page_title: Stefan Starzyński
section_title: Arrest and death
hierarchical_section_title: Stefan Starzyński / Arrest and death
context_page_description: Stefan Bronisław Starzyński was a Polish statesman, economist, military officer and Mayor of Warsaw before and during the Siege of 1939.
context_section_description: On October 5, he was arrested by the Gestapo and, together with several other prominent inhabitants of Warsaw, held hostage as a warrant of safety for Adolf Hitler during a parade of victory held in Warsaw. The following day all of them were released. On October 27, 1939 he was again arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. In December he was yet again offered to escape, but he again refused claiming that it would be too costly to those involved in his escape.
  His fate remained unknown until, on September 8, 2014, the Polish IPN-Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej) officially closed the investigation of the circumstances of his death. Based on a recent eyewitness testimony, the IPN's commission of inquiry came to the conclusion that Stefan Starzyński was shot by the Gestapo at some point between December 21 and 23, 1939. in Warsaw or its surroundings. The crime was committed by Gestapo functionaries Oberscharführer Hermann Schimmann, Hauptscharführer Weber, and Unterscharführer Perlbach. However, it has not been possible to unambiguously establish the Gestapo functionaries who had given the order to kill Stefan Starzyński.
  According to an earlier version of the account, which has been discarded by the IPN, it was believed that Starzyński had been transferred to Moabit prison in Berlin and then to Dachau concentration camp, where he was thought to have died. Several other accounts had assumed that he was either transferred to a potash mine in Baelberge or that he was held hostage in Warsaw until the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising. The date of his death was assumed to be October 17, 1943 (shot to death in the Dachau concentration camp), although other versions mentioned August 1944 (Warsaw), 1944 (Baelberge), 1943 (Spandau prison) or January 1940 (Dachau).
  One version of the account was based on documents, which the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) had received from Germany in 2008. The documents had been held in the archives of former East German Ministry of State Security ("Stasi"), and they claimed that Starzyński was tortured and died on March 19, 1944 in a potassium salt mine, where he was allegedly held captive at a prisoner of subsidiaries camp and slave-worked in Leipzig Enterprise Transport, which produced aircraft parts. According to witnesses, he was allegedly placed on the board set on trestles, holding 2 full buckets of water, under the "penalty" of being shot if he would drop them. According to this account, Starzyński stood on it until he collapsed and died of exhaustion. This version of the circumstances of Starzyński's death was also discarded by the IPN in September 2014.
  In 1957, a memorial was erected to his memory in the Powązki cemetery in Warsaw.
caption: A commemorative plaque dedicated to Starzyński. The inscription at the top includes his most famous quote I wanted Warsaw to be great...
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