they were the immediate commanders of the Luftwaffe unit carrying out the executions. Keller was from the Rhineland; description: round face, obese, dark blond hair. Capt. Rudolf was from the municipality of Suszki, Kępno county, where his parents had an estate; in 1920 he chose Germany, where he was given a post in the army. Description: short, thin, with a stoop, blond hair.
When the civilians were being shot at on 1 August 1944, private Dungler from Vienna proved very zealous; among others, he wounded my brother. Private Hanysz from Silesia also tormented civilians.
I learned all the details concerning the events I have just given and obtained all the information concerning the activities of and posts occupied by the Germans by talking to Luftwaffe soldiers, which I was able to do as I spoke German well and because the Luftwaffe was stationed in the vicinity of my house from 1940 onwards.
As for the staff member, Major Brauer, I have to admit that his behavior towards civilians and insurgents was beyond reproach; he talked about the insurgents with dignity, avoiding the commonly used expression bandit, and on his initiative the civilians incarcerated in the dungeon were granted some rights.
At that the report was concluded and read out.