JAN RUTKIEWICZ

Warsaw, 7 June 1946. Deputy Prosecutor Zofia Rudziewicz interviewed the person specified below as a witness. Having been advised of the criminal liability for making false declarations, the witness testified as follows:


Name and surname Jan Rutkiewicz
Date of birth 14 August 1904
Names of parents Jan and Jadwiga
Place of birth Kielce
Place of residence Warszawa, Marszałkowska Street 18
Religious affiliation Roman Catholic
Occupation head of the health department of the Capital City of Warsaw
Education University of Warsaw
Criminal record none

During the war I was a doctor at the Social Insurance Institution [Ubezpieczalnia Społeczna] in Warsaw, from 1940 until 1941 a doctor in Saint Stanislaus Hospital for Infectious Diseases [szpital zakaźny św. Stanisława], and then a doctor in Child Jesus Hospital [Szpital Dzieciątka Jezus] up until the uprising. In connection with my work I came in contact with regulations of the German authorities concerning the hospital system and social insurance healthcare service. Having assumed a post in the health ministry, I have access to the archives of the healthcare service and documents of the Chamber of Physicians and Dentists [Izba Lekarska].

Supervision over the healthcare service during the occupation was exercised by German doctors, the so-called Amtsärzte: Schrempf, followed by Hagen, and then Jenike. The Social Insurance Institution was supervised by a German doctor, Vieweg, followed by Herbeck and the social insurance institution commissioner named Kurt, who before the uprising was shot by members of the resistance. All these German doctors were subordinated directly to the Warsaw district.

German regulations in the field of medicine were detrimental to the Polish population. They were as follows:

1. Stark differences in the treatment of patients were introduced based on their nationality, which is in breach of medical ethics. Germans enjoyed special privileges: they used their own well-supplied hospitals (Sisters of St Elizabeth Hospital [szpital sióstr elżbietanek], a special ward in the Wolski Hospital [Szpital Wolski], and in the Social Insurance Institution Hospital), their own pharmacy at Krakowskie Przedmieście Street 55 (where they got medicines that were unavailable to Poles), spas (in Otwock, Busko-Zdrój, Krynica, Zakopane). Germans also received a separate, far better, complete category of food in hospitals. Jews were especially mistreated: after the Germans’ entry, Jewish patients had to use a separate waiting room and separate office hours. In the insurance institution in Wola I witnessed an incident where Doctor Vieweg, having ascertained the presence of an old Jew in the Aryan waiting room, hit him with his fist on the face so hard that the old man collapsed, and then kicked him, swearing loudly. Upon the establishment of the ghetto, Jews were not allowed to be in hospitals in the Aryan district under pain of being sent to a camp, not only for the patient, but also for the members of the medical personnel treating him.

2. Constant transferring of hospitals in connection with modification of the boundaries of the Jewish quarter. The Germans in this way confiscated the entire equipment of the hospital on Czyste Street.

3. The introduction of the ghetto caused the outbreak of an epidemic in the Jewish district and beyond it. Typhus was fought by means of police methods (the closing of an entire house, in which there was only one case of typhus, disinfection of entire houses, etc.), which only tormented people, but did not help to fight the epidemic.

4. Methods of fighting social diseases were vitiated and limited only to identifying and segregating the carriers. In connection with a regulation of the Arbeitsamt, workers sent to the Reich were examined; patients with infectious tuberculosis, venereal diseases and trachoma were left onsite without care; healthy persons, or even non-infectious carriers, were sent to work. The selection was not aimed at providing assistance or social care, since the patients were not treated. It was only about selecting people fit for work.

I should note that the attitude of the official Germans doctors towards Polish practitioners was insulting and often brutal. At every step, both in bulletins and at personal briefings, they constantly emphasized their superiority.

In order to present the actions of the Germans in the field of medical care in the Warsaw district in more detail, I submit the first issue of the monthly of the Supreme Chamber of Physicians and Dentists [Naczelna Izby Lekarska] titled “W Służbie Zdrowia” [“In Health Service”] dated 1 January 1946, which on page 9 contains my article titled Zniszczenia dokonane przez Niemców w instytucjach lecznictwa publicznego m.st. Warszawy w latach 1939–1944 [Destruction caused by the Germans to public healthcare institutions of the Capital City of Warsaw in the years 1939–1944]. The material presented in that publication is based on information collected from the heads of particular healthcare departments during the German occupation, on my own observations, as well as on materials collected in secret by the Society of Democratic Doctors [Koło Lekarzy Demokratów] during the German occupation and prepared with my participation. Moreover, I submit the second issue of the same monthly from March 1946, containing an article by Doctor Bacia and Doctor Przedborski titled O działalności Ubezpieczalni Społecznej w Warszawie [On the Functioning of the Social Insurance Institution in Warsaw]. The materials are based on direct observations carried out by the authors and their colleagues.