07/08/2025
"Segieda noted, among other things: "In the chambers at the top stand the Germans wearing gas masks and watching the dying.""
(in 1942)
6 August 1942 | Lieutenant Napoleon Segieda, a courier for the Polish government in London, who spent the last two weeks or so at the home of Władysław Jekiełek in Osiek near Oświęcim, gathering information about Auschwitz, left for Warsaw. Having passed the information on to the Home Army Headquarters, he then left for Switzerland, from where he managed to make his way to Great Britain after a long break. His oral account and the report he soon wrote down contained basic facts about the camp, including, for the first time, observations on the initial extermination of Jews at Auschwitz.
Segieda noted, among other things: "In the chambers at the top stand the Germans wearing gas masks and watching the dying. A staff made up of prisoners is dragging out the corpses. Since the crematorium can only burn 250 people a day, it cannot always manage to burn all the corpses, although it smokes day and night. When there is a larger number of murders, they are buried in pits carved out with a suitable machine. The corpses are taken away on trucks, rolled into the pits, covered with a layer of lime, over which another layer of corpses is rolled."
We discuss the information about Auschwitz transmitted to the Allied countries and the issue of the bombing of the camp in our podcast: https://www.auschwitz.org/en/education/e-learning/podcast/why-the-auschwitz-camp-was-not-bombed/
On 13 August 1942, Napoleon Segieda, after arriving at the Polish embassy in Bern, reported to the embassy's employee Julius Kühl about, among other things, the extermination of the Warsaw Ghetto. On August 15, Kühl passed this information to Richard Lichtheim, a representative of the Jewish Agency in Geneva. The latter made a report on the same day, in which he wrote, among other things, that "The Warsaw Ghetto is being liquidated. Jews of all ages and genders are being led out of the ghetto in groups and shot" (this was the first point of the report). The next point of the report mentioned, among other things, 100,000 Jews “massacred in Warsaw.” Lichtheim sent the report by radio to London. Napoleon Siegeda thus became the first eyewitness for the "free world" to the annihilation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
