A survivor of the Nazi mass slaughter of Hungarian Jews told a court here yesterday that Herman Krumey, one of Adolf Eichmann’s principal aides in Nazi-held Hungary, personally selected victims for gassing in Auschwitz.
Siegmund Leb, now a Tel Aviv businessman, testified in the trial of Krumey and former SS.Lt. Col. Otto Hunsche, another Eichmann aide in Hurgary. The two former SS officers are on trial on charges of complicity and murder of Hungarian Jews. The Jewish witness told the court that 1,680 Hungarian Jews had been scheduled for release to neutral Switzerland to prove the Nazis’ “goodwill” for the planned exchange of 1,000,000 trapped Jews for 10,000 Allied trucks in the closing days of the war.
Mr. Leb said that instead of being sent to Switzerland, the group was first moved to the Bergen-Belsen camp in northern Germany. There, he said, Krumey removed many names from the list of those to be released. The witness, whose family was murdered at the Auschwitz camp, said one of the victims chosen by Krumey was the mother of Joel Brand, the Budapest Jew the Nazis sent to Istanbul to negotiate in the trucks-for-Jews transaction which failed.
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.
