One of the 22 ex-Nazi defendants on trial here for the mass murder of Jews and others at Auschwitz and Birkenau, during World War II, justified some of his brutal actions, when he testified under oath today, by the claim that “they were bad people–after all, they stole bread and shoes.”
The witness was Emil Bednarek, 56, the only one of the 22 defendants who had not been a member of either the SS or the Gestapo. He was himself an inmate at Auschwitz for five years, serving as a trustee throughout the period 1940-45. Ethnically a German, he had served awhile in the Polish Army, had crossed over to the German side, and was arrested four years ago as a suspected Nazi when some former Polish inmates of Auschwitz recognized him in Bavaria, where he ran a small cafe.
He insisted he had never as charged, hit Jews who had refused to go peacefully into the gas chambers. He said he had never given any prisoners the “cold shower treatment,” which involved dousing naked prisoners with water in midwinter, then letting them freeze to death outdoors. He denied he had beaten prisoners in Block Eight at Auschwitz, where he was “top elder,” until the inmates died.
The court heard overall denials from the next witness also, a piano builder named Gerhard Neuberg, who had served for two years as a medical corpsman run by the SS at Austoryita, Neuberg, 54, admitted he had been an assistant to a physician in one of the camp hospitals. But he insisted he had never “selected” any of the prisoners who had been sent to the gan evens. That Job, he said, was done by a doctor who came very Tuesday to pick for death those patients who were “too sick.”
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.
