DEATH SENTENCES

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 64, Issue 60, 20 December 1943, Page 3

DEATH SENTENCES

GERMANS TRIED AT KHARKOV.

EVIDENCE OF MASS EXECUTIONS

TORTURE OF INNOCENT

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright.) LONDON, Dec. 17.

A military tribunal at Kharkov has sentenced to death by hanging three Germans and one Russian charged with participating in the “mass, brutal extermination of peaceful Russian citizens by gas vans and other methods.”

The condemned men are Corporal Reinhardt Retzlav, aged 36 years, of the German Field Police; Plans Ritz, 34, assistant commander of the-Ges-tapo in Kharkov; Captain Wilhelm Langled, 52, German Military Secret Service; and Michel Bulanov, a Russian, who served the Germans as a chauffeur.

A large number of Kharkov workers who gathered in the hall listened tensely to the evidence and to the accused men’s confessions. They applauded when the tribunal announced the verdict.

How the Germans pulled out a Russian’s heard, piece by piece, to force a confession that he was a guerilla was told by Retzlav. Another Russian was beaten with rubber truncheons then pricked with red hot needles. Both were innocent, but were later killed in a gas chamber. Retzlav said he estimated that 5000 to 8000 Russians had been executed in Jitomire, 35,000 executed at Kiev, 4000 at Lubny, and 2000 at Pereyaslavl. These were centres where he had been stationed for different periods.

Retlav said the Russians went to the lethal chamber quietly, because they did not know where they were going. -A few who struggled were driven into lorries with sticks and rifle butts.

The bodies of the gas chamber victims were usually buried. Bulanov, the only Russian accused, said he had been a transport driver for the Gestapo. He witnessed the executions of Russians from Kharkov hospital. The Germans drove the sick persons a few miles outside of Kharkov, unloaded them beside a ditch, and shot them with tommy-guns. Bulanov, between January and July last year, estimated that he drove 600 victims to their death. He was paid about £4 10s sterling weekly and allowed rations and working clothes. The clothing of most of the victims was packed up and sent to Germany.

Ritz was asked under whose orders the execution and torturing of Russians was carried out. He replied: “It was the result of instructions from Hitler and his collaborators. The principal culprit is Hitler, who called for a rule of cruelty and spoke of the superiority of German rule. He also spoke of the need for the extermination of the ‘barbaric Russian people.’ “The next man is Himmler, who maintained that it was futile to observe the law code.

“Then comes Rosenberg, with his propaganda extolling the superiority of the German race. This propaganda has led to the conduct of the German soldiers.” Ritz admitted that he helped to shoot 3000 Russian civilians at Taganrog.

Men of the Adolf Hitler S.S. Division shot or burned to death 800 wounded Red Army officers and men in an army hospital when they recaptured Kharkov, according to an indictment by the Russian State Commission for the investigation of German war crimes which w r as broadcast over the Moscow radio. The indictment stated that the Germans closed the doors of a section of the hospital artd then threw in bombs. The wounded tried to escape, by jumping out of the windows, but tommygunners were waiting for them. The Germans next day returned to the hospital, and after ejecting the medical staff finished off the rest of the wounded.

LETHAL GAS CHAMBERS

USE IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS

(Rec. 11.5 a.m.) LONDON, Dec. 19. During the cross-examination of witnesses at the trial at Kharkov, Colonel Heinisch, German Commissar for Melitopol, said that the German Government’s decision j;o bring the “death van” into use in occupied Russia was announced at a conference of regional commissioners. Lethal gas'' chambers had been in regular use at concentration camps in Germany for some time previously.