On 21 September 2023, the first aerial photographs of Bolesławiec and its surroundings from the World War II period, obtained from US archives, were presented at Bolesławiec’s Councilors’ Hall. City Hall: – Comparative analysis of the photographs against the current state makes it possible to discover or clarify certain historical facts and the exact locations of Gross-Rosen subcamps in former German Bunzlau and its surroundings.
– The pilot batch of photographs dates from December 1944 – says Monika Rutyna, head of the Spatial Information System Department, the initiator of acquiring archival resources from the National Archives Records Administration.
Bolesławiec Mayor Piotr Roman in turn emphasizes that photographs from American archives are important research material for local historians which, alongside eyewitness accounts, is becoming a primary resource for gaining a deeper understanding of Bolesławiec’s history and precisely locating sites that no longer exist, including World War II labor camps. The acquired aerial photographs undoubtedly have value as historical source material.
– When Professor Alfred Konieczny was preparing his excellent scholarly publication “Arbeitslager Aslau,” he presumably did not know about, or did not have access to, the extraordinary document consisting of aerial photographs of the Bolesławiec area taken in December 1944. Thanks to the efforts of our city authorities, such historical photographs reached City Hall only now, in the first ten days of September 2023! One of them shows the KL Gross-Rosen subcamp called “Arbeitslager Aslau.” After seventy-nine years, this photograph precisely established the location of that grim subcamp – says regional historian Zdzisław Abramowicz.
City Hall: – Aerial photographs from American archives make it possible, among other things, to precisely locate the camp barracks of “Bunzlau I,” previously incorrectly located near present-day Staroszkolna Street. The “Bunzlau I” barracks disappeared soon after World War II—almost all of them while the Soviets were taking over the camp.
The photographs became a valuable source for determining the actual location of the camp barracks at the present-day intersection of Wańkowicza and Gałczyńskiego streets—the area includes green space, a parking lot, and multi-family housing on Wańkowicza Street.
– The recent emergence of aerial photographs completely unknown in Poland, taken in December 1944, this time conclusively and beyond any doubt shows the actual location of the camp barracks! They were situated even farther from the factory halls than previously thought, when we did not have access to such precise sources. It is now clear that this was where the prisoners’ marches to the Landa plant or the former Karlswerk steelworks, where tanks were repaired, began – Z. Abramowicz reports.
In the further part of the presentation, Z. Abramowicz recalled a number of historical facts:
The Gross-Rosen camp was established in August 1940 in Lower Silesia, at a granite quarry in Rogoźnica, as a subcamp of Konzentrationslager Sachsenhausen. From 1 May 1941 it became an independent unit, after which numerous subcamps began to be created.
The first Gross-Rosen subcamp in former German Bunzlau took over the grounds and facilities of the closed Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden, a labor camp for Jews. Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler entrusted the preparation and administration of a network of such “Jewish camps” to a special commissioner, the zealous Nazi and SS-Brigadeführer Albrecht Schmelt. The “Organisation Schmelt,” established at the end of 1940, took its name from him.
In Bolesławiec, the Zwangsarbeitslager für Juden was established at Hubert Landa’s timber plant, “Bunzlauer Holzindustrie Hubert Land.” In 1944, this ZAL was transformed into Arbeitslager Bunzlau I, which henceforth became a subcamp of the “parent” Gross-Rosen concentration camp. AL Bunzlau I consisted of six barracks surrounded by a triple wooden fence and barbed wire. Additional security was provided by high-voltage electric wire hung outside the barriers. From there, work columns went to work in the factory halls of Hubert Landa’s plant and other places of forced labor.
The prisoners made wooden barrack components, camp furniture, and aircraft models used to construct dummy airfields; they also expanded production halls and carried out many other tasks. Those imprisoned in AL Bunzlau I were mainly Jewish, but before AL Bunzlau II was established, Poles were also sent there; they were later transferred to the “Concordia” building.
In the subcamp’s daily “existence,” the enslaved people were also subjected to Jewish tormentors, the camp kapos, who were just as cruel as the German overseers. A group of twenty-four prisoners was separated from this subcamp and sent as “Arbeitskommando Rausza” to service ammunition and weapons stores in Ruszów. The exact date when this kommando was established is unknown; an SS officer whose surname has not been established was formally appointed its head, while the “prisoners’ self-government” consisted of kapo Pinkus Orbach and the Jewish criminal Izydor Silbiger.
The AL Bunzlau II subcamp was established in the grim buildings of “Concordia,” whose tower has displayed the company’s name for many years: “Concordia Spinnerei und Weberei.” Originally it was a textile factory, opened in the 19th century by the Jewish industrialist Samson Woller. Its inner courtyard, paved with granite blocks, is now surrounded by abandoned halls. Rust-colored strips of rails embedded in the ground mark the stone surface of the deserted yard. The former weaving mill complex was assigned to military production to “Weser”–Flugzeugbau from Bremen, specializing in the production of Focke-Wulf Fw 190 aircraft and the “notorious” Junkers Ju 87 Stuka dive bombers in 1943.
In 1944, part of the “Concordia” building became a subcamp called Arbeitslager Bunzlau II. No wooden barracks were built there; instead, two floors of the building—the third and fifth floors, in the attics—were used to confine people crammed together in appalling conditions. By then, the Germans were intensively searching among prisoners from the main camp and other Gross-Rosen subcamps for skilled workers—locksmiths, welders, and turners. These specialists, later imprisoned in AL Bunzlau II, also performed various jobs that did not require specialized training.
The first block of AL Bunzlau II occupied the third floor of “Concordia,” while the second block occupied the fifth floor. Prisoners could not communicate between the floors; on each floor, rows of bunks and tables stood in the main hall, while partition walls separated the toilet areas from the rooms.
The first block also housed a tailoring and shoemaking workshop. Nearly twenty years ago, while Local Television Bolesławiec was preparing a report about the AL Bunzlau II subcamp, numbers of several prisoners written in copying pencil were found on one of the door frames on the third floor. Many years after their discovery, it is difficult to say whether they are still visible.
On both levels of AL Bunzlau II, bunk beds formed tightly packed rows of sleeping places. The prisoners’ living conditions—one entire, horrifyingly overcrowded hall served as their place for daily life and “rest” after work that exhausted their strength and health, as well as a dining room, bedroom, toilet, infirmary, office, and small room and duty station for the SS crew—were therefore catastrophically bad.
On 11 February 1945, a column was formed from the surviving prisoners and set out along the tragic route of another “death march.” This also marked the end of the history of the Gross-Rosen subcamp from Rogoźnica—Arbeitslager Bunzlau II. After thirty-two days, on 15 March 1945, the evacuation column from this subcamp reached KL Mittelbau, often called “Dora,” near Nordhausen. A list of arrivals drawn up on 16 March 1945 recorded the numbers and names of 441 people…
The circumstances surrounding the establishment of AL Aslau, a Gross-Rosen subcamp near the village of Osła, close to a German Luftwaffe airfield and cooperating with the Bolesławiec subcamps, have not been fully explained. This camp began operating around July or August 1944. Its “inauguration” came with the arrival of the first transports of prisoners from Rogoźnica. Nearly five hundred people were brought on 14 July and 1 August; the names of 476 prisoners have been established.
Arbeitslager Aslau was commanded by the forty-five-year-old SS-Oberscharführer Wilhelm Gustav Fisch. The names of the other overseers are also known. They included SS-Oberscharführer Kӧnig and Ziehe; SS-Unterscharführer Arndt, Hess, Kempers, Lindner, Lücke, Pers, Schliewer, Schnell, Hermann and Wilhelm Schulze; SS-Rottenführer Baumgӓrtel, Fechner, Fleck, Funke, Hoppenstock, Kunerth, Litzenberg, Loshe, Müller, Schӧnenberger, Alfred Schulz and Vogt; SS-Sturmann Guder, Jahnke, Lüders, Romann, Ewald Schmidt and Steinhaus; and SS-Schütze Walter Flos and Gassenheimer. The prisoner-doctor was Dr. Witold Kopczyński, a co-founder of Polish scouting in the Free City of Danzig.
Some of the German overseers, especially the youngest, treated the prisoners extremely cruelly. Severe beatings took place, and inhuman punishments were imposed for real or merely imagined offenses. On their way to work in the airfield halls, the prisoners passed beneath the motorway bridge that still exists today.
The wooden prisoner barracks of the camp were surrounded by a barbed-wire fence connected to high voltage. Guard towers equipped with searchlights and machine guns stood at the corners. The camp also had an infirmary, a kitchen with a canteen, a food store, craft workshops, a clothing store and laundry, as well as a bunker and a room for storing corpses.
The doctor was a Pole, the forty-one-year-old Dr. Witold Kopczyński, before the war a physician for Polish organizations and co-founder of the Polish Scouting Association in the Free City of Danzig. The possibilities for treatment in the infirmary were essentially quite illusory—there were no medicines or medical instruments, and paper strips were used instead of bandages. The dead were taken to the crematorium at Gross-Rosen, but corpses were sometimes also buried in a forest one and a half kilometers from the camp.
The purpose of establishing Arbeitslager Aslau was primarily to provide slave labor. Mortality was not particularly high, but a tragic period began when the subcamp was evacuated westward. On 9 February 1945, Lagerführer Fisch ordered the foot evacuation of AL Aslau. Most likely, 545 prisoners left the camp, while 50 remained in the infirmary. Ultimately, 487 people—about 90 percent of those who set out on the murderous route—reached their destination, KL Mittelbau in Nordhausen, still traveling on foot, on 16 March 1945.
On the way, all attempts to escape, hiding in straw at overnight stops, and similar behavior were punished by death.
Another Gross-Rosen subcamp operated in the forests near the village of Krzyżowa. This was Arbeitslager Kretschamberg—Karczmarka, established on 1 February 1944 and closed on 9 February 1945. Delivering workers there and to nearby Trzebień—mainly Jews from Western European countries—was made considerably easier by the suburban Bolesławiec–Modła railway line, which had a stop and siding near the former Kretschamberg forester’s lodge.
Searches conducted several years ago with employees of the Gross-Rosen Museum for remnants of this facility’s infrastructure encountered difficulties in identifying the surviving ruins, resulting from the fact that an extensive German Reich Labour Service camp—Reichsarbeitsdienstlager Abtlg 5/105 Kretschamberg—had operated there earlier, before AL Kretschamberg (Karczmarka) opened, and that after 1945 the Soviet troops that annexed the area for their own purposes used and expanded the existing facilities.
The labor camp near Trzebień, Arbeitslager Kittlitztreben, was established as a Gross-Rosen subcamp at the turn of February and March 1944. It was staffed by about thirty Luftwaffe soldiers, and its commanders were, successively, SS-Hauptscharführer Reinhold Kluss, SS-Unterscharführer Herbert Hanke, and SS-Oberscharführer Otto Weingärtner. Men from Poland, Hungary, Belgium, Germany, and Austria were imprisoned there. They were held in an area surrounded by barbed wire, near Luftwaffe ammunition depots. It is possible that some of them were also transported to work at Bolesławiec’s “Concordia.” In February 1945, nearly one thousand prisoners were evacuated; about three hundred sick prisoners remained on site.
In Łąka, near the expanding German copperworks—the later postwar site of the “Wizów” Chemical Works—three separate labor camps for Jews were established.
The grim World War II history of the former Kreis Bunzlau consists not only of the dramatic fate of prisoners in the Gross-Rosen subcamps from Rogoźnica. It also includes the ordeal of many young Polish women and men, as well as entire Polish families forcibly brought to Bolesławiec land during World War II. Hundreds of people transported to the former Third Reich worked in every locality of our county and in the town itself.
The blood of the defenseless, brutally beaten for real or invented “mistakes” used as a pretext for abuse; helpless tears flowing at night in the darkness of camp barracks, attics, or barns where Polish forced laborers were “quartered”; the boundless longing for home; and the paralyzing fear of twentieth-century slaves must never be forgotten.
There were, however, honorable exceptions. Some farmers and ordinary German residents of the town or nearby villages never abused their position toward the defenseless slaves of the 20th century; they treated the Polish women and men deported to Bolesławiec land humanely, respecting them despite the orders of the Nazi authorities—and sometimes even treating their farmhands as members of their own families.
The list of wrongs inflicted by the Germans on Polish women and men transported during World War II to the former Kreis Bunzlau in the Third Reich will never be complete or finally closed. Unfortunately, the passage of time has already taken from this world almost all those who witnessed the German crimes.
The knowledge they passed on about those years of contempt for other human beings must be known by future generations who respect their national history and Poland’s past, including its past in the Bolesławiec area.
After seventy-nine years…
Toward the end of the war, Lower Silesia remained beyond the practical reach of Allied bombing for quite a long time, so factories threatened by bombing were relocated there to produce for Hitler’s army. As more recruits were called up to the Wehrmacht and other formations, industry lost skilled workers, who were to be replaced by concentration-camp prisoners and civilian forced laborers.
Production for the Luftwaffe also took place in the former Bolesławiec county, and one of the places where mainly Polish prisoners were confined was Arbeitslager Aslau, a KL Gross-Rosen subcamp. Its history has been covered in several extensive studies, as far as possible, including work by the distinguished scholar Professor Alfred Konieczny. His many years of painstaking research, including the collection of memories from surviving prisoners, culminated in a publication issued by the Gross-Rosen Museum in 2002.
It contains both the origins of this “facility” and a broad discussion of the work performed by the prisoners, their daily living conditions, mortality, and fate during the “death march.”
Professor Alfred Konieczny also presented a very thorough description of AL Aslau itself, writing about its presumed location: “Accounts by former prisoners speak only generally of the subcamp’s location in a forest near the nearby motorway, some distance from the airfield. A detail important for determining the subcamp’s precise location is the information that on the way to work at the airfield they passed beneath the motorway. This must mean that the subcamp was not located—as had previously been assumed—north of the motorway or near the village of Osła, but south of the motorway.”
The camp was established on a roughly square plot of land, approximately 150 meters on each side, and was enclosed by electrified barbed wire. A guard tower equipped with a machine gun and searchlight stood at each corner; outside the fence, to the right of the main entrance, there was a guardhouse, while on the left stood the commandant’s and SS crew’s quarters.
When Professor Alfred Konieczny was preparing his excellent scholarly publication “Arbeitslager Aslau,” he presumably did not know about—or did not have access to—the extraordinary document consisting of aerial photographs of the Bolesławiec area taken in December 1944. Thanks to the efforts of our city authorities, such historical photographs reached City Hall only now, in the first ten days of September 2023!
One of them shows the KL Gross-Rosen subcamp called Arbeitslager Aslau. After seventy-nine years, this photograph precisely established the location of that grim subcamp…
Doctor from the AL Aslau concentration camp
Nearly five hundred of the first prisoners of the German Arbeitslager Aslau—another subcamp of the Gross-Rosen camp in Rogoźnica—were brought on 14 July and 1 August to the site prepared near Szczytnica and Osła, in the former Bolesławiec county. After the war, the names of 476 people from this list were established.
Their place of confinement was situated near a motorway and a Luftwaffe airfield. Arbeitslager Aslau was commanded by the forty-five-year-old SS-Oberscharführer Wilhelm Gustav Fisch, but the names of more than thirty other overseers are also known. On their way to work in the airfield halls, the slaves passed beneath the motorway bridge that still exists today.
The camp was surrounded by a barbed-wire fence connected to high voltage. Guard towers equipped with searchlights and machine guns stood at its corners. The central area was occupied by an assembly square, next to which there was a fire reservoir. Washing troughs were provided outdoors; only the latrines had a roof and partitions.
The prisoners were housed in three large wooden barracks divided into three rooms. The central area was a dining room with tables, while rooms equipped with bunks were located on both sides.
The camp had an infirmary—the so-called rewir—a kitchen and its own canteen, as well as a food store, craft workshops, a clothing store and laundry, plus a bunker and a room for storing corpses. Outside the fence stood a guardhouse and a command building, which also contained the overseers’ quarters.
The camp doctor was a forty-one-year-old prisoner, Dr. Witold Kopczyński. The possibilities for treatment in the infirmary were illusory, however—there were no medicines or medical instruments, and paper strips were used instead of bandages…
Doctor of medicine Witold Roman Kopczyński was born on 21 February 1903 in Brody, in Żary County. He was the son of Dr. Teofil Kopczyński, a Gdańsk pharmacist and prominent activist in the Polish community in Gdańsk. Young Witold, together with his schoolmates—the later well-known physician Stefan Mirau, Alf Liczmański, and Wanda Malewska—became pioneers of the Polish Scouting Association in Gdańsk.
On 8 August 1920, the First Men’s Scout Troop of Zygmunt August was established there; its founders were brothers Stefan and Witold Kopczyński, Mieczysław Tejkowski, Mirau, and Witkowski. Witold Kopczyński became deputy to troop leader Stefan Mirau. Thanks to their activity, the First Gdańsk Girl Guides’ Troop of Emilia Plater was also established in September 1920.
Nineteen years later, on 1 September 1939, Dr. Kopczyński and his brother Stefan, a pharmaceutical physician, were immediately arrested by the Germans. The youngest brother, Alfons, who had just completed his medical studies, was shot by the Nazis while tending the wounded during the defense of Warsaw. Their mother was later arrested and sent to the concentration camp in Ravenbrück, where she was imprisoned until the end of the war.
The Germans took revenge on the Kopczyński family for their loyal and openly expressed attachment to the Polish community in Gdańsk. The guards greeted Witold in the camp with the words, “Here comes that accursed dog Kopczyński.” He was imprisoned in the Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen and Majdanek concentration camps. Despite the terrible camp conditions, he remained cheerful and helpful. He was liked and respected by the other prisoner-doctors and by the patients entrusted to his care.
When, while saving a sick prisoner, he took responsibility for the man’s mistake, the German torturers punished him by hanging him from a post by his arms, which had been tied and twisted behind his back. He hung that way for nearly an hour… After this draconian punishment at Majdanek, he was sent to Arbeitslager Aslau—and ultimately from there reached Dora near Nordhausen by “death march,” where, extremely emaciated, he lived to see liberation.
After liberation, despite his ruined health, he worked for the Social Health Service in Sopot. He died on 4 July 1967 during sanatorium treatment in Polanica-Zdrój.
Location of Camp Bunzlau I
During the postwar investigation into German war crimes, Hubert Land, the owner of the Hubert Land Works and accused of war crimes, stated during questioning that AL Bunzlau I was not on his plot of land, but next to it. According to the account of a former forced laborer, given more than a dozen years ago—he had worked, among other places, at the Lepski sawmill in Bolesławiec, where squared timber was initially prepared for Landa’s company—he transported it to the factory on large horse-drawn flatcars. At the plant, Landa saw from a distance, beyond some track, an object separated by a fence and barbed wire, with guard towers. At that time there were three tracks there, one of them the railway line to Nowa Wieś Grodziska; only two, however, entered the company’s territory.
Many years later, the management of the former Metalplast, which used part of Landa’s former factory buildings after the war, arranged a formal ceremony to collect soil from the former AL Bunzlau I site. It apparently determined through its own channels that the collection should take place near the present bypass, concluding from the information available at the time that the camp had most likely been there. Thus, in September 1985, scouting delegations from Świdnica and Bolesławiec collected soil for an urn; members of the “Perełka” Troop from the Świdnica ZHP district took it to the main Gross-Rosen camp in Rogoźnica.
It is worth returning once more to the prisoner’s account quoted above, which clearly states that the camp was surrounded by a triple fence and barbed wire, with wire under high voltage on the OUTSIDE—“whoever touches it dies instantly.” It is difficult to suppose that high-voltage wire also hung around the camp area within the factory itself, packed tightly with halls—as can be clearly seen in the recently obtained aerial photographs—and traversed every day by many German foremen and other civilian workers. From this camp, as the prisoner writes, they left after roll call and marched through the gate to the factory; on their return, they marched, forced to sing songs. If the camp had been right next to the halls, would those “marches with forced singing” have made any sense?
It is known that the “Bunzlau I” barracks disappeared soon after World War II—almost all of them while the Soviets were taking over the camp—and that the structures demolished in 2020 were the halls where the prisoners worked.
A 1943 German map clearly shows where the wooden fence stood and where there was metal mesh or barbed wire! The recent emergence of aerial photographs completely unknown in Poland, taken in December 1944, conclusively and beyond any doubt shows the actual location of the camp barracks!
They were situated even farther from the factory halls than previously thought, when we did not have access to such precise sources. It is now clear that this was where the prisoners’ marches to the Landa plant or the former Karlswerk steelworks, where tanks were repaired, began!
It should be remembered that there are at least a dozen places in Bolesławiec where Poles and other twentieth-century slaves, enslaved by German criminals, worked brutally hard. Years ago, Bolesławiec scouts therefore marked them in a special campaign with special signs painted on walls. It is worth remembering all of them and honoring the memory of the people who suffered there.
It must also be emphasized unequivocally that the memorial stone was deliberately placed not at the site of the former Bunzlau camp, but by the entrance gate to the former Landa plant, because the intention was to put it on display! The memorial boulder at the site of the former Gross-Rosen subcamp AL Hartmannsdorf near Leśna, beside the main road, was placed in the same way. It is actually several hundred meters from the true location of that subcamp, but there too the aim was for it to remind passers-by of tragedies from years ago rather than be hidden in the overgrowth at the camp site!
The Bolesławiec boulder is intact and awaits being returned to its proper place once the various works currently underway in that area are completed.
Finally, it should be recalled that M. Mołdawa wrote about Bunzlau I much earlier; he later published the work several times with corrections. In his book “Al Bunzlau I and Bunzlau II—Gross-Rosen Subcamps in Bolesławiec,” Professor Konieczny discussed many errors in Mołdawa’s publication.
Unfortunately, the literature on wars and martyrdom contains many such situations, not resulting from the authors’ bad intentions. Discrepancies between different accounts are not unusual; after many years, people remembered the same facts differently. What matters most is remembering the times of contempt, so that they never happen again. And it is not only worthwhile to seek the truth—we all have a duty to do so.
Important quotations
ARBEITSLAGER BUNZLAU I – GROSS-ROSEN SUBCAMP Alfred Konieczny – AL. Bunzlau I and AL. Bunzlau II – Gross-Rosen KL Subcamps in Bolesławiec – Wałbrzych 2004
“The transfer of the camp in Bolesławiec to the administration of KL Gross-Rosen meant that new authorities were established there. The position of subcamp commandant was entrusted to the then 35-year-old SS-Unterscharführer Erich Schrammel. (p. 33.)Recollection of prisoner Moses Weiss – (p. 31)
“(…) There were six barracks in the camp. A double wooden fence and barbed wire surrounded it. In addition, the camp was surrounded by wire charged with high-voltage electricity; if anyone touched it, they died instantly. Unfortunately, this wire was completely on the outside and could not be reached; at short intervals there were guard towers from which the SS men watched us.” And a little farther on: “We were divided into columns and taken to work in the factory under strict guard. Several SS guards were always beside a few men. No one was allowed to say a word. A bell rang for lunch. In rows of five men, we marched singing back to the camp.”p. 52, Józef Greda recalls: “On 10 February 1945, important changes took place in our camp because the front was approaching. First, 1,100 Jews were divided into two large groups. One group was made up of 300 sick people. The other, numbering 700, was taken farther away. They were human shadows. There were no horses, but clothing and food were loaded onto sleds, and various devices and parts were taken from the factory (…)
The fate of our group of 300 sick people was nevertheless easier. Meanwhile, the Russian troops drew closer, fighting began between the SS men, and bullets whistled over our heads.
We, the 300 Jews who remained there, gathered in block no. 3. Accurate shots hit six blocks, causing them to burn down. Our block no. 3 remained untouched. As it later turned out, this was not a coincidence. Several weeks before the Russians entered, a 20-year-old boy managed to escape to the Russians. One of his companions later told me that this escapee had given the Russians information about the location of the factory and camp. He told his companion about it before leaving the camp. He also told him that when the front approached, all the Jews should gather in block no. 3. That is why this block remained untouched. But 17 of us became fatal victims of the fighting. Stray bullets killed them directly before liberation. At dawn on 14 February 1945, four tanks broke through the camp’s wire fence. A woman of about 40 climbed out of one of them and announced in Yiddish: “You are free.” Twenty to thirty loaves of bread were taken from the tank and distributed among us. At that time, shots could still be heard beside the bathhouse. Fighting was continuing.”
p. 83 – “Michał Lewkowicz, one of those liberated in the infirmary, said in a telephone conversation that the Russians entered the camp as early as 6 a.m., three hours after the evacuation column had set out; for unknown reasons, they shot several prisoners. Soon the organization of life in Bolesławiec passed into the hands of the Soviet military command. Whether and what action it took toward the liberated prisoners remains unknown.”