GRUESOME EVIDENCE

Chronicle (Levin), 1 April 1946, Page 5

GRUESOME EVIDENCE

NAZI EXTERMINATI.ON CENTRE Received Sunday, 9.25 p.m. LONDON, March 31. The trial began at Dachau on friday ,of 60 former memhers of the staff of th. Mauth.au.sen concentration camp from seven diff'erent .countries, charged witu violating the laws and usages of war. It is alleged that they subjected manyi thousands of nationals from 18 countries, including British and Americauj .prisoners of war, to kiUings, be.atings, j tortures, starvation, ahuses and indig- j nities.

After all the defendants had pleaded not guilty, Lieut.-Colonel William Ben | son, the chief American prosecutor, m ; opening the case, described Mauthausen ! as an exterinination centre where up wards of 1,500,000 persons perished Thousands of the yictims were from l Europe's intelligentsia who had the! misfortune to stand up against the Naza i oppression. The first witness, Lieut.-.Compiander Jack Taylor, United States Navy, who was a former inmate of Mauthausen, and who was fiown specially from Amecica, told the Court how inmates were put to death by beating, electrocution. being thrown from cliffs or mashed in ; concrete njixers, being frozen aivl scaided in shower-baths, after which they were lashed until the blisters burst a/iu the skin came oT in strips, and bemg thr.own to hungry dogs. Other retine' rnents ineluded having ?. r-ed-hot poker thrust down the throat, the injection oi magnesium chloride or petrol into the heart, kicking to death, hurying alive and drowning hy the insertion of a hose in -the mouth. One famous Czech gen eral was thus drov/ned. Lieut.-Commander Taylor reeounted i the story of 150 Dutch Jews who were' made to jump off a cliff on to tne rocks below. Those who survived were drag- 1 ged up and again thrown over. EVIDENCE OF CANNIBALISM i Lieut.-Commander Taylor said that, (' v/lien hs was an inmate of the cainp, he ' saw evidence of cannibalism. The camp 1 hospital was formerly a stables in which i as many as five men v/ould he packexi ; into each bunk. The dead would often ■ Lie under the beds and not be found by j

a daily check. He saw corpses without heart, liyer and certain muscles, which the starving prisoners had eaten. ' ' I never expected to live, ' ' he deciared. ' ' My mental condition was ' worse than my physical condition." Ernst Martin, an Austrian, who was for four years in Mauthausen for resistance work against the Nazis, gave evidence that he kept the camp death books, in which the names of all who died were registered. He inserted a ; fuli-stop after the person 's birthplace | in all places where he knew the person I was murdered. The prosecution suhmitted to the Court death-books containing these secret marks. The books certitied that many thousands were shot in tryjng to I escape. j Actualiy hardly a dozep tried to escape, which was practically impossijjle, Witness continued. Berlin in April, 1945, ordered that all records of the prisoners and the S,3. guards shculd be burned. At that tinie they had recocds of 72,000 deaths, and the burning of th-. books took eight days. Martin .said that 46 British and Dutch offieers were stood aagipst a waL all night after arriving at Mauthausen and after being brutally maltreated were shot. Electric barbed wire around the camp was so arranged that, when someone contacted it, a red iight showed in the powerhouse. The guards could then either turn off the power or donble it. They usually let the vi'ctim hang in agony for six hours until he b.egan to burn. Then they eitlier dpubled the voltage or shot him. Members of ihe S.S. received a'bonus of 20 cigarettes apd ejght days' leaye for each prisoner shot.