Information from Dutch and Swiss sources last Spring that Jews were being used as guinea pigs in Nazi poison gas experiments held at the Mauthausen concentration camp, twenty miles north of Linz, Austria, was confirmed here today by an American official lately in Czechoslovakia who was repatriated last week on the diplomatic ship Drottningholm.
The Dutch Government has charged that hundreds of Dutch Jews had been killed in the poison gas experiments at Mauthausen and another 1,200 had died in the sulphur mines adjoining the camp. Swiss sources reported at the same time that Jews from other parts of the continent were also being sent to Mauthausen for experimentation purposes.
According to the American official, several hundred Jews from Prague were transported to Mauthausen after being stripped of all papers and other identification. Nazi authorities in the Protectorate issued a false statement, he said, that the victims were being transported to the Lublin and Lodz ghettos in Poland. Subsequent circumstantial information received in Prague, this source declared, confirm that they had been sent to Mauthausen and that the poison gas experiments were continuing there.
Describing the position of the Jews in Bohemia and Moravia, the American official declared that several thousand still remained there. Lack of railroad facilities, he said, held up the Nazi deportation program. Three years of in cession anti-Jewish propaganda have failed to make the Czech people anti-Semitic and they went out of their way to show sympathy and friendship for Jews, he added.
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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.
