TWO LIVES – ONE FATE: Irena Bobowska – Bronisława Czubakowska

What happened on 12 July 1941 and during the days that followed?
 

In interrogation protocols found in the Gestapo archives, it is stated that on 12 July 1941, Czubakowska started a fire in the toilet for German employees, using scraps of newspaper provided there in a wooden box for use as toilet paper. It was claimed that she had been given the petrol and matches by a female Polish colleague. A female worker who had visited the toilet for the forced labourers shortly afterwards caught the smell of fire and extinguished it together with Bronisława Czubakowska. Bronisława altered her statement multiple times, until she finally claimed, during an interrogation on 25 July, that she had started the fire herself, without receiving help or encouragement from anyone else.[12]

For the Gestapo, the case was therefore closed. The file was passed on to the state prosecutor at Potsdam District Court. Already on 10 September 1941, the court issued a sentence of seven years imprisonment. During the same month following the judgement, the leading state prosecutor at the Potsdam District Court, Karl Tetzlaff, was requested by the Ministry of Justice of the Third Reich to assess whether a harsher punishment might be in order. Tetzlaff, who had already acted for the prosecution in the first case against Czubakowska, bowed to the political pressure and revised his sentence. In October 1941, he unsuccessfully attempted to withdraw his revision. He was also required to regularly report to the Minister of Justice in relation to the case.

Neither the doubt that arose from the conflicting witness statements nor the reasons why Czubakowska had altered her statement multiple times were addressed. Not in the first or in the second trial, which ended with a death sentence. In addition, neither court gave a plausible reason as to the motive of the defendant. Instead, they accepted without question the explanation given by state prosecutor Tetzlaff: that the Polish woman had acted out of hatred towards Germany and the German people. The legal principle of in dubio pro reo, which could have impacted the harshness of the punishment, was not applied. There is no doubt, therefore, that greater weight was given to the country of origin of the defendant than to the harm that she caused. In light of the “Polish decrees” and the “Polish Criminal Regulation” that came into force later, this case against Czubakowska and the review proceedings are a textbook example of how narrow the dividing line was at that time between justice and injustice.[13] Not only that: it clearly demonstrates how the political attitudes of the time impacted criminal justice. They were intended to influence the judicial system and ultimately to bend it to the will and aims of those in power.

The death sentence against Bronisława Czubakowska was overturned by the Director of Public Prosecutions of the State of Brandenburg on 29 April 2005. The legal basis for this decision was the “Law on the Abrogation of Unjust Verdicts in Criminal Justice by National Socialist Courts” (“Gesetz zur Aufhebung nationalsozialistischer Unrechtsurteile in der Strafrechtspflege”) of 25 August 1998.[14]

Let the deaths of the two Polish women be a warning to us all, who believed that the fascist barbarity came to an end, if not in Nuremberg, then at the latest before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Wojtek Drozdek, May 2022

Acknowledgements:

My thanks go to Ewa Maria Slaska and Anna Krenz for their pertinent support, and to Ela Kargol for providing photographic material free of charge. I am grateful to Klaus Leutner for allowing me to view the archive.