Day 13 of the trial, 25 March 1947.
The witness has provided information about himself as follows: Jakub Lewin, 43 years old, assistant physician at the Faculty of Medicine at a Paris University, married, one child, nonbeliever, no relationship to the parties.
Chairperson: What are the motions of the parties as to the mode of questioning the witness?
Prosecutor Cyprian: We discharge the witness from the oath.
Defender Ostaszewski: We discharge the witness from the oath.
Chairperson: By mutual agreement of the parties, the Tribunal has decided to question the witness without the oath.
Would you tell the Tribunal in what circumstances you came to be in Auschwitz and what you know about the case, in regard to the accused Höß.
Witness: I was arrested in Paris on 11 December 1941 and transferred to the camp in Auschwitz on 27 March 1942. Before that, I spent three months in a camp in Compiègne, in France.
Once in Auschwitz, our transport was immediately received with whiplashes from the numerous SS men awaiting us at the station; and I can safely say that from that moment on, we were beaten continuously. That is why, having arrived at the camp, we immediately realized this was a camp where all people were being systematically destroyed. This was the system of conduct that was adhered to in Auschwitz at the time.
The work that the prisoners had to do was beyond the workers’ strength. For example, on the day I arrived, or on the next day, I was sent to work consisting in carrying planks. There were two of us to do the work. We started with carrying one plank, when we returned, we were given two planks, then three and four, and we carried on like that until we collapsed.
At that moment, they started to beat us, and once we were lying on the ground, they left us like that, not paying attention to us.
I must stress that all of our supervisors were criminals with green triangles. The same goes for block chiefs, as well as our guards and kapos [prisoners assigned to supervise other prisoners], who were called Aufseherami or brigadiers.
Then, apart from the work that was constantly beyond the worker’s strength, the food was totally insufficient. It consisted of a fifth of a loaf of camp bread, of a tiny amount of margarine, 5-10 grams a day, a teaspoon of marmalade or a very thin, 5-millimeter, slice of sausage. Aside from that, our clothing was also insufficient. In the winter of 1942, this was in March, we were given the clothes of Soviet prisoners of war, of whom there were still 300 at the time of our arrival, out of, as we were told, 13 thousand. There was no hospital in the camp. The hygiene was totally insufficient, there was no water for drinking or washing yourself. During the first six weeks of my stay in the camp, I never once washed myself or undressed. It is hardly surprising, then, that people very easily fell ill in these conditions, and since there was no hospital, caring for the sick simply consisted in killing them. This I could see with my own eyes, after I had stayed one day in the block. I saw then how, after the assembly, when all the prisoners had left for work, the Blockführer[Block Leader] and his assistants were going through the block, taking people who had stayed behind, massacring and killing them with sticks. In this way, we always had about 30 people dead, in a block of 600, after the assembly.
Later, after my release, I found a document hidden in Kraków containing a list of the deceased and the date of our transport from 25 March 1942. This transport included more or less 1100 people, 90% of whom were people of less than 50 years of age, so relatively young, and since they passed the medical examination, one has to suppose that this was a transport of people in their prime, healthy. Now I want to demonstrate how these people died out. Within the first month, that is, in April, 614 out of this number was already dead. Out of the 500 who remained alive, 246 died in May, and of those left, more or less a half, 143, in June. In July, 62 died, which is also more or less half of the number from the beginning of the month.
It is clear, then, that this killing of people was conducted in a very systematic way. It is a hard thing to describe, all those systems of which there were so very many, of killing people and inflicting suffering on them. Describing the suffering inflicted on those people is an impossibility, to use colloquial speech. All this was happening at the time when Höß was camp commandant. It is not possible for all of the elaborate cruelties to have been ordered by the superior authorities. All of these massacres were organized in detail by commandant Höß or his subordinates.
That is all.
Chairperson: You are a doctor?
Witness: Yes, I am.
Chairperson: Can you tell us about the experiments and sterilization?
Witness: I was a doctor there since 1943. As I said, at the beginning there was no hospital and the sick were simply killed. The experiments were initiated in block 10. I could confirm here what many witnesses have already said, namely that there were many cases of sterilizing women and men, and bioceptions were being carried out, that is, certain fragments were cut out of organs, especially of the uterus. Apart from this, injections were administered of more or less toxic substances. I saw for myself with my own eyes experiments with phenol injections to the heart performed on women, men, and children, who were to be killed. I saw numerous crimes that are hard to describe because it would take too much time. I saw hundreds of people executed by firing squad, I saw hangings of women and men, prisoners and civilians, who appeared there out of nowhere, I saw mothers with children being killed, I saw Soviet prisoners of war massacred in a terrible manner, their wrists, arms, skulls, heads being broken and smashed; I saw tremendous numbers of crimes, it’s difficult to describe it all.
Defender Umbreit: In your testimony, talking about all the different cruelties and barbarities that took place in Auschwitz, you said that they were all inspired by Höß or his subordinates. How would the witness explain the fact that these cruelties were repeated in what appears like a standardized manner in all concentration camps?
Witness: I cannot explain this, but I suspect that there must have been a school, training SS men in killing large numbers of people.
Defender Umbreit: So this would have been a well-thought-out set of rules imposed from above?
Witness: I suspect that there were no rules, but that the purpose of the camp was killing people, because we were outside the law, at the mercy of any SS man who did not have to report to anyone what he was doing.
Chairperson: The witness is free to go.