The 22nd of December 1947, Krakow, Poland. The former staff of Auschwitz - the deadliest German
Nazi concentration camp – hears their sentences read. After a month of gruesome testimonies, it is
revealed that the many SS officers were involved in the acts of inhumane torture and the mass
murder of prisoners often for pleasure, and that their cruelty went far beyond what their superiors
ordered them to do. One of the perpetrators of this criminal Nazi regime is Paul Szczurek.
Paul Szczurek was born on the 26th of June 1908 in Königshütte,
then part of the German Empire. In 1922, the eastern part of Silesia,
including Königshütte, was separated from Germany and awarded to Poland.
Szczurek, after graduating from elementary school, became a steelworker by profession.
The Second World War began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Germany invaded
Poland. Until this moment Szczurek, a Polish citizen of German nationality,
felt Polish. This changed however with the outbreak of the war.
To justify the action, Nazi propagandists accused Poland of persecuting ethnic Germans who were
living in Poland. They also falsely claimed that Poland was planning, with its allies Great Britain
and France, to encircle and dismember Germany. After the SS, in collusion with the German
military, staged a phony attack on a German radio station, the Germans accused the Poles.
Hitler then used the action to launch a “retaliatory” campaign against Poland.
Nazi Germany possessed overwhelming military superiority over Poland.
Germany launched the unprovoked attack at dawn on the 1st of September with an advance force
consisting of more than 2,000 tanks supported by nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter
planes. In all, Germany deployed 60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men in the invasion.
The assault on Poland demonstrated Germany’s ability to combine air power and armor in a new
kind of mobile warfare. The world adopted a new term to describe Germany’s successful war tactic:
Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” Britain and France stood by their
guarantee of Poland's border and declared war on Germany on the 3rd of September, 1939. However,
Poland found itself fighting a two front war when the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east on
the 17th of September, sealing Poland’s fate. The Polish government fled the country that same day.
The last operational Polish unit surrendered on the 6th of October. After Poland’s defeat
in early October 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union divided the country in accordance
with a secret protocol to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. This agreement became
known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and was signed one week before the start of the WW2 on
the 23rd of August 1939 in Moscow by German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and
Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov. The demarcation line was along the Bug River.
The German occupation of Poland was exceptionally brutal. The
Nazis considered Poles to be racially inferior and they launched a campaign
of terror intended to destroy the Polish nation and culture and to reduce the Poles
to a leaderless population of peasants and workers laboring for German masters.
Ethnic cleansing was to be conducted systematically against the Polish people.
In the first three months of war, from the fall of 1939 until the spring of 1940, some 60,000
former government officials, military officers in reserve, landowners, clergy, and members of
the Polish intelligentsia such as scientists, teachers, lawyers and doctors were executed
region by region in the so-called Intelligentsia action, including over 1,000 prisoners of war.
In the spring of 1940, the German occupation authorities launched the AB-Action,
which was a second stage of the Nazi German campaign of violence during World War II
aimed to eliminate Poles considered to be members of the “leadership class.”
The aim was to remove those Poles seen as most capable of organizing resistance
to the German rule and to terrorize the Polish population into submission. The
Germans shot thousands of teachers, priests, and other intellectuals in mass killings.
In May 1940, around 60 km west of Krakow, the Germans established Auschwitz concentration
camp. The direct reason for the establishment of the camp was the fact that mass arrests
of Poles were increasing beyond the capacity of existing "local" prisons.
The first 30 prisoners, the German criminals with green badges, arrived in Auschwitz on the
20th of May 1940 from the Sachsenhausen camp. These mandatory colorful badges of shame,
primarily triangles, were used to identify why the inmates had been
placed in the camp. Green badges were set for convicted criminals who were likely of
a tough temperament suitable for kapo duty. The kapos were prisoners in Nazi camps who
were selected by the SS to supervise the other camp’s inmates in exchange for better food,
clothing and housing and they were often as brutal as their SS supervisors.
The greens, as these 30 German prisoners were called, did much to establish the
sadism of early camp life, which was directed particularly at Polish inmates.
The first transport of Polish male prisoners, including Catholic priests and Jews, arrived in
Auschwitz on the 14th of June 1940 from Tarnów in Poland. They were given serial numbers 31 to 758.
In the beginning, as with most German concentration camps,
Auschwitz I served three purposes: to incarcerate real and perceived enemies of the Nazi regime;
to provide a supply of forced laborers for deployment in SS-owned construction-related
enterprises and to kill small, targeted groups of the population. It was only in 1942 when Auschwitz
also became the largest of the extermination centers where the final solution to the Jewish
question – which referred to the Nazi plan to murder European Jews - was carried out.
During the Holocaust, Auschwitz was the only location where concentration
camp prisoners received tattoos. Incoming prisoners were assigned
a camp serial number which was sewn into their uniforms. However,
only those prisoners selected for work were issued with serial numbers. Those prisoners
sent directly to the gas chambers were not registered and received no tattoos.
Paul Szczurek arrived in Auschwitz in October 1940. He held various positions
within the camp and worked not only at censorship office for letters and
parcels for prisoners but also as a guard and block leader. At Auschwitz Szczurek
turned into a sadist who beat and tormented prisoners regardless of their gender and age.
On one occasion, when counting pairs of female prisoners leaving for work,
Szczurek beat them with a stick or with his hands about the head or blindly all over the body,
paying no heed to the effect of his blows. He would do it either for no
reason at all or because some prisoner fell out of step or failed to keep pace.
Paul Szczurek was also a sexual deviant. He was infamous for beating the female
inmates with a stick on the buttocks and breasts and when the prisoners went stark naked to the
bathhouse for delousing, Paul Szczurek would prod them with the stick in their genitals.
He used to beat and kick prisoners sometimes for no reason whatsoever or,
for instance, for failure to take off their hats upon seeing him.
Beating prisoners with his hands or any other object that he chanced upon,
he never paid any heed to whether his blows landed on the head, neck, chest or any other body part.
Szczurek was notorious for beating prisoners from behind, with a stick on the nape of the neck.
Another Szczurek’s specialty was whipping with a stick either on buttocks or about the kidneys.
On one occasion, when a prisoner was in one of the blocks in the women’s
camp and talked to some woman, Szczurek noticed it, approached the prisoner and,
shouting in German, demanded an explanation of why the prisoner was talking to that female
inmate. When the prisoner responded that he did not understand what he was saying,
Szczurek beat him forcefully with his hand in the face and stomach,
kicked the prisoner and then told him in Polish, “Now you can speak Polish, you son of a bitch”.
As the block leader at blocks 10 and 22, Paul Szczurek enjoyed organizing roll calls.
During roll calls the prisoners were lined up in rows of ten and then counted, which sometimes took
hours and could be especially tormenting for the prisoners, particularly in the bad weather. Some
SS guards organized roll calls which lasted from 5.00 a.m. to the late in the evening hours. Due
to freezing weather and exhaustion, many prisoners collapsed and were then taken to the gas chambers.
Szczurek also took part in selections on the rail ramp, The process of selection and murder
was carefully planned and organized. When a train stopped at the platform,
the arrivals were lined up into two columns – men and boys in one, women and girls in the
other. The SS physicians such as Josef Mengele performed a selection. The only criterion was
the appearance of the prisoners, whose fate, for labor or for death, was determined at will.
Szczurek – when supervising with other SS men the loading of prisoners who were to be transported in
cars to the gas chambers – behaved inhumanly, and tortured the inmates in a cruel way,
beating the women, the men and the children with a stick or a cane while forcing them into the cars.
The SS men kept the people fated to die unaware of what awaited them.
They were told that they were being sent to the camp where work was waiting for them, but first
they had to undergo disinfection and bathe. They were then told politely to hang their
clothes on the hooks, take a shower and were even promised they would be provided with soup and tea
or coffee. However they were taken into the gas chambers, locked in, and killed with Zyklon B gas.
After the victims were murdered, their gold teeth were extracted, and women’s hair was
shorn by the Sonderkommando which were groups of Jews forced to work in the crematorium.
The bodies were hauled to the crematorium furnaces for incineration,
the bones were pulverized and the ashes were scattered in the fields.
Szczurek also took active part in executions carried out both
by shooting at the Death Wall of the infamous Block 11, and by hanging.
Between 1942 and 1944, more than 40 Auschwitz sub-camps,
exploiting the prisoners as slave laborers, were founded, mainly at various sorts of German
industrial plants and farms. In one of them, Monowitz-Buna, Paul Szczurek was also deployed.
Monowitz-Buna held around 12,000 prisoners, the great majority of whom were Jews, in addition to
non-Jewish criminals and political prisoners. The SS charged IG Farben, which build its
factories here to produce synthetic rubber, three Reichsmarks (RM) per day for unskilled workers,
four (RM) per hour for skilled workers, and one and one-half (RM) for children.
Paul Szczurek remained in the camp until December 1944 or January 1945 when Soviet forces approached
the Auschwitz concentration camp complex and the SS began evacuating Auschwitz and its subcamps.
These forced marches of concentration camp prisoners became known as the death marches.
The prisoners had to march over long distances under guard and in extremely harsh conditions.
After the end of the war, Szczurek was tried at the Auschwitz Trial which began on the
24th of November 1947 and lasted one month. Numerous witnesses provided their testimonies.
One witness named Sosnowski testified how in November 1942, while he was walking to fetch some
pipes from the warehouse, he met Szczurek along the way with his dog. Without any reason, Szczurek
set the animal on him which bit the man’s thigh, causing him to bleed. Sosnowski also testified how
in February 1943 during roll call one of the sick inmates could not stand and therefore sat down.
Szczurek proceeded to beat him until he was unconscious. The
man was transferred to the sick bay only after the roll call had ended.
Szczurek declared that everything the witnesses had testified was untrue. However,
his lies did not help him escape justice.
On the 22nd of December 1947, the Polish Supreme National Tribunal in Krakow sentenced Szczurek
to death by hanging. He was 39 years old when he was executed on the 24th of January 1948.
There were no tears shed for Paul Szczurek.
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