German Government Organ Reports on Annihilation of Jews in Minsk

An extensive report on the extermination of Jews in Minsk, Byelorussia, during the Nazi occupation of the city, is published in “Das Parlament,” official organ of the German Federal Government. Tens of thousands of Jews were killed by the Nazis in the little-known Minsk extermination camp. Only nine survived.

Author of the eye-witness account is Dr. Karl Loewenstein, now 69, the only inmate ever to have been “discharged” from Minsk. Being a half-Jewish Christian, a decorated naval officer of the First World War and a veteran of the nationalistic “Free Corps,” he would not normally have been subject to deportation. The Gestapo, how over, sent him to Minsk with a Jewish transport late in 1941 because it was irritated by the support he, a devout Lutheran, was giving to the cause of the anti-Nazi Confessional Church within his Berlin parish.

Dr. Loewenstein had been on friendly terms with the German Crown Prince, whose naval adjutant he was at one time. Because of this circumstance, some members of the German nobility intervened on his behalf after his disappearance from Berlin.

According to Dr. Loewenstein’s account, about 7,300 Jews from the Rhineland, Hamburg, Berlin, Bremen, Vienna and Brno (Czechoslovakia) were killed at Minsk in 1942-43 as were a much larger number of Russian Jews. He describes in detail a particularly harrowing massacre on March 2, 1942.

“Das Parlament,” which features Dr. Loewenstein’s report under the title “In the camp of the German Jews at Minsk,” is a periodical primarily designed to spread information on parliamentary debates and issues. Through its supplements, it has in the past made available valuable studies on Jewish topics connected with the Naziera. It is published by a government agency concerned with propaganda for democratic institutions and ideas.