BELSEN TRIAL

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 89, Issue 228, 26 September 1945, Page 5

BELSEN TRIAL

JEWESS RESCUED FROM THE GAS CHAMBER BREAKS DOWN GIVING EVIDENCE. Recd. 8 pan. London, Sept. 25. The trial of Josef Kramer, and other guards who were employed at the notorious Belsen concentration camp in Germany, is being continued before a British military court in Luneberg. , A Polish woman witness, Zona Litwinska, broke down at the trial yesterday after she had dramatically pointed out Hoessler one of the accused, as an organiser of mass murders in the gas chambers of Auschwitz camp. Shouting, “That is the murderer responsible for the deaths of so many,’ she burst into tears and was led sobbing from the Court. Hoessler lowered his bullet head to avoid her accusing eyes.

When Litwinska resumed her evidence, she said she was arrested in May, 1940, because she was a Jewess. Her husband, a non-Jew and a Polish Army officer, was also arrested and sent to Auschwitz, where he died.

She described how on Christmas eve, 1941 all Jewesses in the camp were lined up and a selection made of victims for the gas chamber. This parade was taken by Hoessler and two S.S. doctors. She was among those chosen to be gassed. She was a hospital patient at the time with a broken leg. All hospital patients who could not leave their beds for the parade were automatically chosen for mination. PACKED LIKE CATTLE.

On Christmas Day, the victims, naked, and packed like cattle in trucks were driven to the gas chamber. There the trucks were emptied of their human cargo by tipping up as if they were carrying coal. The victims were led to a room which looked like a shower bath. “I was terrified,” she concluded. “There were cries and tears, and people shouted and hit one another. Suddenly yellow fumes poured in through a small window. I started coughing and choking. My name was called and I raised my arm, because I could not speak. Then someone pulled me from the chamber —I don’t know who.”

Hoessler took her to hospital, where she was told she had been taken out of the gas chamber because her husband was a Polish officer. Further dramatic identifications electrified the Court as Litwinska described her transfer to Belsen.

Use Forster remained tight-lipped and defiant as witness told how Forster beat to death a girl aged 17, who stole one potato. Witness traversed the floodlit rows of prisoners, identifying 13 others, including Kramer, Grese, Weingartner and Ehler.