More than 100 witnesses from Austria and Poland were expected to be called during the trial of Karl Chmielewski, a former SS captain accused of causing the death of 297 inmates of the Mauthausen concentration camp, which opened in the Ansbach Assizes yesterday.
Chmielewski was accused by the prosecution of inventing a number of means of quick dispatch of inmates including the “death baths” in which prisoners were stripped in midwinter in the outdoors and hosed down with icy water until they collapsed and died. If the trial lasts through April, as is expected, it will be one of the biggest of its kind yet held in West Germany.
Chmielewski was found in 1959 hiding under an assumed name near Ansbach, where he had earned his living since the end of World War II as a rabbit breeder. He denied responsibility, during preliminary investigations, for the killings in Cusen, a Mauthausen sub-camp. According to the prosecution, the number of deaths at Cusen during Chmielewski’s administration rose from 300 a month to 2,000 through application of the death bath and other methods devised by the former SS captain.
According to evidence from camp records now held by the prosecution, a total of some 10,000 victims perished between 1940 and 1942 while Chmielewski was at the camp. Walter Junge, one of his assistants and working overseers, also was awaiting trial on similar charges. Chmielewski, now 56, joined Himmler’s general staff near the end of the war after service at the Oranienburg and Mauthausen death camps.
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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.
