A group of Nazi death camp survivors left for Frankfurt to testify at the trial of former SS Sgt. Willy Zabatsky who is charged with the wholesale extermination of Jews at the Birkenau section of the Auschwitz death camp. His alleged crimes include throwing live children onto piles of burning corpses in order to save the cost of gassing them. Tuvia Friedman, who heads the war crimes research and documentation center in Haifa, will also leave for Frankfurt shortly to attend the trial. According to Friedman, Zabatsky was in charge of the extermination of Jews at Birkenau.
In the spring of 1944 he received a transport of Jews from Hungary, including 400 children, who were selected to die by the notorious death camp doctor, Joseph Mengele. Zabatsky decided on his own that it was too expensive to send the children to the gas chambers and simply threw them on to the pyres where the corpses of previously gassed Jews were being burned. Zabatsky, who is 56, does not deny that children were thrown alive into the flames but claims that he was off duty on that day. The witnesses will testify to the contrary.
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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.
