Nazi General Pleads Guilty of Deporting Jews to Death Camps

Former SS General Wilhelm Harster, 62, commander of the Nazi security police in occupied Holland during World War II, confessed in open court here today that he was guilty of participation in the deportation of 80,000 Dutch Jews to Nazi extermination camps.

With two of his principal aides — ex-SS Major Wilhelm Zoepf and Gertrud Slottke –he has been on trial here since Monday, accused in 23 indictments of deporting to the death camps a total of 94, 398 Dutch Jews, of whom all but 1, 070 had perished, chiefly at Auschwitz and Sobibor.

Testifying as the principal defendant, Harster told the court under interrogation by the prosecution: “The fact that I did not have these 80,000 transferred to other jobs makes me morally and legally guilty, for which I must atone.”

He confessed that, from the very start of the “big deportations” in July of 1942, he knew the Jews would be killed in the camps to which they were sent. Although he had not known the details about what was happening in the extermination camps, he said, he had learned of the mass murders from listening to British broadcasts. He stated that he had not dared ask his SS colleagues whether the BBC reports about mass extermination of Jews were true, and had received no information about these occurrences from his superiors.

Harster told the court that the deportees included old people, invalids, women, children and the mentally ill. He said that only the “wealthy, overseas Jews” were allowed to leave Holland, “most of them with the loss of their fortunes.” Under instructions from Berlin, he testified, each of the well-to-do Jews had to pay at least 20,000 Swiss francs before he was allowed to emigrate.

The former SS chief testified it was his opinion, while he headed the deportation program in the Netherlands, that Germany would not win the war. “I thought,” he said, “that defeat was my country’s unavoidable fate.” The court adjourned its sessions today until Friday.