NUREMBERG TRIALS

Grey River Argus, 31 January 1946, Page 2

NUREMBERG TRIALS

CAMP REVELATIONS Spanish Witness NUREMBERG, January 29. Hitler’s former armaments chief, Albert Speer, shuddered in the dock at the War Crimes trial, to-day, when youthful Francois Boix, a Spanish Republican witness for the French prosecution, pointed an accusing finger at him and said: “He is the distinguished visitor who visited Mauthausen camp in 1943 and was photographed there.” Boix, as a professional photographer, was made assistant to S.S. photographers at the camp. Witness said that Speer looked extremely pleased during the visit, and congratulated the camp leaders. He was photographed shaking hands with the Commandant. Boix declared that only 30 Russian prisoners were left out of 3000 after three months’ persecution and executions. HUMAN “GUINEA PIGS” The S.S. medical corps at Buchenwald and Dore concentration camps used the internees as human guinea pigs, causing the deaths of hundreds, said Alfred Balachowsky, Chief of the Pasteur Laboratory, Faris. Balachowsky told the Court that Russian prisoners were deliberately burned with phosphorus with the object of testing methods of curing phosphorus burns. Bacteria taken from inmates dying from typhus was given by extravenous injections to healthy prisoners in innoculation experiments. More than 600 internees were literally murdered to maintain different tvphus strains. OSLO TORTURES. A' Norwegian lawyer, Hans Cappelen, gave evidence that Nazi tortures of Norwegians at Oslo were so terribly effective that when members of the Gestapo burned his feet with a lamp it didn’t hurt so much. He was so feeble he didn’t care. “Gestapo interrogators tore the hair from my head; they pounded my arms and legs, trying to break them. My right arm was dislocated and I fainted. They revived me with water and put a screw arrangement on my left leg, tearing flesh from the bone. I still have, scars on the leg after four years.”

Cappelen told how he was transferred from the “horror house” to Natzweilen concentration camp in Germany. Drunken German guards behaved' like madmen during the trek by 3000 prisoners to Dore concentration camp before the Red Army advance. A prisoner who faltered had tiis brain smashed in with a rifle butt.

HITLER BOMB PLOT. LONDON, January 29.

An Associated Press correspondent at Nuremberg stated; Hitherto unpublished secret documents reveal that Mr Churchill, Mr Roosevelt, and high Vatican officials possessed advance knowledge of the Hitler bomb plot months before the assassination attempt was made on July 20, 1944. Others mentioned in the documents as being aware of the plan “Valkyrie”—the code name of the plot—were Mannerheim, Badoglio, General Andorka, of Budapest, and two de Gaullists who operated from Budapest under the guise of Vichy officials.

One of Goebbels’s propaganda experts, Dr. Emmanuel Shaeffer, in a sworn statement, declared' a Swedish industrialist who operated as liaison between the anti-Hitler forces and the British Government, kept Mr Churchill informed of the developments. Mr Roosevelt received progress reports from special agents in Switzerland, and Admiral Cararis, chief of the German Countei'-Intelli-gence, gave direct, warning in the Vatican through Papal offices at Vienna. Mr Churchill, although notified well in advance of the attempt against Hitler, indicated to the Germans they would not get concessions from the Western Allies whatever the outcome of the plot. NUREMBERG, January 28.

How the French atomic scientist Jacques Salomon was finally put to death at Auschwitz concentration camp by the Germans aftei’ his arms had been horribly broken, and crushed by torture,.was related at the War Crimes trial to-day by Madame Courturier, Communist deputy in the French Assembly.

Courturier, the first woman witness to give evidence before the tribunal said: “On the day Salomon was murdered, he was brought out to say good-bye to his wife. It was a piteous sight, for the scientist’s arms were so pulped, he was unable to embrace his wife in a final farewell.”

Firmly and dispassionately, Courturier told the Court of the agony of death she witnessed during three years’ imprisonment in concentration camps at Ayschwitz Ravensbruk. All the Nazis in the dock kept their eyes glued on the witness. Goering looked i%ale and downcast. Arrested by Petain’s French police and handed' over to the Germans for refusing to sign a declaration, Courturier was sent to Auschwitz with 230 other women prisoners, mostly wives of intellectuals. Only forty-seven survived. When the women were at Auschwitz they sang the “Marseillaise” to bolster their courage. “Our heads were shaved, our arms tattooed and in the presence of S.S. men and women guards, we were forced to strip, and take a shower and don tattered clothing,” said witness. “Women members of the S.S. with sticks broke the skull of one of my fellow-prisoners before my eyes. Others had their legs torn to shreds by dogs urged on by S.S. guards. ' Rollcall was a nightmare, and when it was completed, bodies were scattered around ' like a battlefield, with rats gnawing at the dead and' semi-dead. The lost of one’s shoes meant the gas chamber.” She said that the principal cause of death by disease was the lack of hygiene; there was only one lavatory for 11,000 internees. Women S.S. guards were just as savage as the men and they severely reprimanded Polish women who had just given birth to children because they made too much noise and forced them to stand naked in the courtyard all day with their babies in their arms. Young girls wearing bright dresses played light tunes like “The Merry Widow” waltz to allay the fears of prisoners being marched to the gas chamber. As Courturier unfolded the horrifying story, von Papen hid his face in his hands.

Witness related how Jews marked for extermination arrived at Ausch-

in which she gave her opinion of Gestapo veracity. Lord Lawrence sternly rebuked the Court. Courturier walked slowly from the witnessbox, glaring hatred at the accused Nazi leaders as she passed the dock, witz railway station in such numbers that the guards did not trouble to count them and marched them direct to the gas chambers. Pregnant Jewish women were dispatched to the gas chamber after their babies were born. “One night we were awakened by horrible cries and the next morning we learned from a man working in the gas chamber that there had not been enough gas to kill the babies, who were hurled into the furnace alive.”

Following a 8.8. C. broadcast in July, 1943, desrribing the terrible conditions under which the French were living at Auschwitz, Berlin ordered that they should receive better treatment and the conditions improved. The French survivors owed their lives to the broacast. Witness said that the Germans sent women aged from 20 to 30 to experimental blocks, where Nazi doctors toyed with operations, ray-projectors, and ’innoculations intended to produce sterilisation, by which it was hoped to eradicate millions of people in the conquered areas.

Cross-examining Courturier, Streicher’s counsel suggested that her figures regarding the number of Jews killed at Auschwitz differed from the official Gestapo figures. Laughter greeted Couturier's reply