The final year of General “Grot” Rowecki’s life

However, the Germans only really became convinced of the futility of the idea when the discussions with “Grot” failed to achieve the desired outcome. The general was questioned by Alfred Spilker, head of the special Gestapo division (Sonderkommando) for liquidating the resistance, and Harro Thomsen, the person responsible for Polish matters at the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). What did they talk about? It is said that Thomsen took precise minutes of the interrogations for the record, but these were burned along with other documents when the Berlin Gestapo headquarters were cleared on 22 April 1945.[4]

At some point between 16 and 20 July “Grot” was transferred to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, about 30km to the north of Berlin, where he was interned in the “Zellenbau” (“cell block”), also known as the “bunker”. This T-shaped building was separated from the rest of the camp and was under the direct control of the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. Of the original building, only the west wing remains, in which the special exhibition about the general is being shown by the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum (Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen), which is run by the Brandenburg Memorial Foundation (Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten). In effect, the “Zellenbau” was a special prison where political prisoners and officers from different countries were held, together with agents working for foreign intelligence services whose cover had been blown. The prisoners included the chairman of the Communist Party of Germany, Ernst Thälmann, the head of the “Confessing Church”, Pastor Martin Niemöller, Georg Elser, who conducted an assassination attempt on Hitler on 8 November 1939, the Ukrainian politician and partisan leader Stepan Bandera and a group of Ukrainian nationalists, Molotov’s nephew Vasily Kokorin, and Stalin’s son Jakov Dzhugashvili, who later took his own life here. Other Poles were also held there, although “Grot” was the best known among them.

The prisoners named on a commemorative plaque in the former “Zellenbau” are: generals “Grot” Rowecki and Bolesław Roja, the cleric Dr Juliusz Bursche, Bishop of the Evangelical Augsburg Church in Poland, the Bishop of Lublin, Władysław Góral, politicians and social activists such as Józef Grzecznarowski and Stanisław Kelles-Krauz, both members of the Polish Socialist Party (Polska Partia Socjalistyczna, PPS) and the communists Aleksander Kokoszyn, later the commander of the Polish Internal Military Service (Wojskowa Służba Wewnętrzna, WSW), Józef Tkaczow, and Józef Mrozek, who after the war worked in the Ministry of Public Security in Poland. 

In the yard in the western section of the camp there are three poles to which the victims were so firmly bound with their arms twisted against their backs that after a considerable length of time, they broke out of their shoulder joints.