Joseph Klehr, a former Nazi, gave a detailed description, during testimony this weekend, as one of the 22 defendants in the Auschwitz murder camp trial, on exactly how he murdered 250 camp inmates with lethal injections. He did so in response to a request from Presiding Judge Hans Hofmeyer.
Continuing to deny other charges of many hundreds of additional murders, the 59-year-old former guard explained that most of the prisoners chosen for injections were elderly or sick. This was the second day of Klehr’s testimony.
“They had to wait in the corridor, get undressed and then were sent back into the room where I worked,” the defendant said. “As each came in, they we told to sit on a chair. Then I felt their ribs and placed the needle between the fifth and sixth ribs on the left side. It was very simple.”
The judge asked: “Did any of them resist you? Were they calm?”
“They were calm,” the former guard replied. “They were all too weak to resist.”
Judge Hofmeyer cited testimony of several witnesses that they had seen Klehr wrap newborn infants in newspapers and toss them into the crematory oven in Block 20. The judge added that other witnesses had testified that they had seen Klehr himself drop poison gas on inmates. When Klehr denied both charges, the judge asked him: “Why do you keep denying the testimony of witnesses?” Klehr replied: “All I did was carry out orders. I never did anything on my own.”
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.
