2008-01-18, ostatnia aktualizacja 2008-01-18 14:10
They Were Killing Germans in Revenge
Adam Zadworny, Szczecin/Stettin
During the winter of 1945/1946, in Świnoujście/Swinemünde, cut off from the rest of the world by accumulated ice floe, Poles were murdering German civilians. The National Remembrance Institute (IPN) is searching for the victims' graves and pledging to fill yet another blank page in Poland's post-war history.
The building at Piastowska street in Świnoujście/Swinemünde - which served as police headquarters in the immediate post-war period - today houses a special school. Under the tarmac of the school's sports field, the IPN expects to find a mass grave of the Germans murdered in the building.
At the same time, Tadeusz Wojciechowski, an 85-year-old veteran who organised the Polish police force in Świnoujście, has just published Na dzikim zachodzie (In the Wild West), a historical thriller with brave policemen, the treacherous Werwolf, and a Nazi treasure.
'We were the armed force of the Polish administration on the islands of Wolin and Uznam', says Wojciechowski, who lives in Szczecin/Stettin today. He shows me a yellowed document, dated 20 August 1945, according to which the province's chief of police, then known as Citizens' Militia, or MO, appoints the 22-year-old Wojciechowski, a policeman since a month, head of the investigation department of the MO in the islands. The document mentions Wojciechowski is armed with a Parabellum gun.
'You're the first journalist I'm showing this to', he says. 'I haven't talked to anyone from the IPN yet'.
'Who was murdering Germans?'
'Perhaps the UB [Urząd Bezpieczeństwa, secret police], perhaps the army. My boys, like myself, were from the Home Army (AK). They were tough guys, partisans from the forests around Kielce, and they were eager to kill Germans, but I kept them on a short leash. You know, our chief [Jan Zientara] called me once, and says his wife is coming so I'm to secure some German gold for her. He told me to cut off German women's fingers with golden rings'.
'And?!'
'I didn't do it. I notified my superiors at the provincial headquarters'.
'And the others?'
'Some obeyed'.
Historians believe that, in the autumn of 1945, the population of the Wolin-Uznam county included some 22,000 Germans (51,000 before the war) and several hundred Poles, the largest group among which were the members of the fledgling local Polish administration and security forces.
During the winter of 1945/1946, due to the accumulation of ice floe on the river Świna, the only road to Poland was blocked. The settlement campaign virtually stopped. The members of the UB and the MO on the islands found themselves free to do anything they wanted.
'They became the masters of life and death for the inhabitants of Świnoujście/Swinemünde, cut of from the rest of the country by the rivers and the waters of the Szczecin/Stettin Lagoon', says Paweł Skubisz, historian at the IPN in Szczecin/Stettin.
According to the IPN's findings, UB and MO members robbed and murdered local civilians. Germans were arrested on the slightest pretext and murdered, others died of hunger and disease while in custody.
Only on 5 January 1946 five detainees were killed at the police headquarters, including a 16-year-old girl. She had been in custody for two months, a UB officer raped her after she was arrested, and when it turned out he had infected her with syphilis, they decided to kill her because they had no money for the medicine.
Another German woman, arrested for arguing with a Polish one, was beaten to death. A 22-year-old German civilian was hanged on a window bar, his body hung on a rope outside the building.
When the ice finally melted, in March 1946, ensign Józef Zając from the MO headquarters in Koszalin/Köslin came to Świnoujście/Swinemünde for an inspection. In his report, he mentioned the unusually high number of deaths and noticed that the arrest log was missing. That triggered off an official inquiry.
In 1947, out of the nine men charged with the murder and maltreatment of Germans, seven stood trial at the Military District Court in Szczecin/Stettin (one had hanged himself, one escaped).
The sentences were mild. Jan Sołtyniak, head of the UB in Świnoujście/Swinemünde, received the harshest sentence, four years in prison, but only because he was proved to have stolen a freight car of potatoes.
In another trial, the defendant was Jan Zientara, head of the MO in Świnoujście/Swinemünde, who organised robberies of German civilians (the IPN found the case records this week). He was sentenced to eight years. 'We estimate there were over forty fatal casualties', says Paweł Skubisz. 'Two graves were exhumed in May 1946. The documents suggest that the Ministry of Public Security wasn't interested in either clarifying the circumstances of the crime or determining the number of victims. It actually tried to torpedo the military prosecutors' investigation'.
In the late 1980s, during the digging of ditches near the former MO building on Piastowska, workers dug up human bones, but the local prosecutors closed the inquiry after a while.
Following an appeal issued by the IPN and Gazeta's local edition, witnesses have been coming forward. A man who, as a boy, lived near the building, showed the place where the wall stood where the murdered Germans were being buried. Another one kept for years a testimony written down by a German man who was remanded in custody in the building on Piastowska.
'The killers were young members of the security forces, people who had experienced the atrocities of war, the death of family members, concentration camps, forced labour. They had a lust for retaliation, and from victims they turned into the executioners', says Paweł Skubisz.
Translated by Marcin Wawrzyńczak
Źródło: Gazeta Wyborcza