Jews, Russians and Poles were treated with greater severity than other nationalities in the concentration camps of Nazi German, according to “all the evidence available,” Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, majority leader of the Senate, told Congress today in presenting the report of the joint Senate and House committee which investigated Nazi atrocities at the request of General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
In the hour-long report which he read to an engrossed Senate, Barkley declared “we are of the opinion that a colossal scheme of extermination was planned and put into effect against all those in occupied countries who refused to accept the principles of Nazism, or who opposed the saddling of the Nazi yoke on their countries.” The report states that the intelligentsia, college professors, generals, business leaders and professional men of occupied countries were seized and placed in the atrocity camps “unless they agreed to spread the doctrines advocated by the Nazis.”
The committee, consisting of six members of each house, visited three camps, Buchenwald, Nordhausen and Dachau, which they described as typical of the more than one hundred concentration camps in Germany, and furnished an “accurate cross-section of the entire German political prisoner camp system and policy.” Various agencies, including the United States Army, are collecting evidence to be used in punishment of the war criminals, the report states.
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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.
