NAZIS TO FACE TRIAL

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27376, 15 June 1954, Page 11

NAZIS TO FACE TRIAL

Concentration Camp Murders

LONDON, June 13. Reuter’s correspondent in Metz says that a grisly tale of Nazi German wartime butchery and bestiality will be unfolded at Metz on Tuesday when 18 of the men who ran the notorious Struthof concentration camp will face trial.

Four English women were victims of the mass murder scheme at the camp. Arrested in France as secret service agents, they died under doctors’ hypodermics. They thought they were merely being vaccinated against typhus and were incinerated. No details were given in 100-page indictment.

The French are satisfied that this time, unlike many of the war crimes trials in the past, they have tracked down some of the men directly responsible for mass murders, scientific exterminations, tortures and various individual acts of brutality.

The prisoners, brought from their cells after years of incarceration, while the massive dossier is being prepared, will include two former camp commanders, one-time guard chiefs, and labour controllers. The indictment is based largely on files and documents meticulously kept by the Germans to record every entry into the camp, and every death. The papers were found almost Jntact when French troops entered the Alsatian camp in the winter of 1944. 10,000 Prisoners Killed

The indictment makes a grim case history of the institution known as a “third category” deportation camp, which received about 40,000 inmates between 1941 and 1944 and killed 10,000 of them in atrocious circumstances.

Through its towering, barbed wire ghtes entered Frenchmen, Englishmen, Jugoslavs, Czechs, Russians, Swedes, Dutchmen, Poles, and racial “guinea pigs” such as Jews and gypsies, bound for the gas chambers and experimental laboratories. Struthof gathered prisoners from every part of occupied Europe and slaughtered without discrimination.

The dossier tells the story of the building of Struthof in 1941 and the extermination of the prisoner builders, and of its growth from a small camp to a vast collection of rickety barracks, a gas chamber and four crematoria.

It alleges that guards were allowed free rein to satisfy their sadism, to execute a prisoner on the spot, to set *

a pack of ferocious dogs on an inmate, or to devise a fantastic variety of tortures which would only bring death after lingering agony. The sick, weak, and maimed were beaten as mercilessly as the strong. Those who fell from exhaustion at their heavy tasks were often left to die in the mud or snow. The dossier even reports cases when S.S. men urinated on the open wounds of the injured and lashed them with sticks as they lay helpless on the ground. Witnesses have told how . they watched prisoners being buried tp their shoulders in mud while their comrades were forced to pelt their exposed heads with stones. They saw men hanging for hours and days by their wrists in the bitter cold or burning summer heat, and S.S. men dancing with their hobnailed boots on the outstretched limbs of victims spreadeagled on the ground until all the bones were broken.

They told of the sick being dragged from the infirmary on a night when the temperature was 12 degrees below zero, immersed in icy water and rubbed raw with coarse brushes. In 1942 a group of 30 Russians suspected of planning an escape were trussed up on a platform in front of the assembled camp and needles and lighted matches were forced under their finger and toenails. Four of them were kept in chains day and night for six weeks.

As soon as the gas chamber was installed in 1943 it began to claim its victims. The remains were sent to Professor Hirt in Strasbourg to aid him in his research into hereditary characteristics.

As the Allied armies approached in the autumn of 1944 the tempo of extermination was stepped up as though the Germans were hoping to destroy human evidence. In the last few weeks the gas chambers, incinerators, and execution squads were busy night and day and fresh guards were brought in from the outside to relieve the exhausted butchers.