Kraków, 10 October 1946. Investigative Judge Jan Sehn, acting in accordance with the provisions of the Decree dated 10 November 1945 (Journal of Laws of the Republic of Poland No. 51, item 293) about the Main and District Commissions for Investigation of German Crimes in Poland, being a member of the Main Commission, heard the person named below based on Article 255, in relation to Articles 107 and 115 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, who testified as follows:
| Name and surname | Władysław Fejkiel |
| Age | 34 |
| Parents’ names | Jan and Karolina |
| Profession | Doctor |
| Religious affiliation | Roman Catholic |
| Nationality and citizenship | Polish |
| Place of residence | Kraków, Smoleńsk Street 1 |
| I | was staying in Auschwitz camp in the period between 8 October 1940 and 18 January 1945 |
as prisoner no. 5647. Initially, I worked in different kommandos. In March 1941, due to total exhaustion, I got into the prison infirmary as a Muselmann. Having recovered in summer 1941, I took the post of a nurse (Pfleger). At that time, prisoners who were doctors were not allowed to work as doctors. In 1942, as a prisoner doctor, I was ordered to run block 20, which was an infections ward. In January 1944, I became an infirmary camp elder (Lagerältester Häftlings-Krankenbau) of the main camp in Auschwitz. Initially, in 1940, the infirmary blocks consisted only of the one-story blocks 20 and 21, then block 28 was added, as well as block 19 – for the convalescents – and, in the final period of the camp’s existence, block 9 as well. In the period when the hospital was limited to just the two blocks, the population of prisoners was around 5 thousand, while around a thousand of them were ill because of extreme exhaustion or due to beatings. There were no infectious diseases at that time, and most of the prisoners were young and strong people. After a short period of staying in the camp, not longer than 3 months, these people would wilt. I myself had deteriorated from 75 kg (when entered the camp) to 41 kg during the first four months of my internment in the camp. Several patients would be squeezed onto a single mattress, it would often be the case that up to five people lay on a single one, no matter the illnesses they suffered from. They were fed worse than the ill who kept working. The medical supplies assigned for the hospital had only a theoretical meaning. For a block with 400 patients sick with diarrhea (Durchfall), I would receive 30 heart drops and 20 charcoal tablets. This amount of medicines was supposed to suffice for all the sick for the whole day. I must note that a daily dose of charcoal for a single patient is 10 tablets, half a gram each. In the initial period, the hospital didn’t have any tools. A couple of stolen knives, tweezers and forceps was everything that the prisoner doctors used for secretly carrying out the most serious surgical operations. By the end of 1941, a young SS medic, Dr. Entress, intending to learn how to operate, arranged a surgery room. Its equipment was primitive but sufficient. Later on we supplied ourselves with the right instruments that were brought to the camp by people who went to the gas chamber straight from the train platform. The hospital blocks were not equipped with any medical or hygienic facilities by the Germans. We did it ourselves by stealing the necessary materials. Using them, we made bathrooms, showers and a ventilation system. In the initial period the hospital didn’t serve any medical purpose: it was a collection of people who were dying or had died, and an institution whose purpose was to issue fictional medical cards and death certificates. This situation changed in spring 1942, it seems to me that it was because of the demand for labor for the German war machine to fight a total war. Then a fictional category of prisoner doctor (Häftlingsarzt) was introduced, and the patients forecast to return to work soon would be treated, while the ones who didn’t give hope of a quick recovery were exterminated through gassing or injections. Wiping the camp out of the element unfit for labor was done through picking the people who required long-term treatment. This process was referred to as selections. Of course, no medical examinations underpinned the process; in many cases the selection was done by guesswork. Therefore, the victims of the selections were often people who would have made a full recovery after long-term treatment. In 1942, under the guise of fighting typhoid, the camp authorities resolved to exterminate the carriers of the disease (the lice) along with the ill. That’s when the camp’s commandant Höß issued a general authorization to annihilate all
He was an alcoholic and when drunk, he would harass his victims for no reason. The number of people killed this way would be from several dozen up to over a hundred, and in some periods of huge intensification, up to 300 prisoners daily would be killed that way. Overall around 20 thousand prisoners were killed in the Stammlager itself with the use of lethal injections. Not only were the ill and elderly killed with injections, but also children who were absolutely fine, but unfit for work simply due to their age.
I recall an operation like that carried out by the camp’s authorities in the first months of 1943. Several dozens of boys were killed then, around 80 from the Lublin area and various Polish towns, as far as I remember. Those children, aged from 10 to 14, were moved to block 20 and placed in a room specifically prepared for them. I wanted to put them into the population record, but the elderly of the hospital camp, a German named Bock, told me that he had been ordered to wait. My intuition was that he thought that the children would be moved elsewhere or released from the camp. It turned out this supposition was wrong.
Another assistant came to block 20 in the afternoon of the same day, an SS-man called Scherpe, who took the boys to the outpatient room with the help of Pańszczyk and needled them one after another. It was the last procedure which Pańszczyk took part in. Killing the children caused a nervous breakdown and he never did lethal injections again. Two months [later], he went away in a transport.
A fictitious medical record was always prepared for all of the numbered prisoners who were killed – whether by needling, shooting, or being killed during work. By orders of a German camp doctor and in accordance with his instructions, the records were drawn up by the prisoners in the hospital offices. One of a dozen causes of death indicated by the Lagerarzt was to be put down in the record. The most often were: Herzschlag, severe circulatory failure (Kreislauf Insuffizienz), swelling of the lungs with weakened heart muscle (Lungenödem bei Herzmuskeldegeration), pneumonitis (Lungenentzündung), general sepsis (Allgemeine Sepsis), and different combinations of these conditions. Examples of the aforementioned causes of death are the files shown to me in relation to deaths of my colleagues Chodorowski, Ullmann, Gieszczykiewicz, Joniec, Tempka, Türschmidt, Żabicki, Wojdalski, Stössel, Kozioł, Kukiełka, and Suchnicki. These are all my friends from the time of my internment at the camp. Most of them worked at the hospital. Chodorowski, Joniec, Kozioł, and Wojdalski were selected in June 1942 along with a group of Polish prisoners and placed in a penal company in Birkenau. SS-men incited a revolt of the penal company prisoners and, under the pretense of an alleged escape attempt, these prisoners were shot by the officers of the Political Bureau. For a long time there had been a plan to have them killed, the only matter was to find an excuse. The alleged revolt was such an excuse. They all died on one day. In the files – as I can see now – different dates and causes of death are stated. Due to this I need to note, that in order to keep such operations of mass executions concealed from public world opinion – news from behind the barbed wires reached them via illegal camp organizations – the prisoners killed during such operations would be divided across several,
| or even more than a | dozen days, when they were removed from the population record. |
| The | proof of this are the files of the four of my colleagues mentioned above, the so-called |
| Totenmeldunki | by the penal campaign’s block elder. He didn’t state the date and time of |
| death. The | data was then filled with dates at the secretariat, below which the executed |
where signed out of the population record.
Soon after, I think in October 1942, prisoners who came from Lublin who had arrived in various transports were selected. The whole group of around 200 was hustled to block 11 under the pretense of having a photograph taken, and they were shot there.
Within that group were my close associates from the camp’s infirmary, nurse Leon Kukiełka and doctor Henryk Suchnicki. Both were shot on the same day. As I can see in the file now, different dates and causes of death were stated. Also Stefan Żabicki, Władyslaw Tempka, and Marian Gieszczykiewicz were shot at block 11. I knew all of them personally and had worked with them in the camp. Żabicki actually sent a goodbye letter before dying, with a request to pass it on to his wife.
I state with confidence that all the medical records found in the files shown to me (I was shown the documents from the inspection protocol from 14 September 1946) are made up and added post-factum by the infirmary’s office according to German camp doctor’s instructions. I have described the procedure above. Let me note that the prisoners who wrote down the illnesses were not doctors, and they had never seen the deceased that were the subjects of those certificates describing the cause of the death. They had some free choice limited by a selection done by the German doctor and they used their imagination. As a result, colossal mistakes often occurred. I recall a time when they made up the medical history of a German who had had a prosthesis of his left leg when entering the camp, which then claimed that the cause of death had been the necrosis of the left leg. There was a lot of fuss about that because some German insurance company filed a request for an explanation. We eventually put an end to it by editing some of the documents and stating it was the right leg.
By the end of 1943 the authorities of the Auschwitz camp, that is mostly Höß and his executives, that is the political department, were given a free hand to murder prisoners in the camp as they wished. The authorities used this authorization to a wide extent, killing prisoners by shooting, needling, gassing, and other individual methods at the blocks or worksites. Due to the propaganda concerning the cruelty in the German camps and as a result of repressions that the Allies threatened, and in the hope for a possibility to negotiate peace with the Allies, Berlin forbade murdering prisoners without central authorization by the end of 1943. Since that time the ruling only concerned Aryans. The numbered Jews were still being selected and killed in gas chambers. Mass executions were also being carried out on those who had been brought to Auschwitz for extermination from all the areas of conquered Europe. This included Jews of various nationalities in the first place. Höß, first as the camp’s commandant, then as a special delegate responsible for the Jewish operation, prepared all the necessary technical means for that. It was under his rule when all the crematoria and gas chambers were built, and when these devices could not handle all the victims, he ordered the commissioning of replacement devices, that is the conversion of rural huts into gas chambers and the construction of special pits for burning corpses. The SS men whom I encountered due to my position and my colleagues in the political office told me that transports of people destined for gassing (Sondertransporte) were sent by police units scattered around the occupied countries, at the request of the command of the Auschwitz camp, which issued such demands to the police proportionately to the numbers the destructive devices (gas chambers, crematoria and replacement devices) could liquidate. Höß himself assisted on the platform in receiving such transports, especially when rich Jews came to the camp, e.g. Dutch or Belgian. Once, while coming across from Birkenau to the main camp, I witnessed Höß with his entourage at the ramp, receiving a cargo that had arrived in Birkenau.
The SS-men also told me that when a larger transport of Polish prisoners came from Lublin in spring 1944, Höß didn’t want to submit them into the camp, but made personal efforts to gas the whole group. It was only due to special orders from the Berlin headquarters that the gassing of this transport did not take place, and the transport was directed to another camp.
According to the principles of the camp authorities and the resources provided by them as well as the conditions they created, the Auschwitz hospitals for prisoners could be called hospitals in name only. German doctors didn’t show any interest in treating the ill. They cared about the external formalities instead, writing up medical records, drawing up fever graphs, etc. They were passionate, however, in running experiments on both the sick and the healthy, being successfully provided with a sufficient number of subjects by the Auschwitz conglomerate. In the main camp, block 10 was the experimental block. In Birkenau, a separate Roentgen station existed. The hygiene institute in Rajsko was an auxiliary institution. Experiments on women were carried out at block 10. Those in charge of the experiments were Schumann, Clauberg, Weber, Wirths. The experiments could be classified into the following groups: 1. Research on the effectiveness of sterilization using X-rays. In the course of these experiments, men’s testicles and women’s ovaries were exposed to radiation, and then these organs were cut out after a certain period in order to inspect the results of the radiation. These experiments were run by Schumann. Young men and women aged around 20 were used. The experiments were life-threatening, they were painful and caused permanent disability. Several dozen people were mutilated in that way. The operations caused several deaths.
2. A Königsberg University professor named Clauberg, acting in cooperation with the German chemical industry, tested various formulas provided by these companies in order to find a new contrasting mass for X-ray images of female genital organs that could replace lipidol, which was lacking in Germany. The injections were extremely painful. Moreover, Clauberg injected some substances into women’s Fallopian tubes in order to cause inflammation, and, as a result of this, scarring and overgrowing of the ovary which was supposed to cause infertility; to be more precise: to make insemination impossible. Such operations were also painful and caused afflictions including sterile peritonitis. Several hundred women were the subjects of Clauberg’s experiments. All of these interventions were painful, and the subjects lived in constant fear that they would be exterminated as they were the deponents of the mystery (Geheimnisträger).
3. A German prisoner, Dr. Samuel, in close consultation with and under the direction of the head garrison’s chief doctor (Standortarzt) Wirths, was in charge of research
aimed at early diagnosis of uterine cancer. Because Wirths showed a lot of interest in these experiments, I became convinced that he was going to publish some scientific paper based on their results. Samuel was supposedly cutting out parts of the mucous membranes in the uterus. These efforts didn’t bring any results, and Samuel himself being a Geheimnisträger was gassed and burned in the crematory in Birkenau.
4. The Wehrmacht cadet (Fahnenjunker) Kaschub, a medicine student delegated to
Auschwitz specifically for that purpose by the Wehrmacht, conducted the following experiments on prisoners there: he picked healthy men from around the blocks, especially with healthy skin. He rubbed various toxic substances into their limbs, as a result of which inflammation and blisters emerged (often reaching the state of skin necrosis) as well as wounds and ulceration, very difficult to heal, which required months of treatment. I got the impression that Kaschub was aiming to describe the symptoms which the substances caused, in order to gain evidence to unmask deserters trying to avoid military service.
The chief of Auschwitz’s Hygiene Institute, Dr. Weber, and the SS men under him, drew blood from prisoners. Weber’s representatives usually prowled the hospital blocks, as other prisoners were at worksites and thus out of reach. In accordance with Weber’s instructions, the medical assistants were to draw half a liter of blood at once from a person. Except for that they took blood from the freshly shot. After processing at the Hygiene Institute, the remedies made there were used in blood transfusions for German soldiers wounded on the front line.
Due to my duties, I also had insight into the matters of the kitchen. The prison kitchen inspection was within the camp doctor’s (Lagerarzt) – that is Dr. Entress’s – scope of responsibilities over some period at the main camp, and Rhode’s, Klein’s, Fischer’s, and others, at other times. Entress was not interested in the kitchen at all. Rhode carried out the inspections and due to that opportunity I could also look into kitchen matters, in particular into the matter of food for prisoners. During the inspections we took samples of food that was in the exact same condition as when a prisoner would eat it. We then sent the samples to the Hygiene Institute in Rajsko in order to determine its nutritional value. Based on the results provided by the Institute and based on my own observations, I can distinguish two periods of nutrition for the Auschwitz prisoners. The first one, including the years 1940-1941, and the second one, starting from 1942 until the end of the camp’s existence. In the first period, the energy value of the officially distributed food was estimated at 1155 calories. Such nourishment was received by every prisoner, regardless of his health or the kind of work he was doing. The meals were given three times a day. At 5:00 a.m. the prisoner would receive half a liter of black coffee without sugar. Although the drink was warm, and as such was suitable for warming up the body, it didn’t contain any caloric value due to its contents. It was warm water flavored with a little coffee. In 1941, around half a liter of flour soup would be given out for breakfast, with its value not exceeding 100 calories. Prisoners would get dinner at noon. Considering the results from the Institute of Hygiene research, the type of products the kitchen would be provided for the preparation of the soup, and finally the taste and appearance of the soup, I calculated the value of this food at around 365 calories per liter. Supper was issued in the winter around 16.30, in the summer around 19.30. Prisoners would receive half a liter of the same kind of coffee as for breakfast, or herbal tea, 250 grams of bread and extras such as sausage, cheese, margarine or marmalade. The overall energy value of the evening meal was around 790 calories, and the value for the all-day nutrition in that period was around 1155 calories. In the period between 1942 and the end of 1944 the breakfast wasn’t subject to any changes. And a prisoner would get a liter of soup with value of 275 calories in that period. So the soups worsened. 250 grams of bread was issued for supper, and a fat-based side, sometimes meat, of a calorie value of 830. Overall nutritional value in that later period was slightly more than 1100 calories for the prisoners who weren’t classified as hard-working. The hard-working prisoners would get extras, such as a portion of bread distributed twice a week, or fat. The value of those extras was around 450 calories a day. Please note that these were all the portions that the prisoners were supposed to get. In reality, it was often the case that the prisoners didn’t get any food at all. It was a punishment for minor camp offenses. Not only was the punishment given to individuals, but often to all prisoners of a specific block. The assigned food quotas actually never reached prisoners in full due to thefts committed by the SS men, who had access to products intended for prisoners only due to their supervising posts, as well as other camp authorities and careless block elders. The food that was officially provided, and in particular the food that was actually distributed, was absolutely insufficient to keep prisoners in health. The prisoners starved and 70 percent of mortality within the camp was caused by malnutrition and emaciation. The hungry picked through waste and filth and ate it, which resulted in digestive tract diseases. I know of incidents when hungry prisoners allowed German kapos to knock out their golden teeth in exchange for a slice of bread. There was also a case when a starving Russian POW seized a human liver from the laboratory. When somebody told him it was a human liver, he ran off with his loot and ate it hurriedly.
Around 12 thousand Russian POWs who went through the camp received even worse food. Most of them were starved to death. I must note that a human being working as hard as – and in the conditions of – the Auschwitz prisoners should get from 3.5 to 4 thousand calories to keep the body in balance. The food provided to the Auschwitz prisoners was thus insufficient and according to my observations led people, who came to the camp healthy and well-fed, to hunger diseases within two months. The insufficient feeding of the prisoners occurred without any consideration for the weather, so neither the temperature nor air humidity was ever taken into account. If you consider the fact that the prisoners lived in conditions that did not meet the most primitive standards of hygiene, that the living space per person was around three cubic meters of a room they spent the night in, you will understand the harvest of death in that camp. The mental health of the prisoners was ruined by the constant uncertainty of their fate and the brutal terror, which was a tool aiming to keep the enormous mass of people in control.
The report was read out. The protocol procedure was hereby concluded.