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Details of Sexual Crimes Against Jews in Mauthausen Bared at Nuremberg Trials

January 27, 1946
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Details of sexual crimes committed upon young Jewish men and women by the Nazi authorities at various concentration camps were disclosed today by former French prisoners who testified at the international war crime trial.

One witness, Maurice Lambe, said that several young Dutch Jewish man were selected by the chief physician of the Mauthausen camp and sexual operations performed upon them, after which they were murdered. Another witness testified that Professor Birth, head of the Anatomical Institute of Strassbourg, ordered him and fellow prisoners to prepare vats for the bodies of camp victims, who turned out to be young Jewish women recently killed and still bleeding.

The notes of French physician Charles Richet, concerning conditions at Buchenwald, were read to the court. He stated that on certain nights as many as 2,100 Jews were crowded into rooms so small that most of them died. During the first three months of 1945 some 13,000 prisoners died, Richet declared. Of one shipment of 4,500 Jews, only 148 arrived alive, and these were immediately sent to the gas chamber.

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