An elderly woman juror fainted in court here at the trial of German chemical manufacturer Dr. Gerhard Peters when she heard him explain calmly how a lethal cyanide product of his own invention and manufacture, known as “Zyklor B,” was injected into closed rooms at concentration camps through shower-type nozzles. Dr. Peters is being tried in a local court for being “an accessory” to the murder of 300,000 Jews in Nazi gas chambers.
Dr. Peters is charged with the death of just 300,000 Jews because at least that number was killed with the “Zyklon B” gas crystals he furnished to Auschwitz after SS Lt. Col. Kurt Gerstein had, by Peters’ own admission, revealed the purpose of the shipments to him in the summer of 1943. The indictment makes no mention of the hundreds of thousands of killings of innocent people resulting from earlier poison gas deliveries made by Dr. Peters.
The defendant, who was handed over by the Allies to the Germans seven years ago and whom high-ranking German personalities are keeping out of jail even though he has been convicted in seven different trials is presently working as an industrial chemist for a Cologne subsidiary of the IG-Farben chemical empire. During the war, he was manager of the “German Corporation for Vermin Extermination” (DEGESCH), a firm derived from IG-Farben.
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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.
