Auschwitz museum debunks Russia’s claim that Pole abused fellow camp prisoners

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Russia has published historical material promoting the narrative that Poles were among the perpetrators of atrocities at Auschwitz, the German-Nazi concentration and death camp, during World War Two.

However, the head of research at the Auschwitz museum itself has debunked the claims, pointing to the unreliability of the documents released by the Russian security services and numerous, glaring inaccuracies in their interpretation of them.

The material was published by Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB), the successor agency of the former Soviet KGB. It focuses on testimony given by Józef Pieczka, a Polish prisoner at Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943, in interviews with SMERSH, the Soviet counterintelligence agency, shortly after the war.

The evidence purports to show that Pieczka used his position as a so-called kapo – a prisoner assigned by the Nazi SS to supervise forced labourers – to “systematically beat” other inmates. It also says he was involved in transporting the bodies of murdered prisoners to be burnt in the camp’s crematoriums.

The testimony suggests that Pieczka felt no need to try to escape from the camp because he said he “lived well” there and “had full control over the lives of the prisoners”.

In its commentary on the files, the FSB also wrote that at Auschwitz – which was located in German-occupied Poland – there were “guards from the local Polish population”.

However, speaking to the Polish Press Agency (PAP), Piotr Setkiewicz, head of the research centre at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, noted that Pieczka’s testimony is extremely unreliable and that the FSB’s presentation of it contains basic errors.

“If he [Pieczka] really was some particularly brutal kapo, then other prisoners would have mentioned this, and there are no such accounts of him,” said Setkiewicz. Indeed, the postwar testimony of another former Polish inmate at the camp, Jan Żółtonos, contradicts the FSB’s claims.

Żółtonos described Pieczka as a good Pole from Silesia who helped organise food for other inmates while removing rubbish from the SS buildings, an act for which he was later brutally punished by the Germans by being hung for two hours on hooks attached to a tall post.

Another document preserved in the Auschwitz Museum archives shows that, from 22 September 1942, Pieczka worked as an ordinary prisoner in the locksmith’s workshop.

The document also states that Pieczka lived in block 15a of the camp. That is another indication that he was not a functionary such as a kapo, because they occupied comfortably furnished rooms in different prison blocks.

Setkiewicz, the Auschwitz historian, told PAP that Pieczka’s testimony, which is now being used by the FSB, “may have been forced upon him” after he was detained and interrogated by SMERSH.

The FSB itself notes that, during the time he was being investigated by SMERSH, Pieczka “fell ill with schizophrenia and was sent for treatment in a psychiatric hospital”. It then notes that a decade later, in 1955, he was handed over to East Germany.

Regarding the FSB’s claim that local Poles were employed as guards at Auschwitz, Setkiewicz says that “this is a complete absurdity, showing that the author of the text has no basic knowledge of the realities of Auschwitz and life in occupied Poland”.

“The camp guards did not come from the local [Polish] population,” the historian told PAP. “[They] were SS-men – Germans, Austrians or Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans from occupied territories] but not Poles, because it was only possible to join SS guard units if one had German citizenship.”

Russia has previously sought to promote the narrative that Poles themselves were to blame for Nazi Germany’s invasion of 1939 and for the Holocaust.

Setkiewicz also notes that the FSB’s text contains other mistakes, such as misidentifying the Red Army units that liberated Auschwitz in January 1945 and falsely claiming that 4 million were killed at the camp, a figure promoted by the Soviet Union but which is around four times higher than the actual death toll.

The FSB’s text was published after Russian President Vladimir Putin accused Poland in January of ignoring the role of the Soviet Union in liberating Auschwitz. Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, Russian representatives were not invited to this year’s 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camp.

Among the roughly 1.3 million prisoners sent to Auschwitz, ethnic Poles (140,000-150,000) made up the second largest group behind Jews (1.1 million). Around 70,000-75,000 of those ethnic Poles are estimated to have died at the camp, alongside 1 million of the Jews sent there.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: xiquinhosilva/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 2.0)

Agata Pyka

Agata Pyka is an assistant editor at Notes from Poland. She is a journalist and a political communication student at the University of Amsterdam. She specialises in Polish and European politics as well as investigative journalism and has previously written for Euractiv and The European Correspondent.