A Polish witness today told the Frankfurt court hearing murder charges against 22 former officials of the Auschwitz-Birkeneau concentration camp that one of the main defendants, Wilhelm Boger, had personally hanged four Russian prisoners who had tried to escape from the camp. Boger, he said, had beaten him up so badly that he had been hospitalized for seven weeks, and still bore the scars of his punishment. He showed them to the court. Boger denied having hanged the four prisoners.
A second witness also identified Boger and two other of the defendants, Stefan Baretzki and Dr. Viktor Kapesius, as the men who selected the prisoners transferred from the Theresienstadt camp in Czechoslovakia, who were to be sent to the gas chambers. Two transports totaling about 45,000 women, children and aged people, the witness aaid, arrived at Auschwitz early in 1944 from Theresienstadt.
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