Warsaw, 6 May 1946
To the attention of
the District Commission for the Investigation of
German Crimes
Warsaw
Court Building, Leszno Street 53/55
floor VI, room 617, Judge H. Wereńko.
Having read the article in no. 118 of “Gazeta Ludowa” concerning the murders committed at the Stauferkaserne on Rakowiecka Street, I hereby take the liberty of sending a few of my recollections from that time.
On 1 August 1944 at 5.00 p.m. sharp, youth members of the Home Army launched an attack on the SS barracks at Narbutta Street 33, on the corner with Kazimierzowska Street. I observed the commencement of the Warsaw Uprising from the windows of my flat at Narbutta Street 37. The first Polish units advanced from the small square on Narbutta Street, initially crawling and jumping, hiding behind lanterns and in the gates of houses, finally reaching houses nos. 39 and 37 and nos. 40 and 38, from where they fired upon the barracks. Proceeding through the courtyards of properties nos. 38 and 40, the insurgents forced their way through to buildings located on Rakowiecka Street facing the Stauferkaserne. Holes were soon made in the walls of our property through the buildings on the side of the square, while all the windows in house no. 35 (opposite the barracks) that were more or less shielded by protrusions of the wall were manned.
The boys were very few in number. Not more than 50 people took part in the attack on the barracks at Narbutta Street 33, yet it appeared that on 1 August in the afternoon they held the upper hand over the Germans. The situation changed dramatically when the Germans received reinforcements during the night and set up a small cannon on the second floor of the barracks. Thus our boys, with an insufficient quantity of weapons and nearly no ammunition, had to withdraw in the morning. I remember the general feeling of despair that we felt when the decision was made, in my flat on the terrace of the first floor. It was a sad necessity, for the boys had nothing left to shoot with, while some of them had been sent to other points (namely, towards Rakowiecka and Madalińskiego streets), so that only a few remained. It was raining, and the unit’s commander, lieutenant Zbyszek Idźkiewicz, had been wounded. The girls carried him on their backs to the Hospital of the Sisters of St. Elizabeth. A few of the boys were killed by the Germans.
In the morning, seeing that there was no resistance from the Polish side, the women in houses nos. 39 and 37 tried to remove all traces of the fighting that had taken place during the night, sweeping out the empty cartridge casings and mud and cleaning up the traces of blood, expecting the Germans to appear at any moment. The Germans, however, did not enter until the afternoon of 2 August, this being because the insurgents, having withdrawn from the corner of Narbutta and Kazimierzowska streets, had proceeded to attack the barracks from the direction of Madalińskiego Street. Before noon on 2 August, they launched a daring assault through a breach in the wall and captured the ground floor and basements. They were forced to withdraw in the afternoon. Oncoming “Tigers” were greeted with bottles containing petrol, but the insurgents did not manage to take any of them out. A few of the kids perished. The Germans regained control of the situation by around 4.00 p.m. Tanks and flamethrowers passed along Narbutta Street. While standing in the attic, so as to extinguish any possible fire, I felt the heat from the flames on my body. We did not allow a fire to develop, for we had water near at hand.
At 4.15 p.m. a larger unit of Germans forced its way through the property in which the pharmacy is located (Narbutta Street 35) to our property, making their way through holes in the wall. Another detachment entered through the street gate while the tanks were standing before the house. Rrraus! Alle raus auf die Strasse! – and men, women, and children, everyone left the house within a minute, holding small packages in their hands, which had been prepared in the event of the house being bombed. The Germans checked to see whether they would find anyone in the flats, while we were led off (together with the residents of a number of nearby houses), under armed guard, through Kazimierzowska Street and around the burning houses (we felt the heat of the embers) to the barracks on Rakowiecka Street.
The women carried small children in their arms. Nobody cried and nobody screamed. Everyone behaved with dignity. The Germans were astounded by the people’s conduct. It was plain to see that they had no specific orders for handling the evicted populace. They had no experience at the time, for we were the first prisoners taken during the Uprising. With the gun barrels of our escort trained on us, we finally arrived at Rakowiecka Street and proceeded to the external courtyard of the barracks. A few higher-ranking SS officers were already standing there. Each one of us had been previously patted down for weapons. We, the men, were ordered to walk to the right, and the women to the left. Since the men were ordered to stand facing the wall, with their backs to the courtyard, I became convinced that we would soon be shot, and therefore kissed my wife and gave her my “bombardment” attaché case, in which I had a spare shirt, a few mementoes and around 120,000 zlotys. A while later I heard my wife calling me, while a German officer who had searched the attaché case asked me where I had gotten so much money from. The eyes of the SS-men glittered at the sight of the cash, however a senior officer, whom I informed that I was the director of a large enterprise, stated that this was no crime and that I was allowed to have such a quantity of cash, ordering that the attaché case be returned to my wife. I was moved back to the line of men arranged against the wall.
In the meantime, crowds of men and women had started to gather. After a while the commanders decided that they would not shoot us, and instead would check something or other, whereupon the soldiers started pushing the crowd towards the basements and side ground-floor rooms of the barracks. Guarding my loved ones and the women with small children, I found myself in an enormous ground-floor hall to the left, in a group that comprised nearly all the residents of our house. A salvo could be heard in the courtyard. Some said that a dozen or so youths and men suspected of participating in the Uprising had been executed. The women started crying. It was stuffy and hot in the hall. Someone fell down unconscious, but we had no water. Finally, at around 7.00 p.m., a non-commissioned officer with a strong voice said that the German authorities would release the defenseless populace back to their homes, and detain only the bandits and insurgents. Gradually, the crowd was let out into the outside courtyard. Walking with my mother-in-law and wife, I was certain that I was free to go home, however in the courtyard a string of Gestapo men separated the men from the women and – while the women exited freely – we were once again pushed towards the side wall. My wife protested and did not want to leave; even after the other women had gone, she still stood there in the courtyard. One of the Germans then attacked her, hitting her with his rifle butt and driving her off. At this very moment a merry Gestapo prankster, who was standing with a machine gun in a turret above the wing located opposite our wall, fired a burst along the wall, a few centimeters over our heads. Since this was a stream of bullets, which tore out fragments of the wall above our heads, the men – clumped together and fearing for their heads – started crouching or bending down; as a result, the tight mass fell over, the men bringing each other down. My wife, who is shortsighted, heard the burst and, seeing that my father-in-law and I had also fallen, was convinced that her husband and father had both been killed. At the same time she was hit a few more times over the head with a rifle butt and finally driven off out of the courtyard into Rakowiecka Street, from where – in despair – she managed to get home, only to spend the night putting out a blaze on the roof and watching out for the wall, which was catching fire from the partially burning house next door.
Soon, they started to select some of the men from our group. I saw that they singled out Doctor Tarkowski, Professor Wakar, the director of the co-operative, and others. I asked them where they were taking them. To the hall on the first floor is what they replied. One man pointed me out. A German walked up and asked whether I was a Direktor or Vorstand. I replied that I was both. He then ordered me to join the others. When I found myself in the hall, I learned from those present there that they were hostages selected from the crowd. So I jumped out into the corridor and, approaching the soldier who was conducting the selection, I told him to once again summon the Generaldirektor of the gasworks, my father-in-law Cz. Świerczewski, who was being led with the rest of the crowd to the basements, for I clearly saw that the conditions were more favorable in the hall on the first floor than in the overcrowded basements. I managed to fetch one more acquaintance, engineer Schmidt-Madaliński, the director of the School of the Association of Traders and a machine vendor from Mazowiecka Street.
After sitting for more or less two hours in the hall, which, as it turned out, was the SS casino, some SS dignitary treated us to a speech. He declared that the Uprising was an unparalleled crime, the Polish bandits etc., etc. In short, he used a large number of appropriate epithets, quite naturally denouncing the action, stating that he had ordered that exactly 60 hostages – we ourselves – be taken from the crowd, and that the hostages apparently realized that the Uprising was nonsensical, but as representatives of Polish society were responsible for the ideology of their fellow countrymen. Acting on the instruction of the Führer, he declared that, provided the Warsaw Uprising was put down within a few days, nothing untoward would happen to us, and not a hair of our heads would be touched. If, however, the insurrectionists were to continue fighting, then we would be killed together with the entire Polish population of Warsaw.
We spent the first night on the bare floor, but they did give us water, marmalade, and biscuits in unlimited quantities. The next night they provided us with pallets. We covered ourselves with our overcoats.
During the night from 2 to 3 August, 84 men were executed beneath the windows of our refuge. Their bodies were placed on a truck and taken somewhere. We were told that they had been evicted from houses from which the Germans had been shot at, and were taken from the basement of our barracks. Two smaller rooms next to our hall in the barracks were placed at the disposal of Volksdeutscher, who together with their wives and children had sought protection from the authorities of the Vaterland. They, or rather the women among them, had to cope with a whole cavalcade of various SS officers and non-commissioned officers, who – having entered into conversation with them – invited the merry ladies to their rooms on the upper floors. Their subsequent squeals and moans testified to the fate of these virgins. In the meantime, a few more men with wives and daughters arrived in our hall. As it turned out, these were the wives and daughters of the prison personnel from Rakowiecka Street, as well as the women of those Poles working for German offices who had found themselves in areas occupied by German units. Among them was the wife of Professor Wakar from the Warsaw School of Economics.
On the second day we looked through the windows and saw the burning city, as well as enormous numbers of Soviet aircraft flying over; evidently, they were trying to save our Uprising. We expected English paratroop drops and a miracle that would save us and all the other prisoners. The crowd of prisoners was being led along throughout the day, mainly to the basements. Finally, when the basements too became full, successive transports of Polish prisoners were located in the garage buildings at the corner of Rakowiecka and Puławska streets. Looking from the windows, we saw bodies on the platforms, and people who, under threat of death, were being forced to load them onto the platforms and to drive with them through the gate in the direction of Aleja Niepodległości.
In the course of the day a senior German officer was wounded. The Gestapo men then barged into our hall and asked which of the doctors would undertake to immediately stop the bleeding and perform an operation. Doctor Tarkowski volunteered, but he declared that he did not have the necessary instruments with him, and that he would have to be escorted home to fetch them. Since he lived in our neighborhood, we asked him to inform my wife and mother-in-law that the father and I were still alive. And so it happened. We learned from Doctor Tarkowski that not only was the Uprising not dying down, but it was growing in strength, and that our boys were being assisted by large Soviet and English forces, while the Germans were capturing successive houses in Mokotów.
During the night from the third to the fourth day, drunken Germans burst into our hall and dragged out a few men to be interrogated at aleja Szucha. The people taken to aleja Szucha did not return on the next day. The orgies with women became more and more extreme. During the night Germans would walk in with torches and lift our overcoats to see whether we were hiding any women. They abducted a few from the neighboring room, and even though the women cried and threw themselves at the drunken German beasts, it was to no avail.
I regret that I destroyed my notes, in which I had written down the surnames of some of the SS and SD officers and non-commissioned officers. One of them, the head commander of our barracks, was Obersturmführer Baumeister.
The canteen provided us hostages with sufficient food. Every day at noon we received soup, there were two wagons of bottled soda water, and biscuits (Knäckerbrot) were available without any limitation. However, the gradual selection of hostages for interrogation at aleja Szucha filled me with terror. I was acutely aware that if they were to take me, it would mean the end of my life. Since I had already been interrogated at aleja Szucha thrice during the occupation and had escaped death by a sheer miracle, I knew full well what the danger was.
On the fifth day Obersturmführer Baumeister, in the company of a few younger adjutants and officers, notified us once again that from this day on all of the Volksdeutscher would be transported to the Reich, while as proof that the Germans felt confident of victory over the insurgents, he would allow us – the hostages – to volunteer for work in Germany, provided however there was sufficient room on the buses carrying the Volksdeustcher. The transports would be directed to Kutno or to Radogoszcz near Łódź. A few of us men conferred, and we decided not to go at that moment. The first transport comprised functionaries of German offices, Volksdeutscher, and Professor Wakar with his wife. Madaliński and I decided to find out what we could, although this was next to impossible. Doctor Tarkowski, who once again visited the wounded accompanied by guards, brought us more news regarding the Uprising; it appeared that the Germans had advanced considerably in southern Mokotów, that they had captured Śródmieście, etc. At the same time, a few thousand men had been brought in from the southern parts of Mokotów, from Różana and Boboli streets, Mokotów Fort, and the environs. As many people as possible had been crammed into the basements, and the rest were driven on foot to the buildings of the motorized regiment at the corner of Puławska and Rakowiecka streets. The German command summoned us, the several dozen hostages, yet again and declared that the Uprising was nearly under control, that all of the weapons and ammunition dropped from Allied planes had fallen into their hands, and that we could be certain that we would not be deprived of our lives. – Provided – Baumeister added – that no unforeseen circumstances arose! This speech made it clear to us that the Germans’ outlook was by no means rosy, and that they had not put down the Uprising.
The night from 5 to 6 August was terrible. Some very fierce fighting must have been going on in Kazimierzowska Street, in the direction of Madalińskiego Street (or maybe Różana Street), for bullets ricocheted off of the windows. The “Tigers” would join the fight a few at a time and return damaged, with bloodied soldiers; there were some terrible aerial attacks – we thought that these were Soviet planes (as it turned out, they were German dive bombers), and we expected that the Allies, who had come to the rescue of our insurgents, would capture Rakowiecka Street any time now. But no – following the heavy fighting, the SS officers drank themselves into oblivion. We were sleeping side by side on the floor of our hall when a few of the drunken beasts barged in and started shining their torches into everyone’s faces, mainly looking for hidden women, but also for those whom they did not like. Around midnight we heard a terrible quarrel between the officers, who had had a fight. Finally, a few of the drunken men found women, it was said that they captured one Polish sister of mercy in the street, they also found some German women, and their cries, screams and squeals, together with the men’s drunken laughter, instilled us with a terrible fear and caused everyone in the hall to start praying. During these hours a few more men from the adjacent rooms were taken to aleja Szucha. After midnight there were regular salvoes under the windows of the internal courtyard – people were being executed. The cries, shots, cries, shots, cries, shots, etc. left us in no doubt as to what was going on there.
The next day we had beautiful autumn weather, with clouds of smoke in the clear sky; we felt hopeless, sitting there locked up. Obersturmführer Baumeister declared that the Germans had magnanimously decided that men aged above 80 would be released home. Since my father-in-law was approaching that age, I turned to Baumeister with a request that he allow him to leave the prison, too. He consented and asked me whether I would go to Germany – to Radogoszcz near Łódź – for work. Having thought about it and conferred with Schmidt-Madaliński and Doctor Tarkowski, and also with my father-in-law, director Świerczewski, I said that I would go, provided he agreed that the sentries who were to lead the elderly to Narbutta Street would stop by and take my wife, so that she could go with me. Baumeister, by far the most decent of the Gestapo men who were surrounding us, consented, stating that I myself could go with the sentries and get my wife, and that they would bring us back together. And so it happened.
My wife and I took only the most necessary travel items from our house and, leaving the rest of our modest possessions under the care of my in-laws and the remaining women, we returned to the Stauferkaserne. At around 4.00 p.m. nine vehicles – including two buses – arrived and we started taking our seats. I was surprised by the fact that many people had very large bundles with them. It turned out that these were mainly functionaries of Mokotów prison, who lived opposite the barracks. The director of the prison, together with his wife, children, and a few bundles of linen, travelled with us. The rest of the truck’s interior was taken up by vodka that had been "requisitioned" from the nearby Hulstkamp factory, shoes from some depot in Rakowiecka Street, and rugs and tinned food. The convoy of nine trucks drove off down Rakowiecka Street, then along Boboli Street to the forts, and from there towards the Wolska highway and further on to Sochaczew.
At this moment we came under fire from the windows of residential houses and villas in Boboli Street – the insurgents were firing at the fleeing Germans. The SS-men pointed their machine guns through the openings and windows of our bus, and started shooting in response. One of them, instead of shooting in the direction of the insurgents, aimed for the sky or sent a single bullet into each of the windows of the passing houses. This strange tactic surprised me, and I therefore asked why he was playing around. He replied that he would shoot at the heroic boys only when they attacked him. He started to pour out his feelings, saying that the boys were fighting bravely, that they were heroes, that he admired the courage of the insurgents, etc. After a while (we were approaching Błonie) his shirt unbuttoned itself, revealing his chest; the day was exceptionally hot. On his neck he wore a gold cross! I mentioned this to my wife. Soon after, when the other Gestapo men started getting drunk on Hulstkamp liqueurs, we drew near to our Gestapo man and I asked him: – Sie Glauber nicht an Wotan, sondern an Gott? – To which he replied: – Ich bin ein Katholiker, ein Franzose, je suis un Francais! – Alors parlons français! – I proposed, and the three of us had a nice chat in this language, incomprehensible to the other German soldiers. It turned out that he was an Alsatian and had been forced to join the SS, for otherwise his mother and sister would have been imprisoned; he joined the SS because he had to, but he hated the Prussians and sympathized with the Poles, admiring their courage. Our exchange became steadily more casual, for the other Germans were hoarsely singing drunken songs and were in fact half-conscious. Seeing what was going on, I asked him whether he could help us. Namely, as far as I knew, when crossing the border between the Generalgouvernement and Reich, i.e. before Kutno or Stryków, the customs guards would confiscate Kraków money and jewelry. Since I had 140,000 zlotys on my person, I would give him one half of the amount if he would only drop us off within the borders of the General Government. He agreed. After a while he stopped the vehicle for a moment on the road, so that it became the last in the convoy, and while we were passing through Łowicz, our truck being thus the last in the column, he was easily able to stop it in the middle of an empty square. He dropped us off, and even gave us a grey army rug and a can of tinned food. When I wanted to give him the agreed amount of 70,000, he refused, since he could not take any money from Poles for helping them in a tight spot, shook our hands and wished us a speedy return to Warsaw. We wished him an equally speedy return to his native Alsace.
In this magical way, by complete chance – having noticed a cross on the chest of a Gestapo man – we managed to remain within the General Government and did not have to go to Radogoszcz near Łódź. Considerably later, we learned that at that destination the Germans had unloaded the Poles into an empty factory and, after filling the entire building, set it on fire. A great many prisoners, ostensibly going “for work in Germany”, were roasted alive in the inferno!
In Łowicz – not without much difficulty – I found a flat, and a few days later a job.
Such are my recollections of the Stauferkaserne.
Warsaw, 9 May 1946
Henryk Drozdowski
Economist, consultant of the Central Planning Office of the President of the Council of Ministers
My private address:
Warsaw, Wrońskiego Street 15, flat 57
(at the place of residence of citizen Popek).