ATROCITY TRIAL AT METZ

Press, Volume XC, Issue 27387, 28 June 1954, Page 10

ATROCITY TRIAL AT METZ

WITNESS THREATENS FORMER GUARD (N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) METZ, June 25. Crying with rage, a former German inmate of the notorious Struthof concentration camp had to be forcibly restraned in Court today after threatening- to smash in the face of one of his former S.S. guards. Harry Wittke, a Social Democrat councillor from Dahme-HolSteip, lost his temper at the constant denial of murder and atrocities by Franz Ehrmanntraut, one of the 16 Nazis being tried at Metz for mass butchery and brutalities while running the camp. He accused Ehrmanntraut, Struthof’s chief dog-keeper, of lashing a Polish prisoner with 200 strokes of a whip until he died. “I was acting under orders,” the S.S. man retorted surlily. One of the earlier witnesses, a Belgian, Major-General Joseph Woussen, at present Air Attache at The Hague? told the Court that when he arrived at Struthof from Buchenwald in October, 1943, “I found that Buchenwald was a paradise compared to Struthof.” General Woussen spoke of the numerous executions that he witnessed in the camp, but never one that followed the “legal forms.” One day, he saw a young Frenchman, “a veritable human rag, thrown to the fierce dogs, which tore him to pieces with their fangs.” A second Belgian witness, Major Georges Boogaerts, said he was the only inmate to speak to four women—three English and orie French—who were incinerated after being injected with carbolic acid. He did not know the names of the English women. The French woman was Andree Morel. He alleged that Wolfgang Seuss, one of the accused guards, was present at the execution of the women, whose heads had first been shaven.