Guard “More Animal Than Human On Trial”

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29107, 20 January 1960, Page 15

Guard “More Animal Than Human On Trial”

(Rec. 11.30 p.m.) MUNICH, January 19, “More animal than human” —that was how Richard Bugdalle, aged 51, a former guard at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, was described at the opening of his trial in Munich yesterday.

He is charged with murdering at least 28 inmates. His alleged atrocities are some of the most brutal described in a German Court.

The packed courtroom listened in horror as Willi Leeuwarden, a former inmate, said: “None was feared as much as this man. He never showed any human feeling. It was horrible. He raved like an animal. Such a man cannot be called human.”

During the first two hours of the trial, Bugdalle kept leaping up and shouting: “I never did that. It’s all a lie. There was never anything like that.”

When told to keep quiet, Bugdalle just murmured as every witness stepped down: “I know nothing about it.”

Leeuwarden told how Bugdalle made prisoners, and Jews in particular, perform the “bear dance,” in which prisoners were forced to dance in circles with their hands crossed over their heads while holding a spade. The prisoners either became giddy and fell down the embankment behind them or Bugdalle simply kicked them down. The prisoners were then shot by other guards for going out of bounds, Leeuwarden said. He said that Bugdalle often took a prisoner’s cap or the tool he was working with and threw it outside the camp area. The prisoner was then forced to go and retrieve it, and was shot for leaving the camp. Another former prisoner, 59-year-old Elmer Stock, described how Bugdalle made inmates stahd

naked in freezing temperatures and then hosed them with icy water until they froze to death. Fritz Bressau, a prisoner responsible for keeping count of the dead in Eugdalle’s camp bloc, said that one day alone he counted 120 dead prisoners, most of them having died from exposure, or burst lungs.