Wednesday 24 January 1940

Kielce, Radom district, General Government of Poland

I thought nothing could be more fun than conquering Poland in less than a month last September, but these days life is even more amusing. I’ve not made an entry for a couple of days because we’ve been so busy, though it’s not been exactly hard work! Last night, after our ‘exertions’, Karl, Gerd, Georg and I ‘borrowed’ a crate of excellent vodka from a merchant’s house in one of the better districts of this miserable city. I don’t remember much of what happened, but let’s say that this morning there wasn’t much vodka left. Gerd had also managed to get hold of six girls: four of them Polish and two Jewish, and not one of them over the age of eighteen! I do remember we had an argument about which of us would have two girls, and in the end, it was Gerd and me: Gerd because he’d found them, me because I pulled rank!

Because I felt so ‘guilty’ this morning, I wrote a long letter to Sophia pledging my undying love as always. She writes such sweet letters to me I feel I must reply in kind.

So the fun we’re having at the moment is all to do with the Jews. This place is full of the bastards! Fritz Katzmann, who is now looking after the policing of the district, told me the other day that before the war there were only around 15,000 Jews in the city. Now there are over 20,000, because they’re bringing them in from other places. I guess sooner or later they’ll have to put them in one area so they can be controlled while we come up with other plans for what to do with them.

Yesterday morning I was in Katzmann’s office and he told me about a house on Pocieszka where a bunch of radical Jews were hanging out. Apparently they came from a small town called Chmielnik, which is just south of Kielce. According to Katzmann, these Jews were political radicals; they belonged to a secular socialist party called the Bund. He said he had his eye on them because he was concerned they might cause trouble. I said to him, ‘Katzmann, what the hell’s the point of keeping your eye on them? What are you waiting for – you want them to start taking shots at our boys?’

He didn’t look too happy at me talking to him like that. He’s the same rank as me – an Oberführer – though I’d be surprised if I’m not ranking him in a matter of months if my promotion to Brigadeführer comes through as I’m sure it will. He said, ‘All right, von Naundorf, you deal with it,’ and I said I happily would. Karl, Gerd and Georg were free, so we took a unit of Stormtroopers with us and went to the house on Pocieszka.

I decided we should treat the raid as a proper operation; after all, we didn’t know if these people were armed. I commanded a unit going through the front of the house while Georg looked after the rear. Gerd and Karl took their men into the houses either side, because these Jews have been known to use the roof spaces as escape routes.

But there was no trouble. There were about a dozen of them, all in their late teens or early twenties – split equally between men and women – all sitting in the kitchen having some kind of meeting. There wasn’t a weapon to be seen. They were obviously shocked when we burst in, but one of them, would you believe, had the cheek to ask us if we had permission to enter the house like that! I told him this was all the permission I needed, and pulled out my Luger pistol and hit him across the face with it. I’m sure I must have broken his jaw, but he didn’t make a sound; he just stood there and smiled. I was so angry I shot him there and then, and the others started screaming.

Once we’d quietened them down, I ordered my men to search the house. One of the women stepped forward and said there was no one else there and they’d happily come to the police station. This seemed odd to me, to say the least. Until we’d shot the young man, they’d had a rather defiant air about them, and now they were volunteering to come along to the station. I reckoned it was because I’d ordered a search of the house. So then I said I wanted an extra-thorough search to be carried out. Sure enough, they discovered a trap door in the cellar, and through this a small underground room – more of a hole really – with half a dozen young children in it. Well, that was a bonus!

When we brought the children out to the street, where the others were waiting, there was quite a commotion, the gist of which was the adults pleading with us to take them but spare the children. Imagine, the sheer (and I have to say typical) arrogance of the Jews, thinking they could negotiate with us!

I was about to arrest them all, but Gerd said he had a much better idea. He herded them together and made them all march along. The adults were trying to comfort the children, who were terrified. My guess is they were all aged around five or six. Soon we came to the River Silnica, which isn’t much of a river, to be honest, but it more than served our purpose, especially as the water was so cold. Gerd got his men to line the children up on the bank, and he personally pushed them in, one by one!

I can tell you, they didn’t last long. I think the cold must have been too much for them. We noticed some of the local Poles watching us from the other bank, and when the kids drowned, they cheered, as if we’d put on a show for them. I sometimes think the Poles in Kielce despise the Jews more than we do.

After that, we took the adults to the SS headquarters, though to be honest, by then I was quite bored with everything. I’d rather hoped they’d have put up some resistance at the house on Pocieszka. I was all for handing them over to the Gestapo for questioning, but Oberführer Katzmann is more of a bureaucrat than a soldier and he insisted that we needed to process the prisoners and then they’d be sent off to a camp.

I couldn’t be bothered with all this red-tape nonsense, so I told Georg just to shoot the prisoners there and then. He hesitated, I guess because two Oberführers had given conflicting orders, so I said, ‘You know what? I’ll do it myself!’ I got the Stormtroopers to line the prisoners up against the wall and we machine-gunned them there and then.

They were remarkably calm, and when they realised their fate, they started singing a song, very quietly, but they sounded like a choir.

I have no idea what the song was, but I can’t get it out of my head.