ACCUSED ADMITS GUILT

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26228, 12 August 1946, Page 5

ACCUSED ADMITS GUILT

TROUBLED BY CONSCIENCE NUREMBURG, Aug. 9. When the British prosecutor, Mr Elwyn Jones, produced a series of documents testifying to experiments carried out by the S.S. on members of concentration camps, the director of the S.S. Institute for Research, Dr Wolfram Sievers, announced that he wished to make, a confession. The documents contradicted Sievers’s evidence before the investigating commission. They showed that Sievers was present with Himmler at Dachau when the experiments were being conducted. These including freezing prisoners to the point of death, keeping them in a pressure chamber till their lungs burst, and injecting them with drugs to bring about sterilisation. Sievers said there had been a great conflict in his conscience about the experiments.

The tribunal then went on with the case against the German General Staff. The first witness, Field-marshal Brauchitsch, claimed that before the war he had serious qualms about the policy supported by military measures. In the summer of 1938 he was summoned to Berlin. The commanding generals who, without dissent, agreed with his view, approved the submission to Hitler of a memorandum warning against war in Europe, which they argued would lead to world conflict. Hitler, in an excited argument, told Brauchitsch: “ I alone know what to do.”

Brauchitsch said he found no possibility of persuading Hitler otherwise, so. he decided to resign. Hitler accepted the resignation, announcing that he was assuming command himself.