The authorities of the People’s Republic of Poland tried to solve the mystery of the monastery. Unsuccessfully. A reporter returns to the investigation years later [FRAGMENT]

Dyhernfurth, Fünfteichen, Waldenburg, Langenbielau, Königszelt, Kleinschönau, Hirschberg, Freiburg, Breslau… The list of Gross-Rosen sub-camps set up so that their prisoners would become slaves and work for German companies seemed endless. Was there also KL Leubus on it? What other secrets did this Gross-Rose factory of death, this dark empire, hide?

I finally understood that solving my riddle was not only, but still, about the bones from Lubiąż. Death commandos were established in almost every major town in the Niederschlesien province and have not been discovered, described or commemorated to this day. Few people know about them. People forgot or never knew about them because they weren’t from here; they came here only after the war and farmed what the Germans had left behind. Or maybe the SS men from Gross-Rosen and its sub-camps carried out the last orders well? They were supposed to cover up all traces, and they almost succeeded. Only forty years have passed since the end of the war, and many places of execution are almost gone. Here and there, only a fragment of the camp fence sticks out, you can see the wires. There is no evidence of the crime. Body missing. No documents. Memory gaps. So there is no crime. The mystery of Lubiąż and many other places of execution remains unsolved.

We obliterated this evidence ourselves, treating the former camps as warehouses for building materials or using them for our own purposes. At the same time, we did not take care to research them, document them, and historically study them. After all, it’s not about worshiping every place marked with war blood, fencing them around, closing them down, creating museums. After all, there is almost no place in the Recovered Territories where terrible war events did not take place. You can’t close them all. What for anyway? But it’s about truth and memory. It was therefore natural that the director of WOAK, who was also from Lvov, also displaced to the post-German area, dealt with this matter.

So, on my map of Lower Silesia, there were more dark spots that deserved at least a granite memorial plaque informing about the crimes committed, and above all, a historical study. The map was getting denser. There were so many…

I tried to understand how it happened that there were so many of them here. Solving the mystery of the Leubus death squad, I discovered more war secrets. Each of them revealed to me the dark side of the war business and allowed me to imagine what could be happening in the post-Cistercian abbey on the Oder. After all, it was also supposed to house a private company, using prisoners of one of the hardest camps of the Third Reich for work.

Reading the documents, I came across the testimonials of Zdzisław Rałł, a prisoner of AL Landeshut, eighty kilometers southwest of Leubus. It is also a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen. There was also a factory producing for the needs of the Wehrmacht. Some of its halls were supposed to be underground, in tunnels dug out by convicts (or in Lubiąż too?). This is another death commando that has not yet been discovered.

Rałł said that “no economy and no industry can function without rolling bearings. The Third Reich could not do without them. They are necessary in cars, tanks, guns, planes and ships” – he argued. And what could the girl from Lubiąż not do without?

The castle and monastery in Lubiąż photo. Sławomir Sierzputowski / Agencja Wyborcza.pl

On August 17, 1943, three hundred and seventy-six American bombers flew over the production plants in Schweinfurt and Regensburg, where the Messerschmitt aircraft factory was located. Another bombardment followed on October 14. Colonel Budd J. Peaslee’s one hundred and forty-nine aircraft then reduced bearing production in the entire German economy by fifty percent. Although the cost of the raid was huge – the Allies lost as many as sixty B-17s – the Germans were also terrified. As a consequence, a branch of KL Gross-Rosen – Arbeitslager Landeshut – was established. The Germans decided to divide the plant and create its small branches scattered all over Germany. One of them was located in a small town in the province of Niederschlesien. Nineteen-year-old Rałł worked there.

Zdzisław Rałł, camp number P-2930

The first transport of prisoners from the Gross-Rosen camp, about eight hundred people, arrived in Landeshut on the morning of July 17, 1944, after an overnight journey in freight cars. The camp was located in the western part of the city, at the foot of the mountain, by the Bóbr River. There had already been a stalag here for French prisoners of war, some of whom were still in the block now outside the barbed wire. Over time, this block was adapted into a camp kitchen.

Four brick one-story residential buildings were also erected. Each had eight living rooms, about fifty square meters each, and two small rooms on the first floor, inhabited by the camp’s prominent people.

The living quarters had twenty-five single-story double bunks, a table, and wooden stools. The building was also equipped with two small tile stoves in metal frames, fired with coal. Due to their low efficiency, lack of fuel and a harsh winter at the turn of 1944 and 1945, water froze in buckets in some blocks at night.

We were completely unable to bathe. There was a shortage of underwear – it was not until November 1944 that it was replaced for the first time. Already at the turn of August and September 1944, lice appeared, which could not be eliminated by any means.

We gave the only set of underwear we had for washing, which we received wet after two days. So, out of necessity, we dried our underwear with our own body. Only sometimes it was possible to do it on the premises of the factory working with radiators. But you had to be careful not to let anyone steal it from there.

However, these treatments did not eradicate the lice. Insects nested in clothes and blankets. Daily checks of shirts under the lamp, carried out by designated hygienists in the rooms, and the beating of prisoners if even a single insect was found, was only abuse; did not improve the level of hygiene. The multiplying fleas, which took over the ground-floor rooms in the second block, also became very troublesome.

The prisoner’s personal equipment in this camp included only a spoon and a bowl. A prisoner could not have a knife or penknife, because having them was considered sabotage and punishable by beating in a way that took away the rest of strength and health.

To cut the bread, the room supervisor had one or two knives, which had to remain in the room at all times. So the knife was sometimes replaced by the handle of an aluminum spoon, sharpened if possible. The prisoner was obliged to take a bowl and a spoon with him to work. There was nowhere to wash it.

Attempts to insulate clothing with paper, cement bags, towels, and scraps of cotton yarn used as machine cleaner were strictly forbidden and punished with severe beatings. Detection of this kind of “crime” by the kapo usually took place at the entrance to the latrine in the factory.

How hungry we were in Landeshut, let this scene illustrate. An SS man taking care of the dogs, who were fed much better than the prisoners, proposed to the two prisoners a test of strength, consisting in taking a bowl of food from the dog that was being fed. As a reward, they were to be given the right to eat dog soup. Despite bleeding wounds from the enraged animal’s fangs and pain, in a fierce fight, the prisoners defeated the dog with their bare hands.

In such conditions, we worked for a bearing factory under the company Kramsta Methner und Frahne. The factory operated in three separate buildings, commonly known as works in German. Werk I was located 700 meters from the camp in the premises of an evacuated textile and linen factory. The main task of this plant was turning rings into bearings and then hardening them. There was also a forge and repair and repair workshops for machines. The work lasted here twelve hours a day and night, with about four hundred prisoners employed in the day shift and three hundred in the night shift.

Werk II was located closer to the city center, about 1,200 meters from the camp. His task was to assemble the bearings, grind them, final quality control, packaging and shipping. About four hundred prisoners were employed there, only for the day shift.

Werk III was located about two kilometers from the camp, in the north-western part of the suburb. It was not completed until liberation in May 1945. Raw rings from white-hot steel beams were punched there. They were machined on lathes in section I. The factory was started with the participation of prisoners only in October 1944. About three hundred and fifty prisoners were employed there only for the day shift. The general working conditions on this gear were rated as the hardest. There were the greatest differences in temperature – very high with electric furnaces and drafts caused by always open doors. Heavy steel beams carried the prisoners’ shoulders here. This is also where the majority of hospital patients with lung diseases came from.

For the first few weeks – from July to August 1944 – the prisoners went through a period of vocational training in the facilities. Later, wherever it was possible, and therefore primarily with lathes and grinders, strict work standards were introduced. Failure to comply was punished with beatings.

Death Commando – cover promotional materials – Sign