Gestapo murder squads compelled Jewish victims at Auschwitz to send postcards to their homes, purportedly mailed from the German resort of Waldsee, saying “wish you were here,” a Brazilian businessman who had acted as a liaison man between the late Adolf Eichmann’s Gestapo units and the Hungarian Jews testified here today.
The Brazilian, lsszie Petoe, pointed to Hermann Krumey, one of Eichmann’s chief Budapest aides, and told how Krumey had handed him a stack of thousands of postcards a week after the first batch of Jews had been sent to Auschwitz. He said Krumey told him to mail the cards which indicated that they had been mailed from Waldsee, and declared the purpose was “to lull” the Jews still remaining in Budapest into a feeling that they would be sent to a similar resort. Going through the cards, he said, he found two that bore the Auschwitz postmark.
Another witness, 72-year-old Hungarian writer-historian Eugen Levai, accused both Krumey and his co-defendant. Otto Hunsche, of direct participation in the Eichmann program for the liquidation of Hungarian Jewry. He told the court that Krumey had set up a special internment camp in Budapest for Jewish intellectuals. He said the camp was bombed by the Nazis, then combed for survivors, who were sent to the gas chambers in Auschwitz. Some, he said, were sent to Mauthausen, where they were killed. Among the latter group was a brother of Levai who, the witness said, had been a prominent hero in World War I. That “job,” he said, was done by Hunsche.
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.
