[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.

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