German Faces Trial for Supplying Gas to Nazi Extermination Camp

The German chemical manufacturer who sold his special brand of potassium cyanide to the Auschwitz extermination camp, in the full knowledge that it was being used to murder upward of 450, 000 Jews and other people, is facing a German court here for the seventh time in seven years, charged with having been” an accessory to murder in an indeterminate number of cases.”

The defendant, Dr. Gerhard Peters, is an authority on the production of insecticide and during the war, managed the “German Corporation for Vermin Extermination”(DEGESCH). One day SS Lieutenant Colonel Kurt Gerstein told him that “Zyklon B,” a lethal cyanide product of his own invention and manufacture which he had been furnishing to various concentration camps in stupendous quantities, was being used to put to death inmates of the Auschwitz camp. This conversation was confirmed by Dr. Peters himself, in an early stage of the postwar investigation against him. Nonetheless, he supplied another 4, 000 pounds at least.

Although Dr. Peters was arraigned back in 1948, in one of the first war crimes cases handled by German courts, he has not to this day been in jail for any length of time. When the Frankfurt Court of Assizes sentenced Dr. Peters to five years in 1949 for having “contributed to manslaughter,” the leniency of the verdict caused an outcry among German democrats, and among Jews everywhere. Upon appeal, the Superior Court ruled the crime to be murder rather than manslaughter. In 1950, the Court of Assizes accordingly found him guilty of the far more serious charge but pronounced the identical sentence. This time the German Supreme Court which ruled that the verdict was too mild to be admissible.

Nonetheless a Wiesbaden court demonstratively gave him only four and one-half years, which was again vacated by the Superior Court. Having no choice under the letter of the law, the Wiesbaden Court of Assizes thereupon imposed a penalty of six years’ imprisonment; the prosecution had demanded 15 years. That verdict was final, with no further appeal being possible. But numerous prominent Germans signed clemency petitions for him, although he showed no regret about his actions.

Reportedly it was a very high official in the State of Hesse, a member of the Social Democratic Party, who saw to it that Dr. Peters never served the sentence. It was apparently the same high state official who caused the District Attorney to go along with Peters’ petition to reopen the trial because of “new evidence.” The “new evidence” is an assertion that Lt. Col. Gerstein was plagued by scruples of conscience, which is indeed borne out by other testimony and by the fact that, after setting forth his experiences in a number of affidavits, he committed suicide. The judge specially assigned to this case is Dr. Werner Hummerich, who first came to public notice two years ago because of his severity in the case of the former “Jewish Bank” where several persons were convicted for having violated German foreign currency regulations.