TRIAL OPENS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 67, Issue 48, 6 December 1946, Page 3

TRIAL OPENS

STAFF OF REVENSBRUCK CAMP YOUNG GIRLS BECOME OLD WOMEN (N.Z. Press Association— Copyright.) (Rec. 11.5 a.m.) LONDON, Dec. 5. Experiments which are said, to have turned healthy girls in their twenties to grey-haired old women are listed in indictments charging 10 men and six women members of the staff of the Ravensbruck women’s concentration camp with killing and ill-treating Allied nationals, says Reuter’s Hamburg correspondent. Five thousand women are said to have died in gas chambers. Only 15,000 out of 150,000 sent to the camp during the war were left to be liberated when the Russians arrived in May, 1945. The prosecutor said that Himmler once visited the camp and complained that the inmates were not dying fast enough. As a result two experts in mass extermination were sent there. A .BBC broadcast by a Polish girl who escaped apd described experiments in the camp caused the commandant to herd together all the survivors and exterminate them. ivfrs Odette Sansom, the George Cross winner, who was a prisoner there, will tell the court the story of the nightly thrashings and sadistic punishment. Doctors Experiment The prosecutor said that children born in the camp were killed at birth. Doctors in experimental operations, forcibly chloroformed women who later found that they had been sterilised, or had bones- grafted. Two of every five such‘women died through the doctors trying to improve their knowledge of technique. An S.S. corporal personally shot 20 women each day. He was given a proficiency badge, but the rate was not considered fast enough. One woman who was thrashed concealed her artificial leg because it would have meant death automatically. The chief accused is the 24-year-old Thodaro Blinz, who., trained Irma Grese, who was executed for her Belseii atrocities. Carmen Mory, another woman prisoner, smiled during the prosecutor's address. Movy, an attractive brunette, has already been convicted by the French for espionage. Mrs Sylvia Salveson, described as a relative of the King of Norway, said her hair turned grey in the concentration camp. She declared in evidence; “God give me words to describe Ravensbruck. If I were the greatest painter, poet, or orator, I could .not give a full'picture.”