https://doba.pl/ddz/artykul/epizod-ze-sportschule-w-bielawie/34431/0
{quote of historically valuable material}
We have a camp called Sportschule in the area of Bielawa / Dzierżoniów / Pieszyce, which is currently located in Pieszyce, but historically belonged to Bielawa, and the only reasonable, although difficult, access is from Kilińskiego Street in Dzierżoniów. It was part of the Gross-Rosen camp and was a terrible place.
This camp was where later female war criminals were trained in how to treat prisoners. We know several names of women who were "trained" in this camp. One of them is Ilse Forster. Ilse was born in 1922 in Nowa Sól, she was 17 when World War II broke out. Her young age did not prevent her from becoming one of the most hated guards in the camps of the Third Reich. She began her SS career in August 1944, with a 6-week training at the Sportshule camp in Bielawa, after which she was sent to supervise the work of prisoners in Zielona Góra, then she worked in the Guben and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps. Accused of crimes committed in this camp, she was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
Excerpts from the transcript of the interrogation during the trial:
- Did many prisoners come to the kitchen and try to steal food?
- A lot. At first I forbade them to come, and if they disobeyed I beat them with my hands and sometimes with a stick.
- Did Regina Białek work in your kitchen?
- Yes, she did.
- She testified that she often saw you beating other prisoners with a thick stick. Could she have seen it?
- Yes, if she had left her work at the boilers and stood by the door, she could have seen it. But I never beat prisoners until they lost consciousness. They would then run away.
- Did you drag prisoners out of the kitchen into another room and beat them there?
- No. When I beat someone, I do it so that everyone can see.
- Did you ever see Hila Lippmann hit anyone?
- No. She was a kapo in the kitchen.
- She says in her statement that you take women to a small office adjacent to the kitchen two or three times a day and beat them with a rubber baton.
- That's not true.
- Ehlert says in her statement that she heard that you and Frieda Walter often beat female prisoners for no reason.
- That's not true.
- Did Wenzel ever report you to Ehlert for beating prisoners?
- Ehlert came and asked me how I was doing, and I said that people were stealing again and we found a lot of sugar, meat and bread there. I told him that I had beaten those prisoners. I never told him that beating prisoners turned me on.
- Witness Litwinska identified you and accused you of killing a young girl.
- I didn't do it. She came back the next morning and worked in the kitchen again.
- What were the relations between Pichen and the prisoners in kitchen no. 1?
- Sometimes very intimate.
In addition to Ilse, Klara Opitz (acquitted due to lack of evidence), Frieda Walter (convicted), Irene Haschke (convicted), Gertrude Fiest (convicted) and many others "trained" in Bielawa.
The victims of the Bielawa branch of the camp rest in anonymous pits with lime in the woods in the fields. I have no idea what you must have in your head to dig up this lime with dissolved corpses at night 30 years later and build houses from it. No crisis explains it. I have no idea why the camp buildings were later reclassified as a pig farm and why it is currently not protected.
The subject stirs up a lot of emotions in me and I cannot write about it coolly. Words that should not be used in public come to mind, but without them the Polish language in this case is too poor to do justice.
The photos come from the Bergen-Belsen camp website. The first one is Ilse Forster during her trial, the second one is Ilse with her “friends”, the third one is the “friends” forced to bury the murdered after the camp was liberated.
Rafał Januszkiewicz
... click on the pix to enlarge ...
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