WAR CRIMES

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 153, 30 June 1945, Page 5

WAR CRIMES

'Beast Of Buchenwald' Identified By Americans IN WAR PRISONERS' CAGE Rec. 10 a.m. LONDON, June 29. American military officials have identified Oberfuehrer Hermann Pister, the "beast of Buchenwald," who was posing as a Wehrmacht officer in a war prisoners' cage in the Munich area, reports the Daily Mail. Pister, who was commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, succeeded the even more notorious Koch, whose wife was reported to have lampshades made from the skins of murdered prisoners. The Netherlands news agency states that the Dutch Nazi, H. A. Pulles, former burgomaster of Eindhoven, has been arrested. Twenty S.S. guards from the Belsen concentration camp have died of typhus which they caught when they were forced to bury their 'starved victims. They would have been among the first to face Allied justice when the war crimes trials start soon. French, Belgian, Yugoslav and Czechoslovak liaison officers arrived at Twenty-first Army Group Headquarters yesterday to help to collect evidence of crimes against their countrymen and to prepare the way for the trials.

Twenty women will be among the first alleged war criminals to be tried. The charges against them include murder and the commission of atrocities against men and women. If convicted they will be sentenced to death or life imprisonment.