Executed for falling in love in Freren. In search of Bolesław Wernicki (1914–1942)

Where is Bolesław Wernicki’s body?
 

Around four years after the hanging, on 5 May 1946, the registrar in Andervenne issued a death certificate. In it, he recorded the following:

“The Polish civilian labourer Boleslaw Wernicki, last residing at Andervenne Oberdorf, died on 10 January 1942 at 10:50 in the morning in Andervenne Oberdorf.”[8]

No earlier version of the death certificate can be found in the regional archive of the Emsland district. However, the rules that applied during the National Socialist period are also upheld in this later death certificate. Instead of “Execution at the order of the Reichsführer-SS”, he wrote “deceased”, in compliance with the Nazi regulations.

There are two excerpts from the list of graves in the Andervenne municipal cemetery, neither of which are dated, however. Accordingly, it is not clear when the grave was dug. Only the following entry can be found:

“Boleslaw Wernicki, deceased on 10/7/1942, was buried in Andervenne in the municipal cemetery. The grave was marked with a wooden cross and his name.”[9]

The death certificate in the Arolsen digital archive and the excerpt from the list of graves were probably produced in response to a request by the ITS in around 1946. It is possible that Bolesław was reinterred as a result of this request, or that embellishments were added to his original grave. By that time, circumstances had changed, and Himmler’s orders, according to which the body of a person who had been executed was to be sent to a crematorium or buried in a Jewish cemetery, no longer applied. As an exception, it would also have been permitted to bury the body in the “suicide corner of a large cemetery”. At the end of the day, it remains unclear what happened to Bolesławs body after he was executed .

Criminal investigations
 

It was not until 1967/68 that a criminal investigation into the events was conducted. The person who laid the noose around Bolesław’s neck and who knocked away the scaffold on which he was standing was criminal secretary and SS Sturmscharführer Hermann Hagedorn. This was attested to by his colleague and higher-ranking criminal secretary Eduard Prüssing before special committee Z (Sonderkommission Z) of the Lower Saxony federal state criminal investigation department on 10 October 1967. This was not the only execution in which Hagedorn played a leading role. He was known as “the big wheel” when it came to executions, according to the witness statement of civilian prisoner Karl Wachsmann, an internee in the prison camp at Sandbostel near Bremervörde, during the denazification hearings relating to him and the other camp prisoners. He kept a container next to his desk at all times, where he stored a number of different nooses. The prisoner witnesses Rudolf Lüders and Karl-Adolf Haas also gave similar statements.

On 3 December 1968, after investigating ten members of the Gestapo in total, First State Prosecutor Wächter came to a surprising conclusion in his final decision before the Osnabrück district court: in all cases, the main culprit was Heinrich Himmler and the other leaders of the Reich Main Security Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). The following applied to the accused:

“None of them did any more than follow their orders; nor did their actions go beyond what they were required to do. None of them killed at their own instigation or had the desire to obtain the decision-making authority with regard to such actions.”[10]

The decision of First State Prosecutor Wächter ends with the following comment: 

“The proceedings must therefore be brought to a close. 
For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that, as recorded in a summary dated 20/9/1967 filed at the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations in Ludwigsburg, among numerous state prosecution departments, almost all similar proceedings relating to ‘special treatments’ have also been halted, or have been brought to a close due to cessation of proceedings or acquittal of the defendants.”[11]

There were, therefore, no further investigations and no criminal proceedings relating to these crimes in general, and also no criminal proceedings regarding the crime against humanity on Gallenberg hill. “The other state prosecutors are all doing it, too...” is perhaps another way of expressing the second sentence in Wächter’s decision to cease all further investigation.