The charge that Adolf Eichmann was responsible for the murder of 180,000 Czech citizens during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia was made in Prague today by Professor Rudolf Bystricky president of the Organization of Anti-fascist Fighters, it was reported here.
At a press conference in the Czech capital, Professor Bystricky presented a variety of documents which revealed the activities of the Nazi war criminal awaiting trial in an Israeli prison. Most of the material consisted of photostats of original documents bearing the insignia of the Nazi secret police and stamped “top secret.”
One photostat showed a letter written by SS officer Guenther from Prague reporting on the decrease in the Jewish population of Bohemia and Moravia. The report said that out of 118,310 Jews who lived in that region before March 15, 1939, only 61,320 remained on March 31, 1942. Another document consisted of a small map revealing that on October 31, 1943, only 8,531 Jews lived in the area known as the “Protectolat.”
Documents showed that 90 percent of the Jews deported in the first transports to Nisko, Poland, which were directed by Eichmann himself, were subsequently murdered. Out of a total of 4,500 Jews who were deported to Nisko, only 250 returned.
A Czech physician, Dr. Taskier, testified that in the first days of 1940, Eichmann personally ordered 7,058 Jewish youth in Lublin to be stripped naked in freezing weather and dowsed with water. Dr. Taskier said that he helped load many of the corpses. Dr. Taskier and a Polish physician, Dr. Freitag, testified that on orders of Eichmann, all sick persons as well as 30 doctors and 70 nurses were shot in the Lublin hospital.
Other photostats revealed that, at a conference between Eichmann. SS Commanding Officer Reinharot Heydrich and other Nazi leaders, it was decided to immediately deport “50,000 of the most troublesome Jews” from There sienstadt to Minsk and Riga.
An official report by Former Nazi Ambassador Ludin in Pressburg dated August 31, 1942, said that of the 89,000 Jews who were living in Slovakia in 1939, only 15,000 remained at the end of 1943. One document contained a letter to Eichmann from Hermann Krumey, head of the Nazi secret police in Lodz, in which the latter alluded to the extermination of nearly 100 Czech children.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
