Czesław Trzciński

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Czesław Trzciński (1935)

Czesław Trzciński (in the German NS documents Czeslaus Trzcinski , pronunciation ˈtʃɛsɫaf ˈt̪ʃtʂiɲski, born October 6, 1907 in Łódź ; † November 11, 1942 in Rappach ) was a Polish sergeant and forced laborer in Germany who was executed without trial on the Polish national holiday .

Before the war

Wedding photo of Czesław Trzciński and Helena Kubiak, 1935
Czesław Trzciński with his boss and colleagues, around 1936
Czesław Trzciński with his parents and sisters, 1914

Czesław Trzciński was the son of Stanisław Trzciński and his wife Apolonia, née Pankwin. He was born in a middle-class family in the workers' city of Łódź, which was then part of the Russian Empire. His parents had four other children: three daughters and one son. Nothing is known about his father's occupation. As a child, Czesław Trzciński experienced the First World War and the re-establishment of the Polish state. After graduating from school, he was trained as a locksmith. This profession was then later decisive for being offered training in a pioneer non-commissioned officer school. He accepted the offer and made from January 3 to September 18, 1929 training at the non-commissioned officers' school of the 1st Railway Pioneer Regiment in Kraków , which he successfully completed. After being released into civilian life, he worked as a locksmith in a factory. In 1935 he married Helena Kubiak (1912–2002).

Captivity and forced labor

In connection with the German invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, Trzciński was drafted and served as "Plutonowy", that is, NCO in a specialized engineer unit, the 2nd Battalion for Railway Bridges . He fell on 23 September 1939, after the Kielce in the German prisoner of war . As a prisoner of war (Gef.Nr. 5358) he was brought to Germany and initially imprisoned in the Stalag VA in Ludwigsburg and then in the Stalag VC in Malschbach near Baden-Baden . From there he was released on July 29, 1940 as "ZP" (presumably: "Civil Pole" or civil person), assigned to the Schwäbisch Hall employment office and committed to forced labor in agriculture. He first worked in the community of Waldbach near Bretzfeld in northern Württemberg and then in neighboring Rappach for the farmer Erhard. Lore E., the then 12-year-old daughter of the farmer, remembered him as “a very pleasant and friendly man who took care of everything and was very popular with the children”.

“At first it was brought in by guards in the morning. Probably from a camp in Waldbach. Then he was wearing his Polish uniform. [...] During the day he wore work clothes. In the evening he was picked up again in uniform. He was later released from the camp and then lived entirely in the house when his father had to go to war. [...] Of course he ate at the table with everyone else. He had a room in the house on the first floor. He later had to share this with a young Russian woman (Vera) who came to the farm as a foreign worker. [...] He was also always very careful with the animals. "

arrest

Excerpt from the prisoner's book of the Schorndorf District Court Prison with information about the admission and forwarding of Czesław Trzciński from October 27, 1942

One early summer morning in 1942, when Trzciński was working in the cowshed, Christian Erhard, the farmer's father, who lived on the farm, observed him through a very small (about 15 × 15 cm) window between the kitchen and the slightly lower barn and noticed something what upset him very much. He did not want to tolerate this and immediately decided to report Trzciński to Heinrich Wenninger. Despite his wife's urgent requests not to do so, he did so immediately afterwards. The reason for his upset is not known, but what is certain is that it was a trivial matter. The old farmer's intention was probably that Trzciński would be moved to another farm. However, the police picked him up the same day. It is not known how the exact course of the detention was initially. After a certain time, probably in the summer of 1942, officials in black leather coats (probably Gestapo people) went to the Erhard family and interrogated them. They also looked very closely at the conditions on the farm. There is evidence that Trzciński was admitted to the Schorndorf District Court Prison at 12 noon on October 27, 1942 and recorded as a “ pest ”; from there he was transferred to the "Welzheim Police Prison " (that is, the Welzheim concentration camp ) on the same day at 5 pm .

execution

The area between Rappach and Schwabbach in December 1944. On the right below the center of the picture is the Schindersklinge cut-out. The route of the Reichsautobahn Heilbronn - Nuremberg, which was then under construction, runs through the upper half of the picture. On the left-hand side, the Schwabbach (above) - Rappach (below, outside the picture) road runs from north to south. The built-up area of ​​Rappach extends today from the south to the edge of the Schindersklinge. (Aerial photo of the US aerial reconnaissance from December 24, 1944)
End of the Schindersklinge - presumed execution site (prospect 2012)

On November 5, 1942, all state police headquarters in the “Reich”, including the Stuttgart Gestapo , received a telex from the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin about the new guidelines for prosecuting “Poles, Russians, Jews and Gypsies”. A corresponding agreement had been made between " Reichsführer SS and Chief of the German Police" Himmler and Justice Minister Thierack and was approved by Hitler . These new guidelines completely released the state police from judicial control and penalties. The head of the Stuttgart State Police Headquarters Friedrich Mußgay set November 11th as the day of execution. This was Polish Independence Day. Udo Grausam assumes that the choice of this date was intended and intended as a special act of humiliation and revenge for the defeat in 1918. A year earlier, on November 11, 1941, the two Polish slave laborers Franciszek Dembiński and Stefan Szczepaniak had been executed in the Welzheim concentration camp on Mußgay's instructions or with his approval . With the execution of Czesław Trzciński, which was probably the first execution on Reich territory since the new guidelines were announced on November 5, 1942, Mußgay decided to take another step. He apparently ordered the execution not to be carried out in the Welzheim concentration camp, but at Trzciński's former place of work, in the presence of Polish slave laborers working in the area. Apparently he hoped that this would be a particularly effective intimidation for the Polish compatriots of the delinquent. Since only about two weeks passed between Trzcińki's delivery to Welzheim and his execution, one can assume that something special must have happened during Trzcińki's detention, which led the SS to choose him as the next victim.

The execution of Trzciński followed exactly the 'pattern' used by Mußgay. ( More on this in the article by Friedrich Mußgay . ) A depression north of Rappach in a slope called Schindersklinge was chosen as the place of execution . On the morning of November 11, 1942, the police cordoned off the site. A military truck with the tarpaulin open at the back brought Trzciński from Bretzfeld through '' Kirchstraße '' to Rappach and drove on to the execution site. Trzciński was sitting in the driver's cab between two uniformed guards. There was a coffin in the middle of the loading platform, several Polish workers sat on either side and two other uniformed guards stood. No written documents have been received about the execution process. It is known, however, that at least one mayor of one of the surrounding villages led the Polish workers from there to the execution site in Rappach. It is likely that even the mayor of the other surrounding and nearer partly villages in this way the Gestapo in the Grinder's blade was delivered to Polish forced witnesses. At the execution site, the German uniformed men were in command. It has not yet been proven whether the Stuttgart Gestapo chief Mußgay himself was in command in Rappach; it seems very likely in this case. The above-mentioned Polish workers, who were presumably brought from the Welzheim concentration camp by truck, were part of the execution squad: as the henchmen of the commanders, they set up the gallows, carried out the execution and then had to put the body in the coffin and put it on the van loaded. After the chief of execution read the execution order, which was translated by a Polish-speaking interpreter, Trzciński was hanged at 10:10 a.m. It can be assumed that the course of the execution was photographed, as was otherwise customary, and that the photos were later kept in the Stuttgart police station, but all documents were destroyed there at the end of the war. There was no information about the execution in the regional press - unlike executions, which were followed by judgments by special courts.

Whereabouts of the corpse

Name plate 6 on burial ground X, on which the name of Czesław Trzciński can also be seen

The body of Czesław Trzciński was taken to the Anatomical Institute of the University of Tübingen immediately after the execution . There she was treated with carbol , alcohol and formalin and kept as a “muscle corpse” in “box 17”. In the winter semester of 1942/43, the preparation course used them for its own purposes. After consumption, it was burned in the Reutlingen crematorium at the “Unter den Linden” cemetery and the ashes were then buried in grave field X of the Tübingen city cemetery. Grave field X was intended for the ashes of the corpses from the anatomical institute, and they were buried there anonymously. It was not until 1980 that the neglected mass graves of burial ground X were redesigned and provided with six bronze plaques with the names of some of those buried there, including the name of Czesław Trzciński (as Trzcinski Czeslaus).

Criminal prosecution

Mußgay himself committed suicide in the Allied detention center in September 1946, but he was not the only one responsible. His deputy, Hans-Joachim Engelbrecht , had also announced the execution of forced laborers to the mayors of Württemberg-Hohenzollern , the head of the Ostarbeiterreferat Gottfried Mauch had been the head of an execution squad in several cases, and the head of the protective custody department, Ludwig Thumm , acted at least once (in Oberndorf on Neckar ) as head of an execution squad. The name Czesław Trzciński apparently remained unknown to the responsible law enforcement authorities in the Federal Republic. At least the attorney general at the Berlin Chamber of Commerce did not know the name when he began to investigate the former members of the Reich Main Security Office at the beginning of the sixties, who had given 'permission' from Berlin for the "special treatment" of foreign forced laborers, i.e. for their murder. namely to the control centers of the secret state police or to the higher SS and police leaders of the SS upper sections in the Reich. The "introductory notes" written by the Berlin Public Prosecutor in the 1960s on the status of the investigations against several former RSHA members do not mention the name of Czesław Trzciński. No investigative or judicial process is listed in his case until 1975. The German judiciary of the time was undoubtedly functioning poorly. In order to be able to act in such cases, however, she had to rely on reports because the Gestapo had destroyed her documents. However, the population preferred silence. The murder of Czesław Trzciński by the National Socialist police on the Polish national holiday in 1942 went unpunished.

flow of information

Trzciński's widow, Helena Trzcińska, was never officially notified of his death. She probably found out about it at the end of 1942, from a Pole who had come to her home specially. She passed out at the news. Except that her husband was executed, she didn't know for years. She was self-sufficient in raising children and making money for the family, and these tasks took all of her energies. In memory of her husband and father, she and her daughters prayed at the cemetery in Łódź, on the cross for the dead without a grave, and lit lights there. It was not until 1989 that the daughter Irena Maria Baran turned to the Polish Red Cross on behalf of her mother and on her own with a search query . In 1992 they received an answer to this request from the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross in Bad Arolsen , stating the place and date of the execution. This answer did not contain any further information (e.g. about the burial site). Only after the death of Helena Trzcińska did the daughter Irena Maria find out about the existence of her father's grave in Tübingen in connection with Udo Grausam's research. After Udo Grausam found out from the International Tracing Service in September 2008 that a request from family members had been there for a long time, he made contact and invited the family to Tübingen via the International Tracing Service (mediated by the Polish Red Cross). The daughter accepted the invitation and, in June 2009, visited her father's grave in the city cemetery in Tübingen and the execution site near Rappach for the first time in her life.

The events of Czesław Trzciński have not yet been passed down by the Bretzfeld community; there is no mention of this in the 1983 Brettachtaler Heimatbuch . In 2004, the municipal council and mayor refused to participate in a commemorative sign of Czesław Trzciński and have since refused to commemorate. With this, Bretzfeld is apparently in contrast to other communities, where there were comparable cases and there are now signs of remembrance.

Notes and individual references

  1. ↑ The fate of Czesław Trzciński has been researched from archives and authorities in Baden-Württemberg and West German since 2000 and documented with a collection of documents from these sources. The "text collection on the murder of Czesław Trzciński from Łódź (* October 6, 1907 † November 11, 1942) in Rappach" is available for use in the responsible district archive of the Hohenlohekreis in Neuenstein during opening hours, signature: Hohenlohekreis district archive, manuscript collection, Ms. 10.1.34. The legend of a radio broadcast by Südwestrundfunk from November 17, 2007 about the memory of Czesław Trzciński in the Bretzfeld community can also be viewed in the district archive; Signature: Hohenlohekreis district archive, local history collection, signature SO 1, Büschel 114. The bibliography and the web links in this article name the newer texts that have appeared since then.
  2. ↑ A family photo from the summer of 1914 has been preserved, showing Stanisław Trzciński in a Russian soldier's uniform. Apparently the photo was taken to immortalize the family at the beginning of the First World War , because the father of the family was called up.
  3. ↑ Certificate No. 49 from Szkoła Podoficerska 1. Pułku Saperów Kolejowych in Kraków from September 18, 1929.
  4. ↑ marriage certificate of the registry office Łódź No. 373/1936.
  5. ↑ Plutonowy is the fifth rank in the Polish Army.
  6. ↑ Entry in a discharge list has been received by the German Office for the notification of the next of kin of those killed in action in the former German Wehrmacht (short: German Office), Berlin. - The release was based on the "Guidelines of the Reichsführer SS on the release of Polish prisoners of war and their treatment as civilian workers in the Reich" of July 10, 1940.
  7. ↑ Czesław Trzciński's death card (signature FL 20/14 Büschel 750) has been preserved in the foreign workers' file of the Schwäbisch Hall employment office in the Ludwigsburg State Archives .
  8. ↑ a b Letter of December 21, 2005 to Udo Grausam.
  9. ↑ Heinrich Wenninger was a farmer in Rappach and at that time the deputy of the mayor. At first he was seen in an SA uniform.
  10. ↑ According to eyewitness Lore E.
  11. ↑ Benigna Schönhagen writes about the reason for such arrests in 1987 in her book Das Gräberfeld X. A documentation on Nazi victims in the Tübingen city cemetery , p. 64: “It can be assumed that […] many of the […] brought to Tübingen Executed because of a so-called 'GV-Delikts' [offense because of sexual intercourse, which could also mean an illegal relationship with a German woman] had been hanged. They were brought from all over Württemberg, from the Oberland as well as from the Black Forest or Hohenlohe . There was For example, the 21-year-old Anton Wlosinski [correctly Antoni Włosiński], who was hanged in Bolstern in the Saulgau district in April 1941 , or the 35-year-old Czeslaus Trzcinski from Litzmannstadt , whom the Gestapo gave the noose on November 11, 1942 in Rappach in the Öhringen district around the neck. ”- However, the later testimony of the farmer's daughter Lore E. refutes this assumption. Trzciński's admission to the Welzheim concentration camp as a “ pest ” speaks against this assumption.
  12. ^ Prisoners' book of the Schorndorf District Court Prison, preserved in the Ludwigsburg State Archives (signature F299 Volume 68). - Trzciński was registered in the "prisoner's book" as a "transit prisoner"; H. that it was not the local court of Schorndorf but another body that was responsible for his briefing. The submitting agency is not named. According to Lore E.'s memory, there were several months (up to half a year) between the arrest and the execution. This was in line with the usual practice of the Gestapo, which has been documented several times, of keeping the accused in custody for a few weeks or months until they were executed.
  13. ↑ There had been executions before that were not based on proper legal proceedings: the shootings by the divisional courts of the Wehrmacht , the executions with the guillotine by the Stuttgart special court and the "special treatments" by the rope on orders or with permission of the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin.
  14. ^ Independence Day was decided in Poland in 1919 as one of the two national holidays. On November 11, 1918, the Regency Council , the then provisional government of the Polish territories, transferred the supreme command of the Polish troops to Józef Piłsudski , who had recently been released from Magdeburg prison. This event was the decisive step in restoring real national independence from Poland.
  15. ^ Udo Grausam: Visit and return visit in memory of Czesław Trzciński . In: Against Forgetting - For Democracy , Membership Magazine No. 64, May 2010, p. 28.
  16. ↑ According to Udo Grausam's assumption, the reason could have come about on October 29th, two days after Trzciński's admission to Welzheim. A 15-year-old Pole named Władysław Mendrela (?) Was executed there that day. Since the offender's compatriots usually had to watch the execution, Czesław Trzciński probably also witnessed this execution. He may have protested against it and was therefore designated as the next delinquent by the incumbent Welzheim camp manager Hermann Eberle .
  17. ↑ The name 'Schindersklinge' has been in use for some time, but in contrast to the name 'Thalfeld', which is already attested on a land map from 1830, it has not been proven in writing as a winning name. It is not clear whether the two names denote a completely identical area or whether the Schindersklinge is only part of the Thalfeld gain. At that time the distance to the next buildings in Rappach was a few hundred meters, today the Rappach residential area of ​​Steinsfeld borders directly on the Schindersklinge.
  18. ↑ Testimony of the mentioned eyewitness Lore E., letter to Udo Grausam dated October 21, 2005 - The witness who lived in the house by the church was just outside when the car came. Since the passing of a car was something special at the time, she looked closely. Her gaze and Trzciński's gaze met and his gaze is deeply remembered.
  19. ↑ A Mr. Schultheiss, Schultheiss von Weißlensburg , a distant relative of Lore E., came from there with the Poles.
  20. ↑ as evidenced for the execution of Aleksander Krześciak on January 8, 1943 near Güglingen (testimony in a preliminary investigation in 1960/61, archived in the Central Office of the State Justice Administration in Ludwigsburg under 414 AR 10.358 / 87).
  21. ↑ So the time in the death register of Rappach under this date. The death register is now administered by the municipality of Bretzfeld. - “ Markung Rappach, Gewand Thalfeld ” was entered as the place of death and “Hanging” was entered as the cause of death. The entry was made as entered on the "written report" of the Secret State Police, State Police Headquarters Stuttgart, there with the letter II E-5464/42. The address of Trzciński's wife was also entered with the street name given by the German occupiers to the street in "Litzmannstadt". According to information from the registry office of the municipality of Bretzfeld, the "written notification" of the Gestapo to the mayor of Rappach or to the registry office at that time is missing in the collective files for the Rappach death register entry, while the corresponding documents for all other death entries from 1942 still exist.
  22. ^ According to the confidential order of Bernhard Rust , Reich Minister for Science, Education and Public Education , dated February 18, 1939, the corpses of those executed were to be handed over to the nearest anatomical university institute.
  23. ↑ The corpse book of the Anatomical Institute of the University of Tübingen (kept in the University Archives Tübingen, call number 174/8) not only records the date of death, type of death, use as well as hair color and height, but also the wages. Hence we know that Trzciński was blond and 172 cm tall. The wages for his corpse were RM 78.75 .
  24. ↑ Roland Maier: Gottfried Mauch. The horror of the forced laborers , p. 143f
  25. ↑ According to the attorney general at the Berlin Superior Court, the investigations against Engelbrecht by the Ravensburg public prosecutor (file number Js 6447/60) because of the execution of Antoni Włosiński (* on August 6, 1920, executed on April 9, 1941 in Bolstern in the Saulgau district) discontinued on July 22, 1960 according to § 170 II of the Code of Criminal Procedure Holdings: Attorney General at the Berlin Court of Appeal, RSHA working group ( Landesarchiv Berlin , signature: B Rep. 057-01, (No. 110, No. 112 and No. 121)). - There were several investigations against Gottfried Mauch, but because he had suffered a stroke in 1948, his lawyer largely succeeded in preventing his work for the Stuttgart Gestapo from being prosecuted. In two cases, which were heard in court, there was an acquittal "because, in the opinion of the court, Mauch's perpetration could not be proven with absolute certainty". (Roland Maier: Gottfried Mauch. The horror of the forced laborers , p. 145).
  26. ↑ In June 1944 two Soviet forced laborers under the direction of Gottfried Mauch were publicly hanged in Winnenden . The process was known to the local population, but it was not until 1961 that a former patient of the Winnender psychiatric institution broke the collective silence. (Roland Maier: Gottfried Mauch. The horror of forced laborers , p. 144) If there was hardly anyone willing in a city like Winnenden, it shouldn't be surprising that no one in little Rappach referred to the crime.
  27. ^ Testimony from Irena Maria Baran geb. Trzcińska.
  28. ↑ In Baden-Württemberg there are memorials both on the area of ​​the former Württemberg-Hohenzollern and on the area of ​​the former Baden. With regard to Württemberg-Hohenzollern, this is the monument for Mieczysław Wiecheć near Ebersbach- Sulpach. With regard to Baden, these are the monuments for Jan Kobus in Pfullendorf, for Mirtek Grabowski (correct: Mietek or Mieczysław Gawłowski) near Ruschweiler, for Jan Ciechanowski near Haslach in the Kinzigtal, for Bernard Perzyński south of Schiltach in the Kinzigtal, for Marian Lewicki between Villingen and Pfaffenweiler, for Franciszek Zdrojewski and Józef Wójcik near Ichenheim in the municipality of Neuried and for Marian Grudzień, Józef Krakowski and Brunon Orczyński near Rütte near Herrischried . - See e.g. B. also the case of Walerian Wróbel .

bibliography

Alphabetical

  • Hans A. Graef: Monument to the Establishment of the Dignity of Czesław Trzciński . In: German-Polish Society of the Federal Republic of Germany (Hrsg.): Poland and us. Journal for German-Polish Understanding , No. 4/2010, pp. 18-19. PDF
  • Hans A. Graef: Monument to the Establishment of the Dignity of Czesław Trzciński . In: “Against Forgetting - For Democracy”, No. 66, November 2010, p. 28.
  • Udo Grausam: Visit and return visit in memory of Czesław Trzciński . In: “Against Forgetting - For Democracy”, association magazine No. 64, May 2010, pp. 28–30.
  • Oonagh Hayes: Toast a commemoration? Why people think about burial ground X (the victims). In: Ludger M. Hermanns / Albrecht Hirschmüller (eds.): On collecting, considering and interpreting in history, art and psychoanalysis. Gerhard Fichtner in honor, frommann-Holzboog Verlag eK: Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 2013, pp. 37–60. (= Yearbook of Psychoanalysis, Supplement 25) ISBN 978-3-7728-2640-5 .
  • Gerd Keller; Graham Wilson: Welzheim concentration camp. Two documentations about the concentration camp with a foreword by Alfred Hausser , Welzheim o. J. (after 1988).
  • Roland Maier: Gottfried Mauch. The horror of the slave laborers . In: Hermann G. Abmayr (Ed.): Stuttgarter NS-Täter. From fellow travelers to mass murderers , Schmetterling Verlag: Stuttgart 2009, pp. 140–145. ISBN 978-3-896571-36-6 .
  • Friedrich Schlotterbeck : The darker the night, the brighter the stars. Memories of a German Worker 1933–1945 . With an afterword by Christa Wolf , Gabriele Walter Verlag: Stuttgart 1986, ISBN 3-925440-10-0 [first publications: Europa-Verlag: Zürich 1945 u. Dietz Verlag: Berlin 1948].
  • Benigna Schönhagen : Das Gräberfeld X. A documentation about Nazi victims in the Tübingen city cemetery . Tübingen 1987 (= Kleine Tübinger Schriften; Issue 11).
  • Further information on memorial symbols and names of those murdered can be found in the brochure of the Denkstättenkuratorium NS-Documentation Oberschwaben (publisher): Places of thought on Upper Swabian paths of remembrance in the districts of Lake Constance and Sigmaringen . 2012.

Web links

Commons : Czesław Trzciński  - collection of images, videos and audio files

chronologically

personal data
SURNAME Trzciński, Czesław
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Czeslaus Trzcinski
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish slave laborer
DATE OF BIRTH October 6, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH Łódź
DATE OF DEATH November 11, 1942
Place of death Rappach