BELSEN TRIAL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 225, 22 September 1945, Page 5

BELSEN TRIAL

A WOMAN WITNESS

JEWESS TELLS OF THE GAS CHAMBER WIDE PUBLIC INTEREST Recd. 11 p.m. London, Sept. 21. The trial of Josef Kramer, commandant of the notorious Bel.;en concentration camp, was continued in Luneberg to-day. The first witness from among the freed internees was a .Jewess, .a doctor of medicine. She told of the horrors of Belsen and of Auschwitz, the camp to which many of those in Bolsen were removed.

With tears in her eyes she told of the gas chamber, to which her mother, brother and son, aged six, had been taken.

When the trial opened on its fifth day there was increasing public interest. Long queues of people waited to gain admission, and Ihe burgomaster had to ration tickets of admission.

Scenes at Belsen so horrible that they were deleted from films shown to the public were screened at the trial yesterday. Irma Grese, most notorious, of the camp’s female sadists, sat bolt upright, her face expressionless, as the horrors of Belsen appeared before her. The public gallery was again packed. The British military authorities are issuing admission tickets in different towns each clay so that as many Germans is possible will witness the trial.

British army officers who are checking public opinion on the trial report that the method of conducting the trial is making a deep impression on the people. Kramer and his fellow prisoners remained immobile throughout the Him even when they themselves appeared on the screen. Kramer took lengthy notes, and Irma Grese hurriedly a message which was handed down to the defending officer.

The claim of Kramer that he did everything in his power to help the internees was exploded yesterday by Major Adolphus Berney. He told the court that at the German army store a few miles from Belsen he found tons of potatoes, 12U tons of meat, 80 tons of sugar, 20 tons of dried meal and huge quantities of wheat. There was also a completely staffed and equipped bakery, capable of delivering 60,000 loaves a day. What Major Berney said disproved Kramer’s plea that he could not give his thirst-crazed prisoners anything to drink but corpse-fouled water liom static tanks. He said that in live days, using only materials found at the camp, and with S.S. guards as mechanics, he had obtained a running water supply from a river.