Warsaw, 14 March 1947. 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 testimonies and of the wording of Art. 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Joanna Ewa Kryńska |
| Names of parents | Albert and Anna née Zawadzka |
| Date of birth | 19 September 1915 |
| Education | medical doctor |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
| Place of residence | Warsaw, Zaliwskiego Street 19, flat 8 |
| Nationality and state affiliation | Polish |
| Profession | assistant in the 1st Clinic of Internal Medicine of the University of Warsaw |
During the uprising I was assigned to the sanitary station […] to Saint Stanislaus Hospital in Wolska Street. After the hospital was seized by German troops on 5 August 1944, I remained in the hospital as a doctor.
Around 10 August 1944, Oberführer SS Dirlewanger arrived and took up residence in the hospital. Knowing German well, I had to serve as an interpreter and thanks to that I spoke to Dirlewanger and other officers. On the basis of these conversations I figured that Wola had been taken by the German troops and the Vlasovtsy from Kampfgruppe Reinefarth, which was a part of the “Herman Göring” division. I did not manage to establish who commanded the “Herman Göring” division. The headquarters was in Brühl’s Palace. I was told by German officers that once Reinefarth came to Saint Stanislaus Hospital.
Dirlewanger told me in a conversation that he was a friend of Himmler’s. All of the officers respected him highly and said that he was an important man. During Dirlewanger’s stay in the hospital, right up to the end of September 1944, beautiful carpets and silverware were brought for him from Warsaw houses. Sometimes Dirlewanger would spend the night in Brühl’s Palace.
In the first half of August, during a conversation with myself and Doctor Kubica, Dirlewanger said that what was happening to civilians in Warsaw was nothing compared to what had been happening in Russia, where his soldiers had left no human being alive, murdering and raping women. He said that this was necessary for the victory of Germany, all the more so since these were nations who were in all respects inferior to the Germans. The Slavs were [unt]ermenschen. Nor would Vlasovtsy ever make it to Germany. He said that his troops were specially trained to suppress guerrilla warfare.
Dirlewanger cooperated closely with the Warsaw Gestapo, which was stationed in a house near Saint Adalbert Church. Spilke, the head of the division for investigating the mood of the people, formerly from Szucha Avenue, was there. Dirlewanger summoned him several times to carry out purges in the hospital. As a result of this, German doctors several times took away patients with very serious conditions (tuberculosis) and young boys that we were hiding by keeping them in beds. A part of the people who were taken by the Gestapo were taken to Saint Adalbert Church, and a part disappeared without any trace. In the hospital safety shelters, from among the civilians who had come there from the nearby houses, the Gestapo would select people by sight or based on denunciations, and would send a number of them to the camp in Pruszków, while a number of these people disappeared without any trace.
Upon Dirlewanger’s order, the Gestapo carried out three or four such purges in our hospital. How many people altogether were taken away, I do not know.
Upon the order of the head of the health department in the district, Lamprecht, Doctor Hartlieb and others packed up medical equipment (microscopes, etc.) and sent it by cars to Germany. The same happened in other hospitals.
After the hospital was seized by German troops on 5 August 1944, the Untersturmführer asked Doctor Kubica, who was acting as the head doctor in the hospital, to appoint a doctor and two nurses for a German dressing station. Doctor Kubica appointed Doctor Rygalski, myself and a nurse from a Home Army dressing point, whose name I don’t remember. Since at that time the Germans where executing all passers-by in Wolska Street, I did not want to go, thinking that I was being sent to an execution, and then the SS Untersturmführer declared upon his honour that we would not be executed. The escort shepherded our group through Wolska Street.
On the way I could see drunken Germans in front of every house, and the street was covered with corpses. Without reaching Bema Street, on the same side as Saint Stanislaus Hospital, under a red wall, I saw a group of around one hundred and fifty persons, mostly women and children, standing in a crowd, surrounded by SS soldiers. As I was passing by, I heard a burst of machine gun fire. When I was returning a couple of hours later, I saw corpses lying in that spot.
The escort brought us to a railway bank, where it turned out that there had been no dressing station. Major Stabsarzt Hartlieb from Kampfgruppe Reinefarth was sitting at a table there, and said to our escort: “Why did you bring them here, we do not need any Poles, we just need to execute them”.
Doctor [Man]teufel and Doctor Wesołowski, who had been separated from a group herded from the Wolski Hospital to the steam locomotive factory, were sitting near the table. As I heard it, the rest of the men from this group had been executed. These doctors were also brought to a German dressing station.
I approached Doctor Hartlieb and I said that a German officer had declared upon his honour that we would not be executed. Later in the conversation Doctor Hartlieb said that there was an explicit order from Dirlewanger that all Poles in Warsaw, irrespective of their sex and age, were to be executed. Warsaw was to be razed to the ground to show Europe what it meant to organize an uprising against the Germans. Then Doctor Hartlieb, leaving us under guard, took a motorcycle to go to Saint Stanislaus Hospital to check whether indeed a German officer had given his word that we were to avoid execution. After he returned, he declared that, thanks to his intervention and requests, he had obtained a permission from the authorities not to execute us, and then he sent us together with Doctor Wesołowski and Doctor Manteufel back to Saint Stanislaus Hospital.
On 7 August 1944, German officers told me during a conversation that the previous order to execute all Poles had been cancelled, and that now they had an order to execute men only. They did not tell me who had given that order and who had cancelled the previous one. After a few days, I learnt from a conversation with German officers that there had again been an order to execute only men caught in possession of arms and men suspected of participation in the uprising operation. Moreover, they were to be executed without a trial. This order remained in force until the capitulation.
On 7 August 1944, having obtained Doctor Hartlieb’s permission and escorted by two German soldiers, I, Doctor Manteufel, Doctor Wesołowski and five sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul [szarytki], taking stretchers with us, went to the basements of nearby houses to collect the wounded.
When passing Młynarska Street, in front of the Tramway Administration building, I saw a pile of corpses in which there could have been over a hundred bodies. In one of the side streets, near Srebrna Street, we got a couple of wounded out of a basement and took them on our stretchers. Around twelve civilians remained in that basement. I saw that after we had left, a Ukrainian entered that basement and after a moment somebody said that the people who had remained in the basement had been executed. In response to our questioning, our escort said they could do nothing, since the Ukrainians had an order to execute all Poles, so our collecting the wounded only gave an additional clue to the Ukrainians to look for people to execute in basements. As this was the case, we did not venture out on a round with stretchers ever again.
I heard from German officers that throughout the entire period when he resided in the hospital, Dirlewanger was in constant contact with Brühl’s Palace. German officers also told me that there were no Wehrmacht troops in Wola; I myself did not see any Wehrmacht soldiers in Wola until the capitulation. The SS-men said that it was their duty to “clean up the area”.
At that the report was concluded and read out.
Warsaw, 6 May 1947. Member of the District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes, Judge Halina Wereńko, interviewed the person specified below as an unsworn witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false testimonies and of the wording of Art. 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the witness testified as follows:
My name is Joanna Ewa Kryńska, I gave my personal details during the interview on 14 March 1947.
In addition to my previous testimony, I state as follows.
In September 1944, after the transports from the Old Town and Powiśle, when only the city centre was still fighting, being suspected of espionage (in connection with my conversations with German officers and hiding insurgents in Saint Stanislaus Hospital), I was arrested upon Dirlewanger’s order and detained by Spilke from the Warsaw Gestapo in Saint Adalbert Church, where I spent four days. At the same time, soldiers from Berling’s army were kept in the church basement. It was prohibited to make contact with them. They were mistreated by the Germans, but they were not murdered, since they were thought of as Soviet prisoners of war.
At that time it was rumoured in the church that the Gestapo was picking out the Home Army soldiers from among the civilians gathered in Saint Adalbert Church, that they were being subjected to interrogation and then executed. I met Dirlewanger for the first time in Saint Stanislaus Hospital, where he had his quarters, around 8 August 1944 (I don’t recall the exact date). I heard that he had still been in Warsaw after the capitulation. Dirlewanger was an SS-man, he gave the impression of a typical Prussian officer – elegant, handsome, brutal. He commanded units consisting of Russian prisoners of war (Vlasovtsy) and SS brigades consisting of criminals.
Vlasovtsy had Russian officers, were composed of Ukrainians and of the “Kałmuks”. Some of them had typical Eastern, Tatar faces, they sang Ukrainian songs. The Vlasovtsy units did not stay for a long time in Saint Stanislaus Hospital, later there were only instances of them raping women.
As for Dirlewanger’s officers, I was dealing mainly with doctors. I did not see much of front line officers. I don’t know what happened to Dirlewanger later.
Once an SS-Reinefarth general, head of a Poznań unit of the police tasked with fighting banditry [bandytyzm], came to the hospital. I did not see him from up close.
The Schutspolizei was not present in Saint Stanislaus Church or in the neighbouring area. Before 9 August 1944, it seems that we had one wounded German from schupo, later I did not see any wounded from this division.
On 2 and 3 August 1944, larger numbers of tanks were making their way through Górczewska Street from the western direction. My husband, “Waga”, Karol Kryński, died on 2 August 1944 in Górczewska Street during an attempt to destroy the tanks.
We had only a few wounded from the “Herman Göring” division. There were more of them in Karol and Maria Hospital and the Wolski Hospital.
At that the report was concluded and read out.