The prosecution in the trial of Karl Chmielewski, former commandant of the Gusen sub-camp of the Mauthausen concentration camp, demanded today life imprisonment for the defendant.
The prosecution asserted that testimony of witnesses during the six-week trial had proved that the 58-year-old former SS major had brutally murdered at least 293 camp inmates. The prosecution asked three years imprisonment for the co-defendant, Herbert Jumge, a camp guard, for complicity in murder.
More than 100 witnesses testified giving descriptions of unbelievable horrors which took place at the camp, including the death baths devised by Chmielewski in which inmates were taken naked to the camp courtyard and hosed down with ice cold water until they died.
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