The Nazis did not spare even the Polish generals. In Sachsenhausen, General Stefan Rovetsky (Grotto), who commanded the Crane Army, was killed.
True, General Rovetsky was not a prisoner of war, but everything indicates that his murder is fully consistent with Hitler's general plans for the extermination of the leaders of the Resistance.
After a long search and pursuit, the Nazis arrested him on June 30, 1943. Then, shackled, he was taken to the Gestapo residence on the Schuch Alley in Warsaw, and from there, just a few hours later, he was sent by plane to Berlin.
The importance the Nazis attached to the arrest of Groth is evidenced by the fact that, by special order of Himmler, the SS Untersturmführer Merten, who tracked down and arrested Groth, was awarded a prize in the amount of 1,000 Reichsmarks.
At the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin at 8 Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, Grot was interrogated several times. Gestapo officer Garro Thomsen also participated in these interrogations, who testified about it after the war.
In September 1943, Groth was taken to Sachsenhausen and imprisoned in the "Cellenbau" prison, isolated from the rest of the camp, where he, as well as other "honorary prisoners" ("Ehrenhaft-linge") who were there, were treated with a certain courtesy …
Grotto lived there until the first days of August 1944. After the outbreak of the Warsaw Uprising, he was shot by Himmler's personal orders.
In Sachsenhausen, retired Lieutenant-General Boleslav Roya, a former commander of the III brigade, and later an army commander and a deputy of the (pre-war) Sejm, was also killed. He was arrested in 1940, imprisoned in Sachsenhausen and killed on May 27, 1940.
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In Auschwitz, the former commander of the 86th Infantry Regiment, Colonel Zdzislav Matskowski, was killed, as well as his two sons - Zdzislav (born in 1923) and Jan (born in 1926). Colonel Matskovsky organized the Resistance movement in Zamoyshchina back in 1939: both of his sons performed the functions of couriers and messengers in the underground organization, and his wife was engaged in archives and correspondence.
Colonel Matskovsky, along with his entire family, was arrested at his home in Zamosc on March 17, 1941. Arresting his wife and two sons, the Gestapo, as usual, behaved rudely and cruelly.
When Matskovsky told the agents that he was an officer in the Polish army and demanded a different treatment, the Nazis beat him and treated him in this way in the future, first in Lublin, and later in Auschwitz, where he was sent.
Of course, he did not live there for a long time, having died of exhaustion on December 4, 1941. Both of his sons died in Auschwitz - they were shot during a mass execution in October 1942 at the “wall of death”.
Colonel Matskovsky's wife, imprisoned in the Ravensbrück camp, was turned by the Nazis into a "guinea pig" (she was augmented by other people's bones) and returned crippled.
Colonel Witold Moravsky also died tragically. His heroic death will find its place in an honorable chapter in the history of the Second World War, the title of which will be: "The role and fate of prisoners of war in the fight against the Third Reich."