Turned On Gas To Kill Patients

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31319, 15 March 1967, Page 13

Turned On Gas To Kill Patients

(N.Z.P.A. -Reuter—Copyright) FRANKFURT, March 14. A Nazi death clinic doctor yesterday told a Frankfurt court that he had personally turned on the gas-taps to kill mental patients under Hitler’s euthanasia programme.

Horst Schumann, extradited to West Germany from Ghana last November, was giving evi-. dence as a witness at the trial of three doctors charged with the murder of between 5000 and 9500 mentally defective patients at Nazi mental institutes

Schumann, aged 60, said he was the person mainly responsible for killing the inmates at the Sonnenstein death clinic. At least 20,000 persons uere killed at the clinic between summer, 1940 and August, 1941 The three accused doctors in the trial are Aquilin Ullrich, Klaus Endruweit and Heinrich Bunke, all aged 52. They had been practising medicine in their hometowns

in different parts of Germany until their arrest on the murdei charges. In evidence, Schumann said Endruweit, his former assistant at Sonnenstein, had taken part in the killing of at least 40 to 50 groups of patients. At Auschwitz Schumann fled from West Germany in 1950, when his name was linked with medical experiments on inmates of Auschwitz. He was sheltered by the Kwame Nkrumah regime in Ghana until the Ghana President was toppled and the new Government granted a West German extradition request. He is now held in a maximum security prison near Frankfurt pending his own trial.