The director of the Auschwitz Museum in Poland, himself a former inmate of that camp, today told the court trying 22 former Auschwitz guards, doctors and administrators that at least 3,000,000 persons had been murdered there by the Nazis “but the final toll is still unknown.”
The witness was Kazimierz Smolen, who had spent almost five years at Auschwitz, working most of the time as a clerk in the registration section. He said that, “by the turn of 1943-44, we knew that about 3,000,000 were gassed there. Many more died in 1944, but it is immensely difficult to calculate the total figure. So far, it has not been done.”
The witness identified two of the defendants, Oswald Kaduk and Hans Stark, as murderers at Auschwitz. He testified that Kaduk participated in the last two hangings at the camp, on December 30, 1944.” He charged also that Kaduk was one of the chief figures in the selection of inmates–most of them Jews–for gassing in the Birkenau chambers adjoining Auschwitz. He accused Stark of many murders, although Stark was barely out of his teens at the time.
JTA has documented Jewish history in real-time for over a century. Keep our journalism strong by joining us in supporting independent, award-winning reporting.
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.
