On 19 November 1946 in Kraków, member of the Main Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, district investigative judge Jan Sehn, acting upon verbal request and in the presence of the member of said Commission, vice-prosecutor of the Kraków Court of Appeals Edward Pęchalski, in accordance with the provisions of and procedure provided for under the Decree of 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293) in connection with Article 254, 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, interviewed former prisoner no. 39 247 of the Auschwitz concentration camp, who testified as follows:
Name and surname Alfred Woycicki
Date and place of birth 21 June 1906 in Lwów
Names of parents Władysław and Stanisława
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Nationality and citizenship Polish
Occupation Secretary at the City Theatre
Place of residence Kraków, Sienkiewicza Street 11, flat 12b
I was arrested on 18 February 1942 in Kraków and after four months in the Montelupich Street prison, during which a police investigation was being conducted against me. I was transported as part of a group of 62 people to Auschwitz. I arrived in the Auschwitz concentration camp on 11 June 1942. After a brief period of working at Block 11, I was assigned to work in the office of the information service (Erkennungsdienst) of the Political Department of the Auschwitz camp. That bureau photographed newly arriving prisoners, took fingerprints, managed an album of prisoner photographs and fingerprint archives. At first, all the prisoners were photographed, later on they stopped photographing Jewish prisoners, and in the final period (1943) only Germans were photographed. The form shown to me (Attachment no. 1) was used in the office I worked at for record-keeping purposes.
Aside from registration and record-keeping work associated with the intelligence service, the Erkennungsdienst office also performed various photographic jobs at the request of specific SS-men, so photographs were taken, or film with photographs they had taken was developed and prints of those films were made.
[photograph of a form]
Attachment no. 1
In the first half of 1944, Kaschub, a Wehrmacht officer candidate, arrived in the Auschwitz camp. The deputy chief of the Erkennungsdienst, Ernst Hoffman, called him Oberfeldwebel Dr Kaschub. He had a separate, isolated ward on the first floor of Block 28 of the Auschwitz main camp, where young and middle-aged Jewish prisoners were held. With his Leica photo camera, Kaschub took photographs of limbs of men in the ward that had been put at his disposal. He brought the films of those photographs to the Erkennungsdienst workshop, where prisoner Bronisław Jureczek ([from] Brzozowice-Kamień, Upper Silesia) would develop them, prisoner Józef Pysz (Bielsko) prepared blown-up prints, prisoner Lech Koreń (Gdańsk) dried them and cut them, and prisoner Tadeusz Bródka (MSZ), the kapo of the Erkennungsdienst, sorted the photographic prints.
Working in the Erkennungsdienst, I looked at all those photographs as they interested me due to their contents. Namely, they showed the upper or lower limbs affected with some disease, with the same disease in the same prisoner being photographed several times at various intervals, at various stages of the disease’s progress. It was visible in the labels on the plates photographed alongside the sick limb. The plates listed, aside from number of days or perhaps hours, various letter marks the significance of which significance I have been unable to decipher. The photographs that are now being presented to me are those exact photographs taken by Kaschub, depicting prisoners remaining at his disposal in one of the wards on the first floor of Block 28. (The witness was shown 32 photographs, picked up on 17 January 1946 by the Krakow District Commission for the Investigation of German Crimes in Poland from the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków, where they had been deposited in the spring of 1945 by Mrs. Skrzeszewska, the wife of the then-minister of education. One print of each of those photographs has been attached to the present protocol. The photographs are the following:)
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 84
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 85
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 86
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 87
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 88
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 89
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 90
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 91
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 92
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 93
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 94
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 95
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 96
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 97
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 98
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 99
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 100
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 103
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 104
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 105
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 106
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 107
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 108
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 109
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 110
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 111
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 112
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 113
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 114
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 115
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 116
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 117
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 118
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 119
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 120
[photograph of a limb]
Photograph no. 121
Hoffman explicitly stressed to the prisoners employed at preparing those prints that no print of the films brought by Kaschub for development can go missing. All the prints, even failed ones, must be turned in by the prisoners to him, to Hoffman.
The ward where the prisoners given to Kaschub were housed was closed-off. The people held there could not leave, other prisoners were barred from entering. I managed to get into that ward under the following circumstances: Kaschub would bring his photo camera to the Erkennungsdienst to have it loaded with film. I would take the camera back to him to Block 28. One day, when I was in Block 28, Kaschub’s ward was open, as it was being cleaned at the time. Some 20 men were lying in beds there. They were not Poles, so I tried talking to them in German. They did not want to answer my questions, only one of the prisoners, very nervous, told me that he had arrived at the ward he was in completely healthy, that Kaschub scratched his leg, then put a compress on the scratched spot, that his leg became envenomed and was more and more suppurated. The prisoner had a bandaged leg. Other prisoners in Kaschub’s ward also had bandaged legs or arms. I shared the information I had obtained with my fellow prisoners, Prof. Olbrycht from Kraków and Fejkiel, a doctor from Kraków. During my conversation with them I realized that they also had information about the procedures performed by Kaschub on the prisoners placed in Block 28. They then explained to me that Kaschub was experimentally inducing phlegmons or using some kind of irritants that he rubbed into the skin of a healthy limb, resulting in inflammation, boils, hard-to-heal ulcers and other skin conditions. Those professionals and other informed colleagues were of the opinion that Kaschub wanted to experimentally cause conditions that were induced artificially by German deserters to avoid obligatory military service.
By order of the camp doctor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, Hauptsturmführer Dr Mengele, the Erkennungsdienst took photographs of prisoners completely exhausted through starvation, called Muselmanns in camp parlance. The photographs, alongside films and prints, were sent to Dr Mengele. The looks of the prisoners photographed under the orders of Mengele can be seen in the photograph now shown to me, which was also taken in the office of the Auschwitz Erkennungsdienst (Photograph no. 122).
[photograph of four prisoners]
Photograph no. 122
Those photographs were taken for Dr. Mengele in connection with the anthropological research he conducted on the prisoners, for which he selected especially twins, as objects best suited for research into heredity. Its results were the basis for the official German theory of racism. Against the background of this doctrine, and in connection with the introduction of obligation to obtain permission for marriage by SS-men seeking to marry, photographs no. 123, 124, 125 show one of the SS-men of the Auschwitz crew, photographed due to his application for marriage permission. I do not know the name, I recognize the photograph without any doubt.
[photograph from behind]
Photograph no. 123
[photograph from the side]
Photograph no. 124
[photograph from the front]
Photograph no. 125
In all cases regarding the shooting of prisoners who approached the camp fence, the bodies were photographed at the site where the bodies were after the shooting. The photographs were taken by the SS-men of the Erkennungsdienst – Hoffman or Walter. They were attached to the prisoner death file as proof that they committed suicide by running into the high-voltage electrified wire. The picture I am being shown now is a photograph of that kind. I state with complete certainty that it is an Auschwitz photograph (Photograph no. 126).
[picture of prisoner corpse next to wires]
Photograph no. 126
On 11 November 1944, I was transported from Auschwitz to Gross-Rosen. What happened to the materials of the Auschwitz Erkennungendienst, I do not know. After returning to [Poland] in June of 1945, I was informed that some of the photographs of the Auschwitz Erkennungsdienst are in the country; some part of them was supposed to be in Chorzów. This indicates that the Germans, while evacuating the camp, did not haul those materials away.
Read out. At that the interview and the present protocol were concluded.