EXTERMINATION CAMP

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 71, Issue 6137, 17 September 1945, Page 4

EXTERMINATION CAMP

WHAT NEW ZEALANDER SAW AND HEARD ON VISIT TO MAIDANEK CAMP In March, 1945, a contact mission was sent to Poland to consider arrangements for the evacuation of British Commonwealth prisoners of war whom the advance of the Russian armies had liberated from German hands. The New Zealand Minister to the U.S.S.R. arranged for Mr D. P. Costello, (second secretary in the Nevv Zealand Legation, Moscow, and a former officei’ in the Second New Zealand Division) to proceed with this mission in order to watch the interests of New Zealand prisoners of war, and as the senior officer—with the temporary rank of Major—he was placed ill command of it. In the coiirse of his mission in Poland Mr Costello visited the German concentration camp at Maidanek, and also received information from a French officer who had been imprisoned in the concentration camp as Oswiecim. His notea on what he saw of the one camp and what he heard from an, inmate of the other are detailed below. “While at Lubin I visited the German concentration camp at Maidanek, which has been declared a national museum and which is thereby to be preserved for the future. “Maidanek is laid out on lines reminiscent of our own military camps and reminded me particularly of'Maadi and Amiriya camps in Egypt. The whole complex of buildings is enclosed by barbed wire, and the camp is laid out in streets flanked by long barrack buildings of planks and corrugated iron. German notices are still in position on the doors and walls. In the company of a Polisß guide, who spoke only German in addition to his own laiigUage, I made what is presumably the usual tour of the sights.

“First of all one is shown the shower room and gas chamber. The shower room contains 72 shower heads, spaced very close together. At the far end of the room is a short passage leading to the gas chamber. This is a small room about 25ft. x 25ft. with thick' concrete walls and an iron door. In the middle of the low ceiling is a hole through which the arsenic poison Zyklon was emptied from cylinders. There is a big pile of slack Zyklon near the gas chamber, and large stocks of the gas cylinders are preserved elsewhere in the camps. Beside the door of the gas chamber is a window ’ through which the German guards could watch the operation of the gas. “Near the shower room are sheds containing the personals effects of those . who were murdered. The sight is overwhelming, and I saw no reason to doubt the word of the guide that there were 820,000 pairs of footwear there. I examined the shoes they bore the marks of shopkeepers in almost every country in Europe. “About 1000 yards away is the furnace where the bodies were burnt. A high brick chimney communicates by an underground passage-with the six ovens. Alongside is ap autopsy table on which, according to the guide the stomachs of those who were suspected of swallowing valuables at the last moment were opened and examined.

“During my stay in Lublin I asked many Poles what they knew of Maioanek. They all confirmed what I

had been told on the spot. The circumstance which seemed most strongly to have impressed itself on the memory of the people of Lublin was the presence, during two years, of a cloud of heavy smoke from Maidanek, which hung low over the town with a smell of burning flesh. Osweicim “My official business in Lublin brought me into touch with a French officer, Captain —, who had been captured by the Germans in 1943 while engaged upon sabotage work under the direction of London. “Oswiecim (on the Vistula, west of Krakow) was a much bigger camp than Maidaiiek, and far more people were murdered and burnt there. Instead of one furnace there were five, with five chimneys, as well as two ditches each 120 ft. long, 25ft. wide and 12ft. deep, in which the bodies were burnt. There were always four furnaces working (the fifth being in reserve for boom periods) and the ditches, too, were used continuously except for the two or three occasions each month when the ashes were emptied. At Oswiecim the ashes from the ditches and the furnaces were transported in lorries and emptied into the Vistula. “Children who were ‘selected’ were always sent to take farewell of their parents. In many cases the victims were naked when they set out for the gas chamber. Captain saw one parade of 2,000 women, naked’, marching ‘to the gas’ with the German band at their head paying tangos and fox trots. In cases where they were dressed, they were given numbered checks for their clothes in the shower room, and, passing to the gas chamber, filed past a notice which said,, in several languages: ‘Keep hold of your check as otherwise you may not get your own clothes back when you come oUt’. At OsWiecim the gold teeth of the dead were broken out of their mouths by a special team, autopsies were performed on a few, arid they went into the fire. “All those engaged in handling the dead were persons who were themselves condemned to be burnt. The prisoners’ doctors likewise were appointed for periods of three months, at the end of which they passed to the gas chamber themselves. Captain made the acquaintance of a Dr. Pasch, who was burnt at the end of July last year and front whom he got the figures of the previous three months’ burnings. These were: May, 360,000; June, 512,000; 1-26 July, 442,000. On the day when they established their record of 25,000 executed in one day the Germans were issued with an extra ration of schnapps, and celebrated the occasion by a carousal. It was the German practice always to gas the prisoners before they burned them. Exceptions were made in favour of persons seriously ill and of new-born babies; these were thrown alive into the ovens. Whenever contagious disease broke out in a shed all the inmates were gassed and burnt. “After the publication by the Russians of the facts about Maidanek camp the Germans set about removing the traces of their activities at Oswiecim. The surviving prisoners were shot, apart from a minority who lived to be liberated by the Russians on January 16.

The above sounds like the invention of an insane mind. I am convinced that Captain ———. was telling the truth.”—Moscow, March 26 1945.