Henryk Mania

Henryk Mania (born 17 January 1923 in Rakoniewice, died 13 April 2020 in Szczecin) was a Polish laborer and collaborator of Nazi Germany, who served as a kapo in the Chełmno extermination camp. In 2001, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for his involvement in the operation of the camp. He was the first Pole to be convicted by a Polish court for participation in Nazi crimes, in a trial where the prosecutor was from the Institute of National Remembrance.

Biography

Pre-war period Henryk Mania was born on 17 January 1923 in Rakoniewice, in a peasant family. He was the son of Władysław and Agnieszka (née Przymuszała). He had three siblings: two brothers and a sister.

Mania had a primary education and worked as a roofer's assistant.

Imprisonment and work in the Sonderkommando Lange

Shortly after the German occupation began, Mania was accused of attempting to poison a German soldier and was arrested. Initially, he was imprisoned in a camp in Wolsztyn, where he was forced to work for several weeks repairing roads and railway tracks. Later, along with a group of prisoners from Wolsztyn, he was transferred to Fort VII in Poznań. Most of his companions soon died or were murdered. The mass murder experiments using carbon monoxide conducted by Lange at Fort VII lasted for about a month. The Sonderkommando then proceeded to exterminate patients at various hospitals and care facilities across the Reichsgau Wartheland (in Dziekanka, Kościan, Gostynin, , Śrem, and Warta). Lange had a group of 13 Polish gravediggers at his disposal, although eight of them, including Mania, were most often taken by the SS for operations outside of Poznań.

In late May or early June 1940, the Sonderkommando Lange was sent to the Soldau concentration camp, where SS members murdered 1,558 psychiatric patients from East Prussia. Mania and his 12 companions worked on burying the bodies. The Sonderkommando then suspended its activities for nearly a year, and the Polish gravediggers were once again imprisoned at Fort VII. In June 1941, the reactivated Sonderkommando Lange resumed the murder of mentally ill patients in the Reichsgau Wartheland, with Mania and his companions once again forced to work as gravediggers.

In September of that year, with the suspension of Aktion T4 and the start of preparations for the "final solution to the Jewish question", the Sonderkommando was transferred to Konin. In the autumn of 1941, in the forests between and Rudzica, and later in the Wygoda forests near Kazimierz Biskupi, the unit members murdered Jews from ghettos in the Konin County, experimenting with various methods of mass murder (including the use of quicklime). By the end of October, they were sent to Kalisz, where they massacred the residents of a Jewish nursing home. During these operations, Mania and his companions dug mass graves, buried the bodies of the victims, and searched their clothes for valuables. The Sonderkommando, with the Polish prisoners, was then sent to Chełmno nad Nerem, where Lange began organizing a permanent extermination camp.

Kulmhof The Chełmno extermination camp (Kulmhof) began operations on 7 December 1941, with the arrival of the first transport from Koło. Mania, along with seven companions – Lech Jaskólski, Marian Libelt, Henryk Maliczak, Franciszek Piekarski, Stanisław Polubiński, Kajetan Skrzypczyński, and Stanisław Szymański – was accommodated on the ground floor of a ruined palace. Their first task was to erect a fence around the building and to build a wooden ramp. Maliczak and Szymański primarily handled this work, while Mania and the other five worked on digging mass graves in the . The SS gave Mania the nickname "Heinrich the Younger" (to distinguish him from "Heinrich the Elder" – Henryk Maliczak).

When mass extermination of Jews began at the camp, Mania's main task became collecting money and valuables that the victims had to surrender as a supposed "deposit", and then issuing them "receipts". He also facilitated taking victims to the palace cellars, and if they resisted, he would, along with three companions, push them into gas vans. He was also responsible for supervising the burying of bodies. After the war, he claimed to have witnessed the arrival of a transport of Czech children from the pacified village of Lidice to the camp for extermination. When six Jews escaped from the camp during the night of 15/16 May 1942, Mania participated in the chase with Polish functional prisoners. He claimed that he acted as a translator, and the group he was with did not catch any of the escapees.

Although the eight Poles were still formally prisoners, in practice, they had already obtained a status similar to unskilled laborers (the so-called Hilfsarbeiter).

Mania remained in the camp until 7 January 1943.

Final period of the war In November 1943, along with three companions from Kulmhof – Lech Jaskólski, Henryk Maliczak, and Kajetan Skrzypczyński – Mania was assigned to Sonderkommando Legath (also known as Wetterkommando). This was a special SS unit tasked with erasing evidence of the crimes committed by the Germans in the Reichsgau Wartheland. Mania and the other Poles were responsible for overseeing around 50 Jewish prisoners, who performed work related to exhuming and burning corpses. Additionally, they helped locate mass graves, most of which they had dug themselves between 1940 and 1941. Patrick Montague provides a different account, stating that Mania was assigned the camp number 189 229 at Auschwitz.

On 4 July 1944, Mania was transferred to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria, where he received the camp number 78 441. Five days later, he was moved to one of the subcamps (Linz III), where he remained until he was liberated by American forces.

Post-war life After liberation, Mania returned to his hometown of Wolsztyn. However, former prisoners of Fort VII soon began spreading rumors that he had survived imprisonment due to collaboration with the Germans. In response, he moved to Poznań and later to Szczecin. An investigation revealed that it was a coincidence of surnames, but it was the first time that the authorities took notice of the real Henryk Mania. (the texts of these interviews have not survived). This case reignited the authorities' interest. On 14 November 1963, the Security Service in Poznań initiated a pre-investigation inquiry under the August Decree,

In 1967, Mania was interrogated again, this time as part of an investigation into the extermination of the mentally ill in the Reichsgau Wartheland. and Mania was placed in custody in Poznań. On 16 March 2001, Zygmunt Kacprzak, a prosecutor from the Branch Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation in Poznań, filed an indictment against Mania, accusing him, under the August Decree, of complicity in genocide. The charges included beating prisoners, confiscating their valuables, clothing, and personal belongings, and leading them to the gas chambers. He also denied using physical violence against prisoners, stating that his tasks involved searching victims' bodies and transporting wood for burning corpses in the Rzuchów Forest. Both the prosecutor and the defense attorney appealed the verdict, but the Court of Appeal in Poznań upheld the sentence. Due to Mania’s deteriorating health, the execution of the sentence was postponed. His family and defense team appealed to the Ombudsman and repeatedly petitioned President Aleksander Kwaśniewski for clemency. This was the first final conviction in which a prosecutor from the investigative division of the Institute of National Remembrance acted as the accuser.

Since Mania did not report to serve his sentence, he was arrested on 1 December 2005 and placed in custody in Szczecin. On 13 January 2006, the court granted a suspension of the sentence due to his health condition.

Mania’s testimony from interrogations in the 1960s and 2000 was first published in 2014 in Patrick Montague’s book Chełmno. Pierwszy nazistowski obóz zagłady (Chełmno. The First Nazi Extermination Camp).

In culture In 2003, artist Rafał Jakubowicz painted Henryk M. from the Zugzwang series, a monochromatic portrait of Mania. The series refers to the history of the Chełmno extermination camp, and the portrait of Mania alludes to the Poznań court's verdict issued in February 2002.