[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 100 (Wednesday, July 27, 1994)]
[House]
[Page H]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[Congressional Record: July 27, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
{time} 1410
THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WARSAW UPRISING
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hinchey). Under a previous order of the
House, the gentlewoman from Ohio [Ms. Kaptur] is recognized for 5
minutes.
Ms. KAPTUR. Mr. Speaker, I rise tonight to pay tribute to the
courageous people of Poland on their upcoming 50th anniversary of the
Warsaw uprising. This is the third in a series of special orders I will
give this week to bring attention to this event. I will continue this
evening by reading to the membership, excerpts from the book,
``Forgotten Holocaust: The Poles Under German Occupation, 1939-1944,''
by Richard Lucas.
August 5.--The German counterattack began with a massive
assault by the Luftwaffe, which dropped incendiary bombs.
Between ground and air action, houses were systematically
leveled on both sides of the street, barricades were
destroyed, and the entire area became an inferno.
Kaminski's unit, which began its assault at a more
leisurely 9:30 a.m. on August 5, only advanced 300 yards. One
reason for the slow progress of its attack stemmed from
stubborn Polish defenders who were hopelessly outmanned and
outarmed. Another reason, however, was the degeneration of
the Kaminski counterattack into an orgy of murdering, looting
and raping--converting men into a mob of marauders more akin
to Attila's hordes than to soldiers of a modern disciplined
army.
Most of the responsibility for the crimes in Warsaw has
been leveled against the infamous Dirlewanger Brigade and the
Russians in Kaminski's Brigade. Though this was true to a
large extent, there were also regular, SS, and police
formations who were involved in the degraded activities of
these early August days.
Oskar Dirlewanger was one of those degenerates who, in
saner days, would have been court-martialed out of the German
army. Born in Wuerzberg in 1895, he served in the German army
in World War I, after which he went on to earn a doctorate in
economics. Though intelligent, he was a liar, an alcoholic
and a pervert who molested children. Convicted of a sexual
assault upon a minor in 1935, he spent two years in prison.
When released, he was arrested again on the same charge, but
thanks to his mentor, Gottlob Berger, an SS general, he was
released and served with the Condor Legion in Spain. In July
1940, he took over a unit of game poachers. Later, the group
swelled to battalion strength and was sent to fight Polish
partisans as the SS Special battalion Dirlewanger. He was a
sadist who treated his own men as brutally as he treated the
Poles. Beating them with clubs to maintain discipline was not
uncommon. He even casually shot men he did not like. Little
wonder that many of his soldiers deserted to the Russians
when they had a chance. After 1942, hardened criminals were
drafted into his unit, which gave and expected no quarter
from the enemy.
Another criminal, Mieczystaw Kaminski, commanded an SS
brigade bearing his name, though he dubbed it the ``Russian
Popular Army of Liberation.'' He was brought up a Russian,
although his father was Polish and his mother German.
Kaminski spent years in a Soviet labor camp and like most of
them lived and worked in horrible conditions. He vowed never
to return to one again. For a time, Soviet authorities forced
him to live in exile in Lokot, near Briansk. Being a
resourceful fellow, he became mayor of the city, and from
that point on his career skyrocketed.
In return for providing the Nazis with food requisitions
and maintaining the area against the Soviet partisans,
Kaminski established a virtual dictatorship over Lokot.
The clever Kaminski cultivated his own popularity by
pandering to the peoples' anti-Soviet feeling, allowing his
soldiers freedom to loot and granting rapid promotion to
anyone he liked.
The number of non-German operating in the SS and police
units was very large: Byelorussian and Ukrainians, for
example, continued more than fifty percent of some of them.
The Kaminski and Dirlewanger brigades have the dubious
distinction of perpetuating the worst crimes of any units in
Warsaw.
What transpired in Wola and Ochota, the western and
southwestern districts of Warsaw, during the early days of
August must be considered one of the most horrendous
tragedies in a tragedy-filled war. On August 5 alone, 10,000
civilians were murdered.
The tragedy for Wola began in the morning of August 4, when
Alexandra Kreczkiewicz and 500 of her neighbors of Gorszewska
Street were ordered to evacuate their apartments. Children
and women cried. Several people were shot at the exit of the
building. It was like the Jewish ghetto all over again. The
Germans drove Kreczkiewicz and her friends to a potato field
where everyone was told to lie down to lessen the chance for
escape. A few moments later the group was told to get up, and
it was driven to a nearby bridge. ``There was no doubt about
our fate,'' Kreczkiewicz related.
When one woman asked where they were being taken, the grim
answer came, ``German women and children are perishing by
your fault; therefore, all of you must perish.'' The SS men
divided the people into ranks and one contingent of 70 people
was separated and ordered to go behind the bridge. The
remaining group, including Kreczkiewicz, was ordered against
the wall between the barbed wire. Soon shots rang out. People
died. ``At a distance of five meters in front of us,'' she
said, ``one of the henchmen, very quietly loaded his machine
gun; another was preparing his camera; they wanted to prolong
the execution . . . I fell down wounded and lost
consciousness.''
When she recovered her senses, Kreczkiewicz feigned death.
The Germans left a guard over the corpses while they burned
the houses in the neighborhood. Scorched by the heat and
almost suffocated by the smoke, she thought of how to get out
of the hell in which she found herself. She crawled behind a
basket of potatoes and inched her way forward when suddenly a
cloud of smoke obscured the guard's vision of the area. She
quickly got up and ran to a cellar of a house that was on
fire. She met a few wounded people who were fortunate enough
to have escaped from the pile of corpses. Despite the heat
and smoke, the determined group of survivors tunneled their
way to a nearby house untouched by fire. They were safe.
The slaughter continued the next day in Wola. Between 11:00
AM and noon, the Germans ordered everyone out of building No.
18 Dzialdowska Street. A pregnant woman with three children
was one of the last to leave the cellar where she had been
hiding, hoping to spare herself and her family. The Germans
escorted the inhabitants of the house to the Ursus factory on
the corner of the Wolska and Skierniewicka streets. There, in
the factory yard, mass executions took place. The people who
stood at the entrance were pushed inside in groups of twenty.
A twelve-year-old boy, seeing the bodies of his parents and a
little brother through the half-opened door, went hysterical.
German soldiers promptly beat him.
Everyone knew what awaited them there. And the agonizing
thing was the realization they could neither escape nor buy
their lives. The pregnant woman came in last and hovered
deliberately in the background, frantically hoping the SS
would not kill someone who was about to have a baby. But such
considerations did not apply to people like Kaminski's and
Dirlewanger's men. They pushed her into the courtyard where
she saw heaps of corpses at least three feet high. Bodies
were everywhere. Then the Germans pushed her into a second,
inner courtyard with a group of twenty people, many of whom
were young children not much older than ten and twelve. There
was a paralyzed old woman whose son-in-law had been carrying
her all the time on his back. Her daughter was at her side.
The Germans murdered the entire family. The old lady was
literally killed on her son-in-law's back, and he along with
her.
The Germans called out the people in groups of four and led
them to the end of the second yard where there was a pile of
bodies. There the Germans shot them through the back of their
heads with revolvers. No sooner had one group been murdered
than another group was escorted to the pile of corpses and
liquidated. People screamed, begged for mercy, cried and even
attempted to escape.
The pregnant woman was in the last group of four. She
begged the German soldiers to save her and her children,
offering a large amount of gold to them to spare their lives.
After they took the gold, she breathed easier, only to find
that the officer supervising the execution would not allow
her to go free. She and her children were pushed toward the
place of execution, where she held her two younger children
by one hand and the elder boy by the other. The children were
crying and praying. Seeing the mass of bodies the elder boy
cried out, ``They are going to kill us!'' The first shot hit
him, the second one the mother, and the next two killed the
younger children. The mother fell to one side. The shot was
not fatal; the bullet had penetrated the back of her head on
the right side and gone through her cheek. She spat out
several teeth, her body grew numb. But she was conscious and
aware of the horror going on around her. There she lay as
other men, women, and children were executed, their bodies
falling on her. Late in the day when the orgy of executions
finally stopped, she was able to crawl to safety.
The SS booted Maria Bukowska out of her home, which was
burned. She, along with several hundred other women of the
area, were pushed down the street. Anyone who looked back was
immediately beaten. Kaminski's men took watches and jewelry
from hapless women, who were allowed to carry suitcases a
while longer. When the crowd reached the central market, even
these items were taken from them and thrown on lorries which
were quickly driven away. Then a car with SS officers drove
up. The men ogled several pretty girls in the crowd and
promptly seized them. The victims ended up in a church, used
as a temporary detention center, where the SS took away the
remainder of the belongings. All the young girls, some no
more than twelve or thirteen, were left behind for the
amusement of the men while the older women were put on a
train for Pruszkow, the camp set up by Bach-Zewelski to
receive Polish civilians.
The SS also followed a pattern of murdering, looting and
raping in Ochota, another western district of the city. On
August 4, 50 of Kaminski's mob surrounded some houses on
Grojecka Street. Under the pretext of looking for arms, they
looted homes and then took 160 unarmed men, including twelve-
year-olds, led them into a cellar, and shot them in the backs
of their heads. They poured gasoline over the corpses, then
threw grenades. The SS repeated the same grisly exhibition
early the next morning at another house, this time killing 40
men and boys. The same morning on another street, Kaminski's
men kicked 40 people into a cellar and machine gunned
everyone. Only three survived.
____________________